Sweet 16 - Spring Break 1st Gen Rebuild

Hey guys.

You guys helped guide my selection of a 1st gen for my son last fall. He turned 16 last week and it's finally time to get the build done! I've got 10 days mostly dedicated to getting this project finished together over our spring break.


I'll be breaking this thread into many posts as we get it done. I'd love feedback and suggestions as we're moving along. Especially if I'm about to do something stupid!

I'll put up a little history in a minute, but the vision is:
1. Build a Tonka truck style Taco with some flash and aggressive looks that a teenager would enjoy and be the envy of the school, neighborhood and race track.
2. Built the Taco I always wished I had when I was a kid. I had jeeps growing up, but my friend had a sweet 4-runner with the hard top that I thought was awesome.

Here's the plan for the next 10 days. Most of this stuff is pretty final, already purchased and waiting to be installed.

1. Body
- Sand and primer all of the rock chips and little rusty pits
- Repair 3 deeper rust spots on the driver door, windshield and passenger rocker panel
- Repair small dent behind rear bumper with bondo
- Full scuff and scotch-brite of the paint
- Trim out fenders for new flares
- Plastidip the entire truck Super Red and black
- Bushwacker pocket cut-out flares plastidip black
- New windshield
2. Suspension
- 3" lift
- Old Man Emu shocks, 883 coils and add a leafs
- Diff drop
- Relocate brake and exhaust
- Replace u-bolts
3. Drive
- Replace steering rack, (some bad components already identified)
- New 33x12.5x15 tires and wheels

It's going to be fun!

 

Nice choice dad! Good suspension choice.

 

trynna be my dad too

 

883 coils may be a bit stiff up front if your not running a plate bumper. 882 or 881 may be better.

 

1, don't sand anything down to primer or metal unless there's rust to be removed. Just scuff any surface with some 400 or 600, use a primer/sealer with a hardener to get it all 1 base color, then do your paint.

the current paint/primer has been proving its worth for years. you don't want to get rid of something that is doing a great job!

2, this is just my personal opinion... please don't do plastidip........ such a waste in my opinion and it's tacky/cheap quality. at least get single stage red and black and throw some flattening agent in there. the catalyzed single stage will be much stronger and more durable than anything plastidip or even OE paints can do. finish ones factory pack colors are a great product to use. 150-200 for gallons of reds or blacks including hardener. 50-75 for quarts.

 

We purchased the truck from a supposed 2nd owner. It has 200k miles and doesn't look like it's ever left the pavement. 3 smallish areas of rust to deal with. Tons of rock chips on the front hood, but nearly perfect otherwise. No scratches and only a single dent behind the rear bumper. It looks like someone rear ended him and pushed the bumper into the body. The bumper is new, but the little dent was never fixed.


The interior looks nearly brand new. The front seat doesn't even look worn. I'm guessing the original owner had seat covers because they look too good to have 200k miles.

It was great to get it home and get some pics going. Our race team mascot wanted in on the pics and loves riding in the back of trucks. Afterwards we headed to the church parking lot to learn how to use the manual transmission. He was a quick study thank goodness.

The next order of business was taking it to my friend's shop to put it up on the lift and give everything a good onceover. There was some slop in the rack that we found, but nothing major. The rust on the frame is pretty superficial. There was an undercoat that seems to be holding up pretty well.

The previous owner said it was due for an oil change. I was waiting a few days to double-check for any leaks and I haven't seen a single drop on the driveway. Very happy! We've done lots of oil changes in our shop, but he never paid attention like this until he did his first oil change in his own truck.

 

Yeah, that was the plan. They'll be stiff for a while too. We have plans to fab up a HD bumper this summer, so he'll have to tough it out until that happens. Glad it's not my daily driver I guess

 

Even then the 883s will soften up a bit over time.

 

Nice! Way cool of you to build up a truck with your son. I truly enjoy whenever I get to work with my dad on my truck. Great memories

 

Thanks for the tip on the body work. I can rub my fingers on the body and rub off a nice white coating. It certainly has been doing it's job for 20 years, so that's a good tip on not messing with it too much. The plan was only to scotchbrite it to take off the loose stuff on the surface, but not to disturb the actual paint. 400 or 600 may be a little more.

The plastiderp is a done deal for several reasons and I know it's very polarizing. It getting spray-gunned on there and should be a pretty quality job. It's getting a pearl treatment on the top as well. You'll have to hold judgement until the project is finished. We're intending to have fun with this project and will likely peel and re-dip next year. I also know that I don't have the time, patience or skill right now to do a quality job with some real paint.

 

pearl treatment? another odd thing. if youre going for the naturally flat look of plastidip, you won't be getting any pearl since not only does the pearl need to be applied within a clearcoat, but needs another clearcoat on top to truly bring out the effect. and if you do all that for the pearl effect, you won't be getting the flat look of plsatidip. some more to consider.

 

I'm putting some trust in my plastidip contacts on the color and application and hoping for the best. It's a pretty flat yet bright red and achieved with a base layer of gunmetal gray and then putting down a red with lots of red tint and some red pearls on top of the gray. This is the target color:

 

awesome that you get to teach your son and do the build together. I end up teaching my dad what to do on his van half the time

 

Now that we had a feel for the condition on things, it was time to have a little fun.

The only option I would have liked on the truck was the diff lock. I don't expect we'll do any hard core wheeling with this thing, so he'll have to learn how to carry a little speed through things to keep from getting stuck.

The truck did great, but we did experience one issue. While doing some hill climbs, the 4WD hubs became disengaged during a pause halfway up the hill. I backed down and tried it again and couldn't get it to lock up. Finally after driving around, backing up a few times, etc. it locked in again. I haven't looked to see how the hubs actuate in these models, but something was flaky. Maybe it was the lake we were driving through a few minutes earlier???

The V6 was awesome. Should be a big help when we upgrade the tires and throw some bikes in the back.

 

Very cool to be building with your son. And an awesome choice for a first car/truck. His grin in the pictures says it all.

 

Made some good progress on Friday cleaning out the garage and converting it from our usual moto hobby. We also built a checklist and an attach plan for the project to help keep us on track and try to keep pace for the next week.

Shop before:


The tires are here and ready to go. My son keeps rolling them up to the truck to try to imagine how it's going to look.


The flares are also here and ready to go. We're planning to clean them really well to make sure the paint adheres. I've heard they use some kind of chemical in the mold that isn't paint friendly and must be removed. I'm not sure exactly what we'll use on them.

I also picked up a new steering rack to install while we're doing the suspension. The left outer rod had some slop, so we might as well get it done.


Planning to start some real work on Saturday.

 

Saturday was some good progress on the tear down and body work.

I got up early to try to get a jump on the bed removal with hopes to have it out of the way so he could get going on the chassis cleanup. It ended up taking a few hours and was more of a pain that I had thought. You can read about the woes and solution here. I can tell already with the few things we've done so far, that "nothing ever works smooth" when dealing with a 20 year old vehicle. Reminds me of Lyle trying to work his shotgun. I was ready to put a few holes in the truck myself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJYE0HuKNfI&feature=youtu.be&t=18s

Removing the spare tire: It was funny to see his mind grasping the explanation on how the rear tire lowers for the first time. It's something we all take for granted having done it many times, but it is a unique contraption to explain to someone new. Using the jack handle to twist a pulley that lowers the tire...


A little frame cleanup. Scraped off the loose stuff, treated with rust treatment and then a few coats of chassis paint.


We needed to get rid of the extra white that isn't on the list for receiving the red or black dip.
We blacked out the edges of the engine bay so that the new red will fit nice. He can black out the rest of the engine compartment some other time.


We also did a little on the driver side door jamb. I didn't prep the paint well enough, so we'll be sanding it down on Monday and hitting it again. We are also switching to a semi-gloss instead of the gloss to match-up a little better.

We also sanded down the front of the hood to get rid of the major rock chip area. Lots of primer and sanding to get it reasonably smooth. I put a few more coats on today as well.

I'm really happy with how the top of the windshield turned out. There was some major rust and corrosion going on there. We got it sanded down really well, treated the rust and then Bondo'd it smooth. Hopefully it holds up.

The truck bed had a dent and rust in the back corner behind the bumper. It looks pretty decent, but it was a lot of Bondo. It's pretty hidden behind the bumper, so I didn't sweat it too bad. We ground down the end of the bed and tailgate to clear out the rust and sprayed lots of coats of bedliner spray. We're planning to put the plastic bed liner back in, but it doesn't cover everywhere. Now I'll have the original white areas sprayed with this stuff where the bed liner doesn't cover. It'll match up better against the red and hopefully be more durable.

I've still got to do some work inside the bed. That was a surprise rust spot hidden under a pile of dirt under the bed liner. Here is everything cleaned up for the night.

Planning to finish all of the body work tomorrow and get a good start on the suspension.
- Sand and paint the door jambs
- Fix new rust spot in truck bed
- Give entire body a light sand to remove the oxidized top layer
- Get started on the suspension and steering rack replacement

 

Sub'd

 

Finally getting caught up on pictures and posting. Project is pretty much finished, so here is how things turned out.

We spent the next few days scraping, cleaning, sanding, primer, frame painting the entire truck. My son put more hours on our blast cabinet than it’s seen in its entire life. I’ve questioned having that thing around due to its size, but it’s so dang nice to have during projects like this. Well that, and a big air compressor. Definitely time for an oil change for that thing.




Everything is rusty and had to be broken, cut or otherwise removed. I had been spraying WD40 on the various bolts over the past few weeks. I just didn’t anticipate what a time killer it can be to deal with some of that. Now that the project is complete, I realize that it is better to cut your losses and cut quickly instead of fussing with stuff for hours and then end up cutting anyway. It just isn’t’ worth the time in many cases to deal with it.

Another handy tool was the cutoff wheel. Of course my son loves anything that makes fire!


The old suspension came out relatively well. I had purchased new U-Bolts in advance since I have gone that route before and didn’t want anything to do with trying to salvage those things. That was a simple cut and replace.






Upper driver’s side ball joint had to be replaced. I’m leaving the passenger side alone and figure we’ll do them both when we get to the upper control arms in a future phase. I was grateful to the forum for a slick trick on cutting down a HF pitman arm puller to press in the new joint. That worked slick!


One thing I learned the hard way was the assembly of the front strut. I ordered the Old Man Emu stuff from Toytec and was given the option for assembly for $100 bucks. I thought that was a rip-off and knew I could send it for free with my buddy to his shop who has a nice spring compressor. What the website didn’t mention is that the top-hats are not included with the kit and that the top hats are included if you get the $100 assembly. After hunting around for the right top hats, I gladly would have paid the $100 for assembly. Live and learn I guess.

The truck was considerably taller after installing the 3” lift. We were really excited getting it to that point.

We had to take some time off to head to the DMV for the final driving test. He passed!


As we started on the paint prep, it became clear that the white door jambs were going to look ugly against the red paint. I had heard what a pain those were, but we tackled it anyway. We wanted to do a neutral color that would look good with whatever exterior color paint we chose in the future. We rattle-canned them black after a good sanding and hit them with several coats. They look really great and will be easy to touch-up in the future. I know that paint won’t be super durable, but it should be easy to fix.


Thursday finally rolled around and it was time for paint. I had been working late on Wednesday to build our semi-permanent paint booth. You can see it in a few of the pics. I tacked 1x2s all around the edge of the ceiling in the shop and then stapled some 5 or 7 mill plastic to the 1x2s. I also put duct tape along those leading edges before the stables to keep the staples from pulling through the plastic. I then finished it up with another layer of 1x2s to sandwich the plastic sheeting. At the bottom of the plastic I dropped in some heavy PVC pipes and then wrapped the plastic over the pipe and taped it back to itself. The pipe is heavy enough to keep the plastic wall pretty well sealed against the floor, but allows some movement so I can push the walls out for a little extra room. This worked great and made it easy to roll-up the walls when I was finished. I used blue painters tape to seal the overlapped corners once it was setup.

In the future, I just need to pull the tie strings and drop the walls. Roll out the canvas tarp for the floor, blue tape the 4 corners and setup the fans/filters. I think I can do this within about an hour each for setup and stowaway.

It was finally time to paint the truck. This was our first time painting anything, so I had been watching lots of videos trying to learn the technique. Luckily the Plastidip is very forgiving after several coats. Each coat really melts into the previous layer and tends to smooth over mistakes. Still, there are a few problem areas that you don’t really notice unless you know they are there. The biggest lessons I learned were:

- Have the gun moving when you first pull the trigger. My first shot on the truck ran as it blasted out until I got moving. That was a pretty quick habit.

- More difficult was to keep the arm/wrist locked to keep the paint from fanning out or in with a funky pattern. Always trying to keep the tip of the gun perpendicular to the vehicle was tricky.

6 coats of gun metal gray


7 coats of super red


Several coats of black on the bumpers, grill, flares, etc.




Here is a short time lapse of the actual paint job.


Overall the paint job turned out pretty well for our first time. I also learned that my Bondo/sanding skills need a lot of work. Luckily the Plastidip hides some of my poor work pretty well.

We’ll see how the dip holds up. It gave us exactly the look we were shooting for and after putting on the dip coat, it feels really smooth and hard and is very similar to paint. The only difference is that this will require a little more care and maintenance and will need to be replaced in a few years. Everything we used was from www.dipyourcar.com. We used 2 gallons gray, 2 gallons red and almost a gallon of black, so around $300 worth of paint including the shipping and some supplies.


We saved installing the tires until the very end as an incentive to keep working. We knew that would be the grand finale in finishing the truck.


I invested about 140 hours during our spring break in getting the project done. It was a burner at the end without a lot of sleep, but it was nice to move through a project so quickly. My son spent about 110 hours as well. I would be out in the shop for a few hours each morning before him in order to prep the work for the day. I tried to make sure that he had several things to accomplish each day with everything ready to go. That helped to keep his interest and allowed me to work on other things as well. At night I would do some of the clean-up and layout the plans for the next day.


I think we accomplished all of the things I wanted out of the project. I always wanted to do up a Tacoma, so that is checked off. This is a nicer truck than any father should ever get for their 16 year old, but I consider the money and time invested a part of his life skills. He will eventually know how to do most anything on that truck and won’t be afraid to do things in the future. It’s a great platform for a reliable vehicle, cheap parts and easy to work on. Hopefully it will last him through his college years and beyond.


In addition, it goes well with my truck, so now big red has a little red in the driveway.

It's back to reality with work and school. We've been messing around with the new rack and pinion and rod ends trying to get that replaced during the past few nights. I stripped one of the line threads on the new one, so going to try to tap that tonight and get it installed, hopefully without leaking. We've been holding off on driving it other than a parade lap around the block. It needs an alignment bad with the 3" lift and the new rack and pinion. Hopefully it'll visit the school parking lot next week.

 

That is awesome. Adopt me? Lol