Zmartin19 2016 Trail Build/Adventure Thread

[Zmartin19]

Well I guess it's time to start a build thread.

Here it is on day one.

And here it is a few days later with the window tint. All ceramic tint to keep all the heat out, well worth the extra dough.

Next up I purchased the Daystar lift off amazon just to hold me over until I bought the full on suspension lift. For around $100 it isn't a bad option. I will say that I had a fitment issue with the rear spacer and the bump stop. The I.D. of the spacer was about an 1/8" too small for the bump stop to fit. You could squeeze the bump stop into the spacer but seeing how polyurethane isn't a good material for stretching. Daystar worked with me to provide another set of spacers to remedy the problem however it didn't work. I ended up just squeezing them in there and hoping for the best since they are temporary anyway. My best guess is that whoever Toyota uses for a supplier on spring and/or the bump stop changes the way they're made slightly or they used a separate supplier for the 2016 models. The part numbers for both were the same so there's no telling.
During surgery.

Finished product.

Next I purchased the 270amp alternator from the D.C. Power engineering group buy. I haven't installed it yet so I've got no pictures. I'll provide those as soon as it's installed.
I also recently purchased a set of powder coated sliders without the tread plate from the RCI off-road group buy. Unfortunately the one that had the hardware packaged with it was damaged during shipping due to the hardware bag bursting and it scratching the coating. So I don't have any photos of them installed either. RCIs customer service (aka Josh) was great! He offered me a few solutions but had no problem getting another slider out to me and paying to ship the damaged one back to them. Eventually I will purchase a full set of skids from them. Great company, great product
Finally about a 2 weeks after taking delivery of the 4Runner I placed a large order with trail duty. I purchased a gobi rack with sunroof cutout and no insert. Due to the deal going on I got a 40" rigid E series light bar for the front and two SR series 6" bars for the rear. My only complaint was it took over 16 weeks to arrive when the estimated lead time was only 8. The rack is too notch quality, very impressed. I wish they would've emptied the tubing of the ladder before fully welding everything but oh well, nbd. Anyway, tonight I finally got the opportunity to start installing it. I got all of the brackets mounted to the vehicle and ready to accept the rack after I get the roof washed and waxed tomorrow morning. I followed the DIY thread from this forum however instead of using crappy silicon I used 3M 4000UV which is the real deal marine sealant, it will never ever leak ha. I didn't snap any photos during the install unfortunately but here's some pics of the sealant, the finished bracket installation the rack, and the light bar.

Once I get the rack installed I'll start work on my bussmann AUX fuseblock. It's a pretty labor intensive deal but all in all straight forward. I'll take pictures during the wiring process for y'all. It should be better than any shop could probably do. I'll be following the thread I found from googling "DIY bussmann." I believe it's actually from a Tacoma forum from a guy named bodenzord or something. I'll check and edit later. Anyway I'm building two since I had to buy such large quantities of the parts and will be selling it soon.

Well that's all I've got so far. I'll update as I get other things done.


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[susanbanthony25]

Great build. Excited to see it come together!

 

[Zmartin19]

Well I put the the ladder on yesterday! Looks great. My one complaint as others have listed is that the ladder doesn't sit flat on the top part. I don't have any pics of that yet but I can take some tomorrow. In the mean time here's a quick pic I snapped of the completed ladder.

I also forgot to mention I blacked out my emblems with the nox lux overlays. They are great, and I think they're going to hold up better than any other options.

I also removed my stock running boards to package for possible shipping. It's amazing how much taller the lift looks without them in the middle of the car. They are for sale if anyone wants them. $200 local pickup or $300 shipped. Shipping is killer on these things.

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[Vinsil]

Can't wait for the write up on the bussmann Keep it up, coming along great.:usa2:

 

[Zmartin19]

So late last night I placed an order with the retrofit source for the morimoto LED projector fog lights, 2 stroke LED high beams, and the HID low beams. Hopefully in a few weeks those will come in and I can upgrade the abysmal lighting that is stock 4Runner lights.


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[Zmartin19]

I was pretty busy yesterday. I spent the day installing my lows and highs as well as fogs from the retrofit source. Overall I'm very happy with their products.

I started by installing the 35 watt HID lows. I basically followed the directions given by TRS. The first step was removing the stock halogens and installing the HID bulbs. Next you need to drill a 7/8" hole in the gray covers for the harness to pass thru. I used a step drill bit to make the hole followed by a reamer to take care of scraggly edges. The directions don't say to do this but make sure you run the harness thru the hole in the cap before hooking it up to the light. Otherwise you'll have to do like me and remove the pins from the connector to get everything to fit thru the hole. Wasn't a big deal but just some extra unnecessary work. Here's a pic of the hole with the harness going thru.

Next I had to decide where to put everything. I don't remember who's post I saw this in but they put the ballast and some other stuff in the crevice between the frame and the top of the fender. All you have to do is remove the black plastic piece covering the area. You'll need to remove the black plastic piece covering the gap between the grill and the radiator first, then just slide the fender gap cover towards the rear of the vehicle and it will just lift right off. I chose to orient my ballasts as far back as possible since they had the longest amount of harnessed connections. Here's where it gets interesting, I did NOT use the relay harness, I used the CANBUS harness. It seemed simpler with less connections and no requirement to be wired straight to the battery, which was the main reason I used it. I hate having extra wiring if it can be avoided. TRS wasn't sure if it would work but I'm here to tell you it will. I'm sure most people already know that HIDs draw less current than halogens after startup but when they ignite they draw a ton of volts, something like 20k. So the canbus harness is basically a giant capacitor with some resistors to handle this initial draw (anyone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this assumption). All that really matters to me is that it worked and worked great. Here are some pics of how I ran the canbus harness with the ballast and igniter placed under the fender. In the first photo you can see the ballast and the canbus harness on the drivers side. I just used 3M double sided tape to stick each one to the flat surface under the fender. Of course I prepped all surfaces with 99.9% isopropyl alcohol first.

In the next couple of photos I give a more closeup view to show how each is oriented. Almost forgot to mention, due to the orientation of the plugs coming out of the ballast I had to dremel about an inch out of a lip directly behind the ballast on the passenger side so I could move it further back to plug everything in. I don't have a picture of this but keep this in mind. Nothing like grinding on a new 40k dollar car...

Unfortunately the leads coming out of the light that go to the igniter weren't quite long enough to allow me to stick them vertically to the area closest to the radiator cross member. It's barely shown in the previous photo but my solution was to use a double sided taped zip tie anchor in that spot and just zip tie the igniter to it. It works ok right now but I may come up with a more elegant solution later.

I almost forgot to mention that I checked the polarity before booking everything up permanently and black was actually positive with orange being negative, so make sure you check so you don't wonder why the lights aren't firing. Also, I noticed a little bit of what looked to be dried water spots in the area I mounted everything so I just put a bunch of dielectric grease in all of the connections to be safe. Everything else is waterproof to IP66 or 67 or something and should be fine.

Next I installed the morimoto 2 stroke LED highs. Pretty simple install but there were a few things to tackle. First I replaced the stock halogens with the LEDs. I had a hell of a time trying to install the LEDs into the housing and upon further investigation I discovered that the green o ring that comes on the adaptor is just a little oversized and prevented the lights from being inserted into the housing. My solution was to replace the green o ring with the one from the stock light and the LEDs then went right in, still tight though. The directions didn't mention a proper way to orient the fans so I oriented my bulbs with the fan on top, in case you're wondering the fan blows across the heat sink, so it's blowing down now. Here's a pic of the light in the drivers side housing.

You may have noticed in the previous pic I chose to install the LED harness on the vertices support for the radiator using you guessed it, double sided tape. This area fit the LED harness perfectly and was out of the way and didn't interfere with anything on either side.
On the passenger side I installed everything the exact same way. But to mount the box I removed the filler neck for the washer fluid reservoir. Once that's removed you have plenty of room to work. Here's a picture of the LED harness installed on that side with the filler next reinstalled.

Finally I installed the morimoto fog lights. I thought this installation would be the most "intensive" due to removing the bumper but it was actually the easiest and quickest. I've read it's not entirely necessary to remove the bumper But I was taking this opportunity to also install my TRD pro front balance so I removed it. First I removed all the plastic tabs from behind the grill and next to the headlights and unscrewed the bolt near the hood latch in the center (more on this later haha). Then I went around the perimeter and removed all the screws holding the bumper to the vehicle. Here's the fun part. To actually remove the vehicle there are tabs in each wheel well that you need to pry the bumper out or off of. Once you do that you grab the top corner of each side and pull. It's going to feel and sound like you're breaking something but that actually normal. Once you do that to both sides you should have a friend waiting because the bumper is going to fall and be caught by the fog light harnesses, ask me how I know. If I were to attempt to do it again I would probably leave the top center bolt near the hood latch engaged loosely to prevent that from happening so you can get to the fog lights to disconnect them. Here's some pictures of the surgery...

The fog lights assemblies are easily removed by unscrewing the two Phillips head screws. Here was an interesting part, as others have noticed, the inboard morimoto enclosure tabs are too large to fit into the bumper. I read in another thread where the person trimmed the extra plastic so that they would fit into the bumper. I did this and proceeded to try to install the enclosures. The inboard tabs went into the bumper but the outboard tabs were flat out spaced too far apart to be reliably installed and not look terrible so no dice. I pondered a while and compared to stock and morimoto fog light enclosure. Their geometry are very simple so I decided to try to install the morimoto housing into the stock fog light enclosure. It worked great! It took some critical thinking to figure out how to take apart the stock enclosures and I can assist anyone who needs details on this just difficult to explain thru text. Since the lights are so low and obviously get splashed often I put a ton of dielectric grease in the connectors for extra insurance. Next up I installed the trd pro bumper valence. Cake walk with the bumper removed, I highly suggest it because I don't see how one could removed those pesky clips with your hand contorted behind a bumper and not being able to see. Finally I just reversed the order in which everything came off and done! Here's a pic of the finished product!

And here's the lights before I aimed them, they were way high.

Here's a few pics of the lows vs the high beam. Exterior ones are pre aiming and interior ones are aimed with a bad angle from my driveway ha. I'll try to get better ones later.

Alright well I'm done typing for today. I think it took nearly an hour to type all this up. I hope y'all enjoy the somewhat write up, I tried to get relevant pictures. Please comment if you'd like to see different picture of my setup or would like more information regarding my installation. I'm new to this build thread thing so bare with me.


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