Final update on the front-end rebuild: Got everything put together pretty much by Friday afternoon (7/19/2019), with a little bit of buttoning up things on Saturday (setting final torques, picking up lost nuts, etc.).
Thursday was spent mostly getting all the old diff parts switched over to the new diff from ECGS.
Ultra black sealer for the passenger side diff tube:
No, I did not forget to put the stub shaft in the new diff:
All buttoned up with new Durobumps front diff mount bushings:
Took some extra time to clean up the eccentric bolts before putting the refurbished LCA's back in their place. They turned out to be in really good shape, so now there is an extra set of SPC cam bolts sitting on the parts shelf.
Clean enough to eat off of:
The order everything got put back together was; LCA's, steering rack, ITRE's, and then the diff. This makes it a lot easier to torque that vertical bolt that goes down from the top of the steering rack (123 ft/lbs), since the diff doesn't get in your way.
Maneuvering the diff back up into place wasn't as terrible as my expectations of doing it were. After fiddling with it on the jack for a little bit, I decided just to set it on my chest and bench the mofo up into place. Took about 10 minutes of jiggling it around once the rear mount was sitting on the cross member.
Everything back in place:
At some point in the shuffle, I somehow lost the nut that goes on the long bolt on the driver's side of the steering rack. Looking back at the previous post, there's even a picture of the thing sitting on the workbench:
Ended up calling the local Toyota dealership to get a new one from them ($3.60 with tax). I'll probably find it when the next time I sweep out the garage in a week or two.
Before putting the knuckles back in with the new SPC UBJ's installed, the coilovers were given a few more cranks with the spanner wrench. This was never really done since installing them, so the rake was a little more that 3 inches rear to front. That, along with moving the SPC UBJ's to the "G" position should help with the tire rubbing on the driver's side during hard left turns (and reversing turns). The rinky dink little spanner wrench I have just wasn't getting the job done, so a bit of a torque multiply parts were added to it with some stuff laying around.
Rinky dink:
This should do the trick:
No we're talking:
Of course, with new ITRE's, LCA's and cranking the coilovers up, that meant that the alignment was off. Getting the camber as close as possible so Firestone didn't have to mess with the eccentric bolts too much would be ideal (to keep the tire as forward as possible in the wheel well). So, out came the shade tree mechanic way of checking the camber.
A couple of carpenters squares held together with welding magnets:
The garage floor is surprising level left to right, so that helps:
Ended up not having to adjust the eccentric bolts too much to get the camber in spec once I got the alignment sheet back. It was spread eagle like Hustler center-fold on the toe though which made for an interesting drive over to get it aligned, lol!
Eccentric bolts before alignment:
Eccentric bolts after alignment:
Spec sheet (lol toe):
Steering angle inclination is a tenth of a degree out of spec, but not bad all told.
Even after losing that one nut, most everything on my list got ticked off. Was left with a couple of 35mm nuts that I'm not sure where they go, but oh well. They don't seem important. /s
