Recent content by jsmith7

Restored the B pillar badges. They were in pretty rough shape... Scraped off all the old paint. What a pain... Used some gel type, t shirt paint for the letters. black spray paint on the backs. Not perfect, but much better than before.

Onto the driver door... There was a cluster of small dents near the handle. First pic below highlights these dents. Pounding these out from inside was quite the pain. Going to try to use as little body filler as possible. The PO also used self tapping screws to screw in some carpet on the...

This fall/winter I plan on fixing the rust, dents, and other body imperfections and giving it a fresh paint job. I plan on doing all the work myself in my garage. I will makeshift a paint booth when it comes time to spray. I have started on the driver front fender. A few dents/creases as well...

Sitting nice and purty. Rides great! I can actually accelerate up hill going 75mph. With some mixed driving, a tiny bit of trail riding, but mostly highway I averaged 20.3 on my last fill. Not too shabby! First time setting diff bearings/backlash and pinion bearing preload. Ive put about 1200...

Finally pulled the 4Runner out from behind the garage after a little over a year. Sold the wheels and tires that were on it with a '91 4Runner I had bought for cheap, planned to rebuild the engine and sell... Ended up taking the engine completely apart, realized I didn't have time to rebuild...

Wow, I haven't been on here for quite some time. I moved from Ohio to Michigan and bought a house. All of my free time was spent renovating that... So the 4runner got put behind the garage and hibernated...

Awesome build! The attention to detail is amazing, makes me wish I could redo some of the things on my build. I learned the hard way that skipping corners and not going the extra mile with painting components and hardware will bite you in the butt later on, especially living in the rust belt. I...

Thanks man! I haven't done too much. I've put about 5,000 miles on since the rebuild. It's developed an idling issue when the engine is warm. If the engine is cold, or hot, it idles fine, but sometimes has really low idle when it's warm. Just applied some fluid film to protect the...

Thanks, guys!

cleaned up the front end too. finally, the before and after shot... Other than losing about 3 qts of oil in about 30 seconds on initial start up because the machine shop forgot to replace one of the oil galley plugs, the whole rebuild went pretty smooth, and she is running great...

Well, the block finally came back from the machine shop! I found out the cylinders were bored at some point in the past and i could get away with honing them. After the crankshaft was polished and the block was decked, i had new bearings, rods, pistons, and rings installed. Once I got it home...

So, I decided to pull the motor the Friday before spring break. With a week off for spring break, I thought this would be the perfect time for the rebuild. My plan is to clean up the engine and engine bay really well, paint and refresh everything I can, without going too crazy. I'll be putting a...

nice work! I'm actually going to be pulling the engine to do a full rebuild. A couple things have pointed towards putting a fresh head on it, so I might as well do it right and take a look at the bottom end while i'm at it.

I'm looking forward to your next post as I just found out that I have a blown head gasket.

That's what I was thinking. Do it right the first time. Thanks! Looks like that's gonna be the approach I'm going to take.