How to put a 1989 Toyota Pickup tailgate on 97 Tacoma

I was wondering how you put a 1989 Toyota Pickup tailgate on a 1997 Tacoma

 

And if anyone has done it before

 

i imagine it starts with a sawzall and a few beers.

 

A guy on the Expedition Portal forum some years ago built a strange Gen 2 Tacoma with lots of bodywork mods. The mods were just for fun, I believe, and he planned to take the truck to, IIRC, east central Africa.

One of his mods was to cut out the stamped T O Y O T A sheet metal from an old tailgate and patch it into a matching rectangle cut out of his new one. Couldn’t have been cheap, but that part of the final truck looked pretty neat.

 

The most intriguing question would be why?

 

nah. people do weird stuff all the time. my current fascination is a trailer that i really had no right in starting. it started off as a 'simple' 3500 pound utility trailer build. now it's going to be a fully air-bagged, tilt deck with air tilt, 7000 pound, winch equipped, and dual axle, car trailer...

but this is like deciding to date girls, and then asking the internet hive mind how to date girls. part of the decision process must involve some admission to the amount of effort it's going to take, or in my case, at least enough tools and random knowledge to blatantly ignore all of that and bludgeon everything with tools and money to make something work.

very little between the 89 and 97 tacoma is going to match up, so it's going to take a lot of stubbornness, lots of grinding, cutting, and welding, and extra good levels of bodywork skills to pull off decently.

anything is possible with enough tools, money, and stubborn determination.

 

Here are some pix of that odd Tacoma build from 2012, discussed on the Expedition Portal forum. The tailgate was probably the only part of it that appealed to me. (I won't show the custom grille and retrofitted 80-series LC headlamps...)

 

I have a 90 tailgate I'll donate to the first person who does this. You pay shipping.

 

I don't have a 97 to measure but from what I recall of the g1 the tailgate is much thinner on the Toyota truck. I would think the difference in thickness would be the crux to solve.

I can 100% guarantee that the older tailgate is smaller on all [x,y,z) axis. So he would have to fabricate some form of shim.

 

Plz show us

 

Here's the original thread on ExPo. Most of the images were stripped away or downgraded to useless in the great Photobucket fiasco, but if you look -- especially near the end -- you'll find views of the truck, including the front end.

https://forum.expeditionportal.com/threads/containerized-retromod-global-tacoma.77748/

 

Dang! I like the front end!