I wasn’t planning on doing a build thread, but then I realized the more I mod this vehicle, the harder it will be to keep track of everything that was done to it and the maintenance dates. So here we go!
I had two sedans, one was my FWD daily, and the other was my RWD play car that I slammed. It was getting old paying 2x the reg and insurance, aside from never driving my play car. It also snows where I live so I made the choice to sell both and get a Toyota truck that’s 4WD. Well my buddy bought a 3rd gen about 6 months before I did and he pretty much sealed the deal for me after not being satisfied with the quality of used trucks in my area.
I managed to find this at a used car dealer for under blue book. It has 236k on it but was incredibly clean. Before going to check it out I spoke with a nice gal at my local dealership to confirm the car had the maint done to it. I also confirmed it didn’t come from a rust belt state, so I bought it!
Clean title, zero accidents, e-locker, recently resprayed. Its not perfect, but it is certainly much cleaner than some of the other runners I found in my area. I wasted no time getting the running boards off:
The tires were absolutely junk all of them had no tread left and they were cracked all over. I had my eyes set on the SCS F5 wheels and I knew I had to have them once I saw them. I wasted no time buying a 3” lift from toy tec and getting my wheels and tires mounted. I felt like I was on borrowed time with the stock tires so everything happened pretty quickly:
I didn’t think the wheels and tires would fit inside the vehicle (especially with a spare), but low and behold she surprised me! I also de-badged the rear of the vehicle. I think it makes the car look much cleaner (sorry no pic). We got the lift kit on late on a Friday and went for a quick drive:
The following weekend I managed to install the total chaos UCAs and get it aligned:
Here is a tip if you are installing UCA’s on your own. This trick will only work if you have a front diff spacer and if you kept the shorter OEM bolts:
Quote:
i was doing this on my own with no help so i had to figure out a way to hold the 4 washers per side on each UCA that the total chaos arms utilize while fishing in the super long bolt through the engine bay. here is my tip:
i just recently lifted my 4runner with a toy tec lift. the kit came with diff spacers that utilized longer bolts. i kept the stock bolts. the stock bolts are what make this so easy. the shank diameter is the same as the UCA bolt, but about half the overall length length (which is perfect for what we need it to do).
feed the OEM diff bolt through the backside of the UCA, threading in the two rear spacers as well (left side on the above pic). it is only long enough to reach the middle of the tube on the frame that holds the UCA in place. this is just enough for it to hold the back two spacers in place and orient the UCA in a way that you can thread the long bolt through the front side of the UCA all by yourself. i used packing tape on the bottom to hold the front two washers and it worked like a charm. once everything is in place, all you need to do is push the long UCA bolt into its final resting place, and this will knock out the OEM diff bolt in the rear while still holding the arm and all of the washers in place.
hopefully this makes sense. front OEM diff bolts on left, UCA bolt on right. even though this is a total chaos arm, you can still utilize this trick with other arms or even OEM ones.
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I then took her up to the mountains and blasted through some fire roads and absolutely had a blast.
As of right now here are the next planned mods:
-Get poly bushings for spare pair of LCAs I have and install LCAs
-Confirm the nardi hub I just bought will fit my steering shaft and figure out the airbag bypass
-Extended sway bar end links from the user on here.
