Camper shell fun
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2022
- Messages
- 105
Hey guys, Eliot told me I should post this up in here. This is my 2000 Toyota Tacoma four-wheel-drive V6 five speed. It’s got 335,000 miles on the original engine and transmission and a lot of them are off-road. This is my first ever four-wheel-drive truck after years and years of driving a 86 Toyota 2wd with a total chaos lift spindle uni-ball kit. Someone here may have recognized that truck as it was blue with a camper shell hence my user name. Anyhow I bought this truck from my boss and it had an upper, 2.5 inch coil over, 2.5 inch bypass and spindle gusset. Since then I changed out the front suspension with a non-production kit that is 1 inch wider per side. There are also a couple of other goodies on the front end that I cannot really discuss right now as they are products that will be coming to market within the next few weeks. In the rear it had Spring over Deaver Spring’s with dual 2.0 shocks one bypass one smooth body. I then put F-67 springs on the back but left the shocks and shock mounts. Since the shock mounts were set up for spring over it drastically limitary of travel so recently hi mounted new rear shocks and here are the pictures from that project. I wanted to use long shocks so I can get the full amount of travel out of the leaf springs but I am picky and I did not want anything protruding through the bed as a ride motorcycles and whole things from time to time And just generally don’t want shit in the bed. Also the goal of this truck is to be the ultimate sleeper and I think so far that theme is working quite well. I did not want any clicking of bypass tubes because I am anal about my truck making noises. So I decided to use 2.5”x16”stroke fox internal bypass piggyback reservoir shocks. I also wanted to put them outside the frame and refused to use wheel spacers at all. If you know these trucks you know that nothing fits outside the frame really so I got to work. I notched the frame from the side and platted from the inside of the frame into the crossmember. Then I cut the whole wheel well out and started building my upper shock mount. I love using factory stuff and Toyota specific parts and I really wanted to use the upper billet shock mount that comes with OEM replacement fox coil overs that mounts with three bolts through the top so I basically built a coil bucket in the rear. I was taught to fabricate by someone who had a racing background in the 80s and 90s so everything is very lightweight and used .125 and .090 4130 plate for all of it. After that was done I mounted the lower shock mount as close to the leaf springs as possible so the shock body would not hit the leaf springs. I ended up covering up everything by using a late 60s Chevy truck tubbed wheel well I bought from jigs. I still need to put lining on the wheel well so it blends in better but I think it turned out pretty good.
