Fully polished TuRD

Evreything is tacked zuk except for the rear mounts those are fully welded in right now, it is what it is related to that. Im going to be messing around with it tonight and hopefully get the castor set so i can weld the knuckle balls on later this week. I need to see what contacts what steering wise up front, i think ill be riding the bumps with minimal uptravel, which is fine since most of the lines i take i tend to be way offcamber. I went to moab in 2005 as a passenger and it was a 2 day trip. This year it was either moab or south dakota to wheel, south dakota won since i have never been there to wheel. Someday ill be going back to moab, some day!! How did the truck work out in moab?

 

Moab has changed somewhat since my last wheelin visit in 2006.....the trails are more rutted out and eroded which means the rock steps are taller and more dangerous. The trails are fenced off in some places now where there was never a fence of any kind on any trail back in the 80's 90's and early 2000's. Lions Back is off limits......Cannot wheel over the Gemini Arch anymore....now you get to park and walk 600 feet to walk over to Gemini. We used to drive up to it and OVER it back then.....no more.

My 01 Taco with the flipped FJ60 and 488 gears and auto and stock chain driven transfercase did pretty good. Nothing broke. I noted a ding in my oil pan from the diff contacting it but that does not surprise me too much as I know it happened going thru the Golden Crack. And then a slight clunk while getting off the Golden Spike Trail and that turned out to be a TrailGear straight pitman arm....seems the splines in it are "sloppy"....oversized without the taper effect that the OEM and Marlin pitmans have in them so that is about it.

I still have the factory 8" e-locker in the rear....the front is a massive 9.5" ring gear of course and I have elected to stay open diff mode for now. It made it a bit more challenging to get up some of the obstacles that I used to take for granted in the past with lockers in both ends.
EDIT----9-10-16-----That is changing in a couple weeks....gonna install an FJ60 Harrop elocker in the front and backing it up with RCV chromoly axles shafts.


We did have on day 1 a little incident at the Z Turn on Moab Rim Trail.......a nicely prepared late TJ Jeep in our group of 5 did a 3/4 roll.....almost landed back on his wheels but not quite. A nasty cut to the head for Jim and a fractured C2 C3 upper neck issue. Jim is aok now, by the way.
Day 2 and day 3 went without any more hospital trips. I've been up the Moab Rim trail many times in the distant past but never have I seen it this eroded with deep steps. Because of the ridge this trail is on means that everything slants/tilts to the right increasing the dangers. Maybe I am one of the few to notice it because of the gradual nature of the eroded steps.....it was 10 years away from this trail and it was very obvious to me anyways.....or I'm getting softer

You would think a head gash like this would bleed something terrible but it did not.

 

Holy crap!!

 

Work on finishing up that awesome FJ60 SAS and let's meet at Moab.......we don't have to do the Moab Rim on the first day......
Coil sprung Jeeps have a tendency to roll when the front end is pointed up in the sky. Tacomas don't have that issue with leafpacks......shackle to the front is extremely stable on vertical climbs. I'm a little taller than I want to be (24" frame to ground) but it is what it is.

 

Sweet pics, i miss that place. So @ZUK i hammerd the knuckle balls on last night (what a pain in the ass) and i have a few questions: how did you spin the ball in the tube to set the castor? Its definately a tight fit. My other question is how did you ensure the knucle ball is on straight? I eye balled it and i assume it aligns itself a bit, but do you have any tricks? I obviously dont have an axle alignment bar, nor am i going to buy one.

 

What I did was place an aluminum bar thru the trunnion holes and tap down on the one end while pulling up on the other...the knuckle then turned relatively easy and the aluminum meant no damage to the trunnion surfaces.

And because of the press fit of the journals there is no way for you to make any adjustments in the up/down left/right plane...it's too solid a press in fit to have any adjustment. The deeper in it presses the less any chances of "tweaking " the camber......if it was pressed in only 1/4" of journal surface then maybe there is some tapping that could possibly effect camber....but being pressed in with over 1" of journal surface grabbing it I figured no way to effect camber alignment....not even the weld would pull it enough.

The top numbers in green agree with that info

 

http://www.yotatech.com/f152/sas-fj...y-2001-tacoma-283930/index4.html#post52258344

Here's the spot in my build where I was messing with the degrees.....What I should have done was set one knuckle for 3~6 degrees and then tack......and use a bubble to make the other agree exactly with it.

 

Cool thanks ZUK. I have a digital angle finder and a laser level (dont know what ill do with that but it should make me look cool to the neighbors and wife) that i was going to use to set the camber. You can actually see my angle finder sitting on my "bumper" in a few of the pics.

Thats what i was thinking about the knuckles and self aligning but i wanted to ask to be sure. Goal is to get the castor set tonight so i can drop the axle and take it to a friends and fully weld it on a nicer machine than my flux core special i have been using. He has some idea for a jig to keep the housing from warping while welding the knuckles and gussets on.

 

Guess I got lucky....no jig here. I just welded the piss out of it and nothing seemed to warp enough to produce any on-road ill effects.
OK to use a steel bar if you use old trunnion races.
Remember, have your truck with the rear lifted to the spot that you will operate with on the road.....then set your castor. I would think 3~5 degrees would be good? Mine's at 3 to 3.5 degrees and it's perfect on the road.
The weight has to be fully on the front leafpacks to set your castor.

 

Yup, i was going to set the truck up level with the floor and shoot for 8* of castor. A straw poll of the toyota guys i wheel with ranged from 3-12* lol!! It seems you want more castor than less to fight death wobble which is something i do not want to deal with.

 

3-12....that's quite a range. Didn't know it would work on the street with 12 degrees...wow.
Notice that my castor is 3.2 on one side and 4.2 (per Sears readout) on the other? Yet, I have no ill effects on the highway or anywheres. No obvious pulling of any sort. I got lucky. Should have used a bubble on the 2nd knuckle

 

My right front has 1 degree more castor than the left....should pull a little to the left but I don't see it.....should wonder a bit but with no panhard rod on this old school front end I can't say for sure if the wonderI have is due to castor or leafpacks that hunt a little on the road.

see castor section
http://www.carparts.com/alignment.htm#Thrust Angle

 

Part of this is voodoo i think. I have stuff on this truck that on paper should never work yet do, so the castor being off may be the same thing with yours.

Hell i aligned my truck twice in 10yrs and didnt have any handling issue and it tracked straight as an arrow.

My heep yj that i used to have had front shackles, no pan hard and shackles so loose that you could see daylight and it didnt wander at all and no death wobble. It just had very "loose" steering. Meaning you would turn the wheel 1/4 turn before anything even started to happen.

 

You mentioned earlier on page 10 that it worked out perfect that you can run 29" spring center to spring center. Out of curiousity, I went out and measured mine.....I have 29.5" on the rear of the pack and 27.5" on the front.....2" leafpack tow in. Hmm, interesting.

 

That was the spring perch's on the axle and that's what i set the spring and shackle hangars at. However I do have to wrestle one side on depending on what side i hook up first. The nice thing about leafs are they kind of self center once you start driving. Ill have to measure once i get everything tightened down and finish welded.

I eyeballed EVREYTHING and measured after and somehow it all came out square and even which is really really weird.

 

Symmetry.... that's the key......whatever you do to the left make sure to do to the right. In my case, the packs appear to be symmetrical...a mirror image of left and right side.....just that the fronts are equally towed in 1" each. I don't see that as a prob....maybe a benefit?

Hard to say at this point because the WWW has nothing spewing with "authority" to say on this configuration.

 

Castor is set at 5.25* each side and the knuckles are tacked on. Easier than i thought, my knuckle balls did keep wobbling which was a PITA to deal with. I threw the dice with lower castor to keep the steering linkages lower since space is at a premium. I can always degree shim it later. I ended up just putting a long ass breaker bar through the trunion holes and tapped the bottom and it moved.

 

Oh and with the truck sitting on its weight on the jackstands and leveled at preliminary ride height, im at 24.5". Not too bad for sas and 37s...