General Fabrication

You mean caging or non-cage - I could find pics of first gens with solid mounting for cages I think.

 

Non cage at the moment but it’s prep for cage

 

The 2nd gen also has the smaller 9.5" axle that was used with with V6 and small V8s.

 

https://www.trick-tools.com/Baileigh-Industrial-Store_835


Edit: I can’t believe how much the TN-250 notcher has gone up in price since I bought it! Even the sale price is more.
https://www.trick-tools.com/Baileigh_TN_250_Hole_Saw_Tube_Notcher_TN_250_3871

 

I pulled the inner c-channel out of my frame due to some rust and had it sand blasted and now been working on boxing it with 1/8” chromoly.

 

That’s a lot of work! How are going to finish it? I just did some rust mitigation on my frame while I had the bed off and the Eastwood inner frame coating works great behind the box plates.

I have the DMZ plate kit that has holes which gives me a lot of access points for the paint diffuser hose.

 

All lots in this auction will fill your "general fabrication" needs.
https://ucanbid.hibid.com/catalog/337558/herlong-estate-mechanic-shop-auction/

 

Anyone have any recommendations on a good bench vise? My old one has passed away unfortunately

 

check out the new fireball one. if mine brakes going to get that one, but i dont see mine breaking anytime soon lol

 

Anyone have a hook up on plasma / laser cutting out of paper templates for weld-on lock out tabs I’m designing for my LCA’s? Template paper (popsicle box) is my CAD program I run.

 

Sendcutsend can do that. You can send them measurements on a napkin and they’ll cut it for you.


https://sendcutsend.com/

 

Dang - I missed that - I thought it had to be only digital files. One thing I noticed (at least in their bracket design template maker I was fooling around with) is they only offered 3/16" or 1/4" in hot rolled and not knowing enough about the difference in materials for this application, I preferred to use cold rolled which they only offer up to 1/8" afaik.

 

I'd like to see your drawing.
Once a few dimensions are included, you can easily trace it out using a cad program.
I use Fusion 360. I'd be glad give it a go. Im steadily learning that program so I can use my plasma table more efficiently. I enjoy the practice.

 

I haven't been able to find sheets of cold rolled steel thicker than 11 gauge / 1/8"

Can find cold rolled flat bar in 3/16 and quarter but not big sheets

I think people generally use P&O sheet or hot rolled for thicknesses over 1/8 and its fine

Or chromoly if you wanna get baller and racey

 

Thanks man. I got another friend offering to turn a drawing into a CAD file, but if you'd like to it would be greatly appreciated and not a bad thing!

I'm going to finalize the location of the bolt holes by doing some alignment measurements, but this is the general concept done in (super high tech) Powerpoint:

The 1/4" option is HRPO which you also mentioned and I guess is "hot rolled pickled and oiled" ie hot rolled w/ no mill scale. If I don't need to worry about holes wallowing out with 3/4" shanked bolts through 1/4" material, I don't mind saving some money with hot rolled.

Also, what caster angle should I be going for? I can get 5* with upper heim out 1" (with 1" engagement in the arm) and pushing the front LCA bolt hole inboard roughly 1/2" and the rear LCA bolt hole outboard 1/4-1/2" - I'll be taking more measurements before I finalize the hole locations.

Is the heim engagement of 1" and 1" sticking out good? Is there any issue with not having the LCA bolts centered - I can't get nearly as much caster with the LCA bolts centered in the alignment slot.

 

I'll play around with it in the morning. Just hit cocktail hour here.

That diagram will give me all the info I need.

Thanks

 

I like a lot of caster on Lt , like 6 to 8 degrees but thats personal opinion

Also like my heims as burried as possible, some will say the minimum you need in the treads is equal to the shank diameter but i don't think id ever run a heim backed out that much.

I like my lowers solid mount and always run heim uppers for adjustment
Having lower bushings out of alignment isnt ideal but i guess you could think of all the tacomas out there aligning off the lower.
It's obviously going to be more wear on bushings if they arent pivoting on the same perfect axis

To me the best way to set up and align an LT truck is to ditch the oval slot mounts and make your own solid mounts, with a smooth surface and clean hole for the bolt, and you can move them forward a bit to get better castern numbers with your upper heims more equal. Obviously alginment is done off the uppers

Can do this to one tab side of each mount at a time using the other side as a "guide" , ideally keeping the back tabs then you can use some sort of spacer to shift the arms forward and fine tune your new lower mount locations for geometry you want.
Tack in your new front tabs and now you can cut and place your new rear tabs spaced correctly for your bushing mount width.
Always leavea little extra space between tabs than the bushing mount width so you aren't fighting a too tight fit all the time during install and maintenance, especially after paint., shock shims are good for thin spacers to do this.

Moving the lowers forward a little in your case will help you keep the uppers more neutral for alignment fine tuning and possibly a little more clearance at the firewall.

Then you can plate the lower stuff in and make it all super strong

Depends if its more an occasional off road truck on mellower trails or youre going to be driving it hard off road all the time

I would only run lowers with uniball inner pivots on a truck that still aligns off the lower and would want misalignemnts that have a lot of surface area to the mount tabs for a good solid bite/hold

This is all the extra work that makes a big difference to me between a well thought build that will work better and hold up longer to serious abuse before maintenance

Chances are if someone runs a truck hard on stock pivot mounts there will be a lot more work to repair/replace them when they are bent, damaged, and/or fail and more potential damage to the rest of the truck in the process. Ask me how i know!

 

Did this on my DD for a mid travel kit until I’m ready to really cut it up for LT

 

and on my last prerunner that stock aligned off the lower

 

Man that's a thing of beauty right there - I was actually about to search your build to see what kind of reinforcements you did on the 4runner. I like the idea of keeping the rear tabs and making a spacer - I could use an angle finder to make sure the bolt is parallel with the frame vertically and measure to keep it the same distance from a point on the frame in / outboard I guess.

The truck is passing the 5 year mark in my possession and I've put 200 total miles on it - all but 1 of which were from a drive back from Fresno when I bought it as a basically stock truck so at this point getting it done and even occasional use will be a big improvement (haven't been on a road trip of any kind since April 2020 - just working and messing around with the truck whenever I have time). I still have to reinstall the engine too.

If I can get 5-6* with basically what I described as a setup I'm happy. Plus I'm working outside on this thing with borrowed electricity beside my old neighbor where I used to live before marriage and COVID turned things in a major new direction since 2/20. My buddy that runs his truck harder than I will has about the same in / out engagement with his UCA rod end and has been ok so far so I hope I should be ok until I can go to version 2.0 with more caging etc.

Eventually having a garage and time would be great to implement 2.0 on this - one key issue is I don't have the axles and I'm not sure how far to push the LCA mounts forward - in your pics it looks like they weren't pushed much. But without the axles I'm not sure how much space I have to play with since the front of the rear mount sits flush with the steering cross member.


(not my actual truck)

I'd also like to redo the diff crossmember and build it to accept a 8.0 front from a 2nd+ gen and push all of the LCA mounts with a full weld on assembly - another first gen guy is putting a 2gr in his 4x4 and I'm anxious to see how that looks too.