New Taco driver from Montana!

Hey TacomaWorld! Oh man where to start. I’ve attached a couple pictures of my 2016 Taco in Barcolena Red. Bought this used recently and so far it’s had a couple minor issues I plan to work through. So how did I get into a 3rd gen!? Well, I’ve been a motor head for more years than I care to remember. Let me go over the recent past to get to the present I suppose.

I retired from the Air Force in 2018 and moved back to Montana and started work as a service manager at the local Polaris/Honda shop. After a couple years the owner and I still couldn’t see eye to eye on being fair to all customers so I left and went to work at the local GM dealership as a service writer. While here I was able to get my hands on a few cheap small project vehicles. The most recent was a 2017 Chevy SS. For those that know these cars are not only rare but a blast to drive. I’m glad I will get to say I was able to own one for awhile. The sad fact is every time I was in it I was scared something would happen and a part would break that was on national backorder or discontinued!

The time had come to start looking for something still fun, useful and more importantly didn’t cost me $150 bones to fill up since I was mainly DD’ing an 2008 Duramax. Fuel mileage isnt a huge issue since well my diesel in town from the house to work was 13.5 ish. But when gas itself is over a 1.60 difference a person can save a decent chunk of money every couple weeks! So I began the search for essentially a midsize pickup and ideally wanted a manual trans. That limitation would only allow me to search a few makes/models and it needed to be fairly newer. At first I was actually hoping to find a twin to my first ever brandnew vehicle, 2002 Ranger FX4, the clean ones I found were priced through the roof! Its a 20 year old ranger for sake! This lead me towards Tacomas and Gladiators. Issues with the Gladiator is they are still too new and I wasn’t going to spend those prices. So back to looking at Taco’s.

Living in Montana our towns are small and many miles between the larger cities where one would want to look. I found a few but by the time the weekend would roll around it would be sold or I’d find something I didnt like. Eventually I found the one I really wanted to see, has tasteful accessories, looks nice and it was a manual!

So here she is and the first of many questions I’ll probably have. It was listed as a SR5, what is the main difference between that trim and the TRD offroad, sport etc? When going to 4wd it sometimes takes a substantially longer time than it should. Lets just say the light flashing for 3 days… then stopped, as in went out. Another time it maybe took 2 mins. Same thing for going back to 2wd. Ive searched and read about the parking brake issues. Mine was sticking somehow and continued to drag and heat up the drum enough to keep the RR wheel free of snow. Whats the probability of once I rebuild the rear drums this issue will continue? Looking forward to the fourms as I can see there is a ton of knowledge here!

 

Welcome to TW!

 

Welcome and enjoy.

 

Welcome to TW!

 

Welcome to TW, Zack...and thank you for your service!

 

Welcome to TacomaWorld

 

Thanks guys. Cant wait to pick through the tons of great info here!