Flippac Tacoma Build

Figured I'd start this build thread, always wanted to make one of these, but never really had the time.
The story starts when I was stalkin the hell outta craigslist back in Seattle right during the used car market boom for a 3rd gen 4runner, and after no luck for weeks I finally decided to search tacoma one time, and boom there it was.

Last year of the first gen, manual with only 127k on it for 11k, a pretty damn good deal at the time. The owner had 47 people reach out to him in the first hour but decided to sell it to me as I am a college student and he bought this car back when he was in college. Now before I went back out to school a new clutch/flywheel was installed, and the sway bar bushings were done.

One of my best friends growing up and his older brother were both huge into building their tacomas, with my friend 02 white first gen (you'll see later) being a good build to base some of my ideas off of.

The first thing a lot of people agree to do after baseline maintenance is wheels and tires, and I knew I wanted a wheel that wasn't too flashy but still something nice, and after stumbling upon SCS, I bought 4 gunmetal SR8 -12 offset wheels. I knew I needed to pair it with a decent all terrain tire, and after a good few weeks I found a set of 5 goodyear duratracs 265/75/16 for 600$ brand new. I also found a pretty killer deal on some trail gear sliders already powdercoated, and got them welded on by an old boss for a 30 rack of beer.
Here was my truck as it stood then.

 

I love that style topper for xtra cabs.

 

It was so great, I would recommend those leer 122 or something similar to anybody. It came with the truck and worked great for what it was. I ended up selling it to offset the cost of the flippac (I'll post it all soon) for 900 bucks to somebody whos going to live out of his 1st gen and fly fish all summer, so the topper is still out there getting good use.

 

Next on my list was suspension, and with damn near everything on this build I really had to start thinking about my budget. I am a college student making not a whole lot of money working on campus, but I had an ok amount of money saved from a hard-working summer back in Seattle, so after doing a bit of research I weighed my options.

Block lift/spacer- Cheapest option to just get the look, but achieves nothing for my travel and if anything makes my ride quality worse.

Bilstein/OME- Definitely my more budget-friendly option + I'd probably be able to keep my stock upper control arms. Still get an improvement offroad, but the options I was looking at were not rebuildable meaning I would have to eventually either buy another pair or switch suspensions altogether.

Icon- Rebuildable and quality shocks, but definitely higher on the price scale. I had a chance to drive my friend's 02 tacoma with icon 2.5s all around in Moab, and that really made me love how that suspension setup rode. My friend ended up buying the stage 4 icon fit from toytec for a grand total of 3300 + shipping .

Now I was able to actually find some front and rear icon 2.5s locally in Salt Lake (Thank you Tacomaworld for sale) off a prerunner, and he even included installing and giving me his uniball built right upper control arms for 1400$. Not that much more than a pre-assembled OME kit or Bilstein kit, + the ride offroad compared to stock was so much better. I had a little bit of a squat going on, so I found an icon add-a-leaf and got it installed to level out the ride.

I still don't know much about these upper control arms, but I believe they are designed super similar to Total Chaos Uppers, and I believe they actually accept TC bushings and maybe even the uniballs as well. I've had absolutely no issues with these, although I'm leaning towards something like the icon delta joints as a uni-ball I feel is more prone to have issues in a place like Salt Lake.

A big pro of these icons is the ride height adjustability, as the prerunner had it on max height, so I cranked it down 4 full rotations, and I think I achieved the 2/2.5 inches of lift I was hoping for. I didn't want to mess my CV angle up too much as I don't have a diff drop in, no issues with my CV's yet!

 

WHITE RIM TRIP​

My dope ass uncle and aunt recommended a few places for me to check out in Utah while I was there for school, and the White Rim was the first one on my list. After a few weeks of searching for a permit, I had some random luck and was able to secure 2 nights on the White rim! I called up my buddy and we packed up and left to start our 3 and a half hour journey down to Canyonlands to set up camp for the night before we started our journey off in the morning.

Buddies truck... love to give him some shit about the budget of his truck versus mine but he's definitely got a nicer setup going on.

Not far after paying to get into canyonlands, we took a left and started our trek down the switchbacks. Pretty mellow driving but we had many stops just to look at the beauty of this place. Really breathtaking seeing the sheer drop taken by the road in that first few miles.



Went to preschool with this kid.. look at us now

See if you can spot that little white taco

After a day of driving we made it to airport, our first campground. Incredible views all around and the airport towers were just incredible.


We woke up the next morning to our next campsite closer to the colorado river. The driving up to this hasn't been too bad at all, most of it could be done in 2wd in my truck, but if you were driving a car with lower clearance you'd definitely have some issues on parts. Stock tacomas would be fine, I saw plenty of jeeps and a few 80 series (my dream rig). All these were taken on my kinda beat film camera, still turned out pretty good.

We finished up the White Rim in 2 days, 80+ miles of offroad and off-grid beauty. I will be back soon and hopefully get a permit for White Crack Campsite, in my opinion, a must-do detour and the best campsite on the white rim.

 

Next thing I did, I got some warnings from the dealership and an independent mechanic that my ball joints were starting to get some play, and after inspecting my outer tie rods, I found out one of the boots was torn and leaking grease, so I decided to replace both ball joints and tie rods myself and try to save some money. I followed Adventure Tacos guides online (@turbodb ) and those were massively helpful as this was my first real project doing myself. After 4 days of my car being immobile, I finally finished that project. Definitely a decent project if your truck has any rust whatsoever.

My terrible jack stand setup... broke 2 pitman arms and used harbor freight jack stands. Still saved tons of $$