Never ending Tacoma (mid engine center mount diesel)

[in4aride]

So I'm working on getting pics together to update this with. This truck was my wife's first 4x4. Ordered it in 2015. Barcelona red ccsb. Gradually started adding and building until she popped the motor in Moab.(Well that's where damage happened, it popped 300 miles later at home). Now, it's a cab, a motor, a center mount, and slowly coming together. I'll cover how it started, where it went, where it is and get to where it's going :
Ccsb. Big glass. Reverse mount 6.0 powerstroke (I'll explain later) 5r, narrow spider 9 front with offset 9 rear. JEHC Centermount, trailing arm, 40/42.
Basically a full steel cab, steel (functioning) doors on a full chassis.
Heres the story of my wife wanting more and more, and me taking forever to deliver

 

[in4aride]

So here's where we started. Wife had a 2g prerunner. Left Vegas to move out to Colorado with me so the 2wd had to go. Sold it and got her a replacement 3g in 4wd. What. A. Mistake. The 3g are turds. I can't be convinced otherwise. I've worked with too many to like them.
Anyway. She liked wheeling my jeep and wanted to start lifting and wheeling her truck. Sounds great. Worst idea ever. Hahaha. Most expensive decision ever.

 

[in4aride]

After the little budget boost and 33's we started to add little things. A hitch skid on the rear, sliders, and then we started to do more. Different bumpers, starting with a winch style front.
Also had our buddy at 4wp Tampa get her set up with some non stock wheels. She was so pumped on finally having wheels tires lift and then bumpers.
We moved over to a different part of the state. Did some wheeling down in the San Juan mountains with our buddy and his cool MJ project.

 

[in4aride]

Then things snowballed. We have some good rock trails local, and with the front bumper she thought the 33's looked lame, and she wanted more clearance for the bigger trails she wanted to do.
So of course we jumped to 37. Regeared to 529 and went to a rear locker. Saved the front locker for later.
Bonus for a cool shot on top of the world during ejs 2019.

 

[in4aride]

After beating on it some she destroyed the rear bumper so I tossed to get a quick one before a wheeling trip in Buena Vista. Little did I know that cobbles together bumper would become my life for the next handful of years.
We met up with blake as they made their way across the country hitting different places. Showed them around Ouray and then Moab. Ash went for a ride and that's when it all went down hill for her wanting to do go fast too. Not sure why those episodes never aired. She did get a quick clip in the intro to the series, but the shows would have been cool we got them into some cool spots, even jumped down potato salad hill like Nick Nelson did.
Redid the front bumper to a style that's stuck around since, and did a bunch of Moab wheeling with friends. Rock therapy used to be an October/November annual meet up for some chill fun. Miss that event.

 

[in4aride]

After a couple seasons killing the nittos, we went to a new wheel and tire package. Kmc grenade desert style with some new 37. The new setup actually saved 8# per corner. Went to a different front bumper that was modular, allowing for different 'wings' depending on what we wanted.
Built some spindle gussets and replaced a ton of body mount bushings. Ash was interested in learning the maintenance side of things and jumped in to do some.kf.the work. Also converted to a random set of 2.0x 8 coilovers up front. Much better ride than the budget stuff we had up front.
We traded some.parts and pieces to a company that made the magnetic body covers. These things DESTROYED paint. Even pulling off every few days to wash and reinstall, it smoked the paint underneath.

 

[in4aride]

We were due for some new leaf springs, but for what we wanted the price point didn't make much sense. Shackle flip, shackles, springs, and shocks were putting us at a price point that linking made sense.
So cue the music. 3 link/panhard setup. For packaging reasons I decided to try and mount uppers rearward like you'd find on a wrangler. Honestly worked pretty decent. The next links I did I made the panhard about 8" longer and it made a nice difference for feel on the rear. Kept frame size pivot above frame rail for smoother slides in the rocks. Iirc, this setup was mid 80's anti-squat but we had a wild roll axis (like a +8*) and the oversteer was trash. Worked fine for crawling and DD duty, but could have been way better.

 

[in4aride]

For wheeling the links worked great. Just like long arms on a leaf spring truck, the links definitely overworked the front. We started talking about plans to go to a LT setup, but weren't sure about what route to go. Started chatting on Tacoma world with folks about new brackets for the upper, and maybe even a new cross member to allow for better pivots and utilizing a 10" shock, as well as getting rid of the factory caster inclination.
But for now, just time to wheel.

 

[in4aride]

Ash up chewy

 

[in4aride]

Ash on topless.

 

[in4aride]

Just some more photos. From rides with Blake, to wheeling and popping out her tail light, a trail cleanup in Moab (was awesome got to drive on closed trails to access areas needing cleaned with BLM ) to just cruising.

 

[in4aride]

Last couple of randoms. Almost crunching the door (she saved it) on topless. Getting the shop and her truck nestled in. And her damn near getting stuck on slider out in Buena Vista.

 

[in4aride]

After this it's all down hill.

 

[in4aride]

So while on that same Moab trip we ran pritchett. The tacomas actually do really well on this trail and Ash was killing it driving. We got to rocker knocker, and while most people take the bash up heavy throttle line on the right, we wanted to try the traditional Crab Walk line. This is the reason I hate 3rd gen's. It's not even a steep angle or much lean. But the pickup on the driver side is that the back of the head and if a vertical tilt and driver lean of the smallest degree they start to consume some oil. We got some pretty bad knocking. After pulling the plugs and cycling it. We set oil everywhere and the truck ran fine. It blew up about 2 days later on the road. This was with a large catch. Can. This truck always had issues with smoking, even going up something as simple as Hell's gate. Just obnoxious engine design.

 

[in4aride]

What makes it really frustrating is we had just got her some better seats and harnesses and a new set of that panel protection against my better judgment. This is the only photo of that panel protection, because it's been sitting in my garage ever since because later that day is when it blew up. Truck had barely 40,000 mi on it. She made it to that point with no blown diffs, no blown up tie. Rod ends, no busted CVS, purely a steering rack bushing failure and that's it as far as other problems.

 

[in4aride]

I know a lot of people say that the motor was the same one in the RX 350s. And while that is mostly correct, when that motor was in the lexus's, it had a built-in scavage pump to pull all the excess oil out of the heads and back to the oil pan. When they adapted it to the Toyotas they eliminated that and that is why you see a lot of the third gens with that 3.5 smoking all the time on climbs. Even with big catch cans, and I even designed a PCV pickup relocation with a check ball to pull from the front of the head as well as the back of the head depending on where it was submerged in oil, and that wasn't even enough. Mix that with the trans. Supposedly being lifetime fluid but being absolutely roached after about 20,000 mi, I just was not a big fan of these.

 

[in4aride]

And when we bought this truck, I did buy 100,000 mi extended warranty and all that other fancy nonsense, but obviously they told us to get f'd because of the lift and larger tires. I fought it for a while, pulling up the variations in the motor and even finding some cases where guys had windowed the block in the same way by just pulling their boats out on a boat ramp. And the fact that a dealer in Utah had about 11 Third gens in for windowed motors, but they weren't having it.

 

[in4aride]

So we did with any other normal person would do. Found an LS, or in this case an lq9, out of a donor to swap in. In. Swap on a bolt-in long travel kit from camburg, and do some trailing arms on the back with a Spyder 9. I had also picked up some sticky traps and bolted those up to see how I felt about running those, but without adjusting wheelbase in the front, they just got way too aggressive into the cab so we were definitely going a different route. Picked up a JK steering box set up for hydro Assist to power the swing set steering plans. The camburg kit did require some changes based off of the coilover I was running, the upper Mount change, and where we needed to be reasonably for compression versus droop.
We had cut out and test fit one side of our upper mounts setup, but felt like we needed some more adjusting to get it quite how we wanted it. So to save time, we ordered someone's upper kit, but unfortunately it showed up plasma cut on a pretty rough table with wallowed out holes and things not being the same size and the work to make it work correctly was about the same as us making our own work. So that went in the trash and we just finished adjusting our setup in CAD. You can see we got the fit up for the frame plating and everything else pretty dialed.

 

[in4aride]

We did also end up snagging the JD lower pivot kit. We wanted something a little more substantial on the bottom end if we were going to put so much work into the top side. And on the Spyder 9, I built a back truss that had openings in it to run the brake lines through so the brake lines would be protected by the truss all the way to the caliper. We also threw the truck nickname on the back truss because I thought it looked pretty neat and had it set up to bolt in some LEDs so the lettering and the openings I had in the truss would light up at night and I thought it was going to be pretty slick. I will say the lq9 was a squeeze in there, and we even had to offset slightly passenger to get it to work around the front diff

 

[in4aride]

So went to the rear. Basing off of stock frame we were going to add to, and stock wheelbase, we were limited to right about 22-24" of travel. (Arm length, joint angles, frame interference, etc) Made it so with the shock package we planned on, it wasn't going to gain much of anything over when the truck had before, really just better geometry and a stronger rear.
Did some forklift travel and articulation stuff and Ash was bummed at the effort and cost to what we were getting. So she said cut it and really make it worthwhile.
Disclaimer. I told her this move would be a huge gain in timeline. That it's a wild build now that requires parts that consume a heavy chunk of cash. But she agreed to get to the end build in one go vs tear down and rebuild multiple times.
So everything came off and sold. We kept the cab.