Toyota-Tech
New member
2015 SR5 2x Classic Silver
So I've received quite a few questions regarding my build and figured it would be good to start my build thread to put the details out there for you, my fellow T4R enthusiasts.
First, I brought mine home November of 2014 and really just planned to use it for hauling my upcoming baby boy around...that was until I started seeing so many around town and like in my old show car building days, wanted to stand out a bit. I doesn't help that I see some nice stuff at the dealer Im a tech at everyday too.
My build quickly started in February of 2015 with the front leveling kit as I can't stand how the front is in a nose dive look on all runners. I didn't do anything to the rear and found through research that the best choice was a steel 2.5" spacer which just mounts to the top of the shock/spring assembly. I don't suggest the nylon or aluminum spacers as I've heard they crack. Here's my before and after. Note: my driveway slants to the rear so the nose isn't as high as it appears. It's perfectly level to the ground as measured frame to ground.
Next was changing the customizable features for the side and rear power windows. You can go to a dealer and ask them to change them to allow you to roll the side windows down via the remote and roll them up with the key in the driver door handle. The rear can be changed to allow you to roll it up and down with the key in the back door. If you have a sunroof you can do that via the remote too. At this time I added a startup TRD logo to the radio by adding an image to a thumb drive and through the settings transferred it over.
Up next was my desire to add LED running lights to the front like you see on almost every car out there now. I decided to do individual LED's in the honeycomb of the fog light bezels. You can see my first version but I quickly realized they weren't big or bright enough so search for bigger and brighter LED's and went from a 5mm/20k mcd to 10mm/190k mcd. Each LED had a resistor and they are wired through a relay that is triggered on when I turn the ignition on. I wanted them on all the time and didn't want to switch them on. I quickly then disconnected my stock boring DRL's so I can run my parking lights without the DRL's. Having full access to the factory wiring diagrams was a blessing here. Here is v1 and several shots of v2. To skip ahead a bit, I have now added 5k HID's to the headlights, LED fog lights (LED to avoid melting the fog light housing the HID bulbs create), and LED switchbacks in the front blinkers, amber LED blinker bulbs in the rear and LED reverse and license plate bulbs. You see me coming now. Shameless plug, If interested, I do sell these fog light bezel LED lights as kits now and have sold quite a few across the country. Message me for more info. At this time I also got my TRD Pro wheels through the dealer just before Toyota put the stop orders to sell them without proof of damage to an actual TRDP. I'm running the factory Bridgestone Duelers since I'm not planning to off road mine.
V1:
V2:
Just the running lights:
As I had the bumper off for the LED lights, I decided to plasti-dip the mid and lower section. I have since had it wrapped in matte vinyl.
Next was matte red painting of the 4 on the tail as I saw a runner sitting one day in the service area of my dealer and the 4 on it had a red reflection from another cars taillight a and gave me the idea.
Next was tint. Medium all around. Couldn't go darker because the wife has issues seeing out of any darker and does drive my truck once in a while and I sure don't want to give her any excuse to hurt it.
Now since you can play video through the aux jack and on the factory head unit, adding a DVD player and streaming capability would turn out to be my biggest mod to date. This would become tough due to HDCP encryption companies have in place on DVD players and through streaming making it difficult to pass hdmi into composite video to hook up to the factory system. I first wired direct to the back of the aux jack circuit board my rca (yellow, white, red) and tested my directv box in my garage to see if I can get video. Come to find Toyota has the red and yellow switched through the mini jack so I corrected that during the soldering onto the circuit board. I got video and I was stoked! Now to find a spot for a DVD player and to find one that fit the best. First thought was to find a small one and stick it under a seat but that wasn't good enough and I wanted to build it in somewhere. Since I don't have 4 wheel drive, that spot in the console sounded great to me. Now to find the right player. For price and the fact that I wanted streaming capability I decided to go with a home unit and found a small Toshiba bluray player and quickly took it apart to find it would fit. I proceeded to make a slot out of the side of my console and then though I needed to relocate the IR so I can use the remote. I found that I could extend the IR and cleverly hide it behind the smoked plexi for the passenger airbag light. Once I got it all hooked up I realized I didn't like the streaming capabilities and opted to change it up a bit and just scrap that DVD player and get a simpler one (LG) and add the Lightning to hdmi Apple adapter for streaming as then I can stream Directv, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc. the LG player nearly has the same tray and guts as the Toshiba so it worked out perfect and the tray front is the same so my slot didn't change. I located my hdmi adapter in the tray where the 4-wheel drive is so all I do is connect my phone which sits conveniently in the tray. Now I needed to bring power up front from the inverter. I tapped into the inverter in the back and ran power to the front under the radio. I had to power 3 things but first, back to the HDCP issue so I can stream. After a lot of reading on blogs, I found I could use an hdmi splitter to drop that encryption. So being I went with a simple DVD player, that is connected via composite video to the back of the aux jack, and my lightning to hdmi adapter is connected through the hdmi splitter then through an hdmi to composite converter then into the back of the aux jack. Now the next tough part was to make it so I could play video while driving since the truck wants you to not be moving over roughly 5 miles per hour and have the parking brake on. So through the factory wiring diagrams I figured out how to kill those signals without affecting the car or having it throw codes. The parking brake was easy as I simply had to disconnect the signal wire from the ecu and ground it from the back of the head unit. The speed sensor was a bit trickier but with the use of a relay I was able to basically create a kill switch which activates when I flip on the inverter. Walla! Killing the speed sensor does kill the ability to use navi while driving but if I'm watching a movie I can't be watching navi so moot point to me. What happens is you don't seems to move on the navi when the speed sensors are cut. Once I turn off the inverter the navi works just fine. Up next will be to add monitors in the head rests for my kid once he's old enough but he's 4 months old so I have some time.
More to come so stay tuned and feel free to reach out with any questions as I enjoy this stuff and love seeing the stuff people do, certainly when I can help.
So I've received quite a few questions regarding my build and figured it would be good to start my build thread to put the details out there for you, my fellow T4R enthusiasts.
First, I brought mine home November of 2014 and really just planned to use it for hauling my upcoming baby boy around...that was until I started seeing so many around town and like in my old show car building days, wanted to stand out a bit. I doesn't help that I see some nice stuff at the dealer Im a tech at everyday too.
My build quickly started in February of 2015 with the front leveling kit as I can't stand how the front is in a nose dive look on all runners. I didn't do anything to the rear and found through research that the best choice was a steel 2.5" spacer which just mounts to the top of the shock/spring assembly. I don't suggest the nylon or aluminum spacers as I've heard they crack. Here's my before and after. Note: my driveway slants to the rear so the nose isn't as high as it appears. It's perfectly level to the ground as measured frame to ground.
Next was changing the customizable features for the side and rear power windows. You can go to a dealer and ask them to change them to allow you to roll the side windows down via the remote and roll them up with the key in the driver door handle. The rear can be changed to allow you to roll it up and down with the key in the back door. If you have a sunroof you can do that via the remote too. At this time I added a startup TRD logo to the radio by adding an image to a thumb drive and through the settings transferred it over.
Up next was my desire to add LED running lights to the front like you see on almost every car out there now. I decided to do individual LED's in the honeycomb of the fog light bezels. You can see my first version but I quickly realized they weren't big or bright enough so search for bigger and brighter LED's and went from a 5mm/20k mcd to 10mm/190k mcd. Each LED had a resistor and they are wired through a relay that is triggered on when I turn the ignition on. I wanted them on all the time and didn't want to switch them on. I quickly then disconnected my stock boring DRL's so I can run my parking lights without the DRL's. Having full access to the factory wiring diagrams was a blessing here. Here is v1 and several shots of v2. To skip ahead a bit, I have now added 5k HID's to the headlights, LED fog lights (LED to avoid melting the fog light housing the HID bulbs create), and LED switchbacks in the front blinkers, amber LED blinker bulbs in the rear and LED reverse and license plate bulbs. You see me coming now. Shameless plug, If interested, I do sell these fog light bezel LED lights as kits now and have sold quite a few across the country. Message me for more info. At this time I also got my TRD Pro wheels through the dealer just before Toyota put the stop orders to sell them without proof of damage to an actual TRDP. I'm running the factory Bridgestone Duelers since I'm not planning to off road mine.
V1:
V2:
Just the running lights:
As I had the bumper off for the LED lights, I decided to plasti-dip the mid and lower section. I have since had it wrapped in matte vinyl.
Next was matte red painting of the 4 on the tail as I saw a runner sitting one day in the service area of my dealer and the 4 on it had a red reflection from another cars taillight a and gave me the idea.
Next was tint. Medium all around. Couldn't go darker because the wife has issues seeing out of any darker and does drive my truck once in a while and I sure don't want to give her any excuse to hurt it.
Now since you can play video through the aux jack and on the factory head unit, adding a DVD player and streaming capability would turn out to be my biggest mod to date. This would become tough due to HDCP encryption companies have in place on DVD players and through streaming making it difficult to pass hdmi into composite video to hook up to the factory system. I first wired direct to the back of the aux jack circuit board my rca (yellow, white, red) and tested my directv box in my garage to see if I can get video. Come to find Toyota has the red and yellow switched through the mini jack so I corrected that during the soldering onto the circuit board. I got video and I was stoked! Now to find a spot for a DVD player and to find one that fit the best. First thought was to find a small one and stick it under a seat but that wasn't good enough and I wanted to build it in somewhere. Since I don't have 4 wheel drive, that spot in the console sounded great to me. Now to find the right player. For price and the fact that I wanted streaming capability I decided to go with a home unit and found a small Toshiba bluray player and quickly took it apart to find it would fit. I proceeded to make a slot out of the side of my console and then though I needed to relocate the IR so I can use the remote. I found that I could extend the IR and cleverly hide it behind the smoked plexi for the passenger airbag light. Once I got it all hooked up I realized I didn't like the streaming capabilities and opted to change it up a bit and just scrap that DVD player and get a simpler one (LG) and add the Lightning to hdmi Apple adapter for streaming as then I can stream Directv, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc. the LG player nearly has the same tray and guts as the Toshiba so it worked out perfect and the tray front is the same so my slot didn't change. I located my hdmi adapter in the tray where the 4-wheel drive is so all I do is connect my phone which sits conveniently in the tray. Now I needed to bring power up front from the inverter. I tapped into the inverter in the back and ran power to the front under the radio. I had to power 3 things but first, back to the HDCP issue so I can stream. After a lot of reading on blogs, I found I could use an hdmi splitter to drop that encryption. So being I went with a simple DVD player, that is connected via composite video to the back of the aux jack, and my lightning to hdmi adapter is connected through the hdmi splitter then through an hdmi to composite converter then into the back of the aux jack. Now the next tough part was to make it so I could play video while driving since the truck wants you to not be moving over roughly 5 miles per hour and have the parking brake on. So through the factory wiring diagrams I figured out how to kill those signals without affecting the car or having it throw codes. The parking brake was easy as I simply had to disconnect the signal wire from the ecu and ground it from the back of the head unit. The speed sensor was a bit trickier but with the use of a relay I was able to basically create a kill switch which activates when I flip on the inverter. Walla! Killing the speed sensor does kill the ability to use navi while driving but if I'm watching a movie I can't be watching navi so moot point to me. What happens is you don't seems to move on the navi when the speed sensors are cut. Once I turn off the inverter the navi works just fine. Up next will be to add monitors in the head rests for my kid once he's old enough but he's 4 months old so I have some time.
More to come so stay tuned and feel free to reach out with any questions as I enjoy this stuff and love seeing the stuff people do, certainly when I can help.
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