Another Truck?! Third Time's the Charm TURBOCHARGED

Okay so people asked nicely and I said "why not" so here's a build thread of my current Tacoma that I don't really have a name for. It's a 1996 Extra Cab V6 5-Speed 4x4 finished in a few shades of the early Toyota Super White (but apparently even from the factory it's more eggshell and the pieces from each plant barely match tone in sunlight).

I got it in early November 2019, it had belonged to the father of the gentleman I got it from and for the last 10 years or so had only been used to get up on the mountain for ski trips. Only had about 140k mi on it which was nice.

I guess I forgot to take a picture of it 100% stock, but it did come with the normal double spoke wheels and was 100% stock in every way. In this picture I had already swapped on some of my spare Land Cruiser tires and some new wheels for it.



Skipping ahead just a tiny bit to November of 2022 (most current pic), don't worry I'll fill in the blanks in other posts.



Interior:

• MasterCraft Safety Rubicon suspension seat
• 4" Shifter Extension
• Cobra 19III CB Radio GONE
• Midland Micro Mobile GMRS Radio
• Sony A415-BT Headunit
• Infinity REF-6522ix 6.5" Front Speakers
• Lexus IS300 Steering Wheel
• Havis Police car center console

Exterior:

• VORS VE-37x 16x8 wheels
• 315/75 R16 Cooper STT Pro Tires
• FiberwerX Front Fenders 4.5" bulge & 2.5" rise
• Cut bedside wheel arches for large tires
  
• The 4x4 Store front plate bumper (modified to accept winch clutch lever)
  
• Apex 12k Winch with synthetic line
• PIAA 410 Foglights with selective yellow bulbs
• LROR Bed Bars
• Tepui Ayer II Tent
• Custom 2000lb capable bedslide

Suspension:

• Front
  • SPC X-Axis upper control arms
  • Sway-a-Way 2.5"dia Coilovers with Bilstein 650lb Springs
  • MOOG lower control arms
• Rear
  • Chevy 63" 3/4ton Leaf Springs with frenched in RuffStuff hangers
  • RuffStuff 5" shackles
    
  • TrailGear creeper shackle mounts
    
  • KING 2.0"dia 12" Extended Reservoir shocks with compression adjusters

Drivetrain:

• Haltech Elite 750 with Wideband Module
• Garrett 60-1 T3 Turbo @16.3 psi (made 405hp and 482lb ft at the tires)
• Custom fabricated turbo manifolds and downpipe
• TiAL Sport Blowoff Valve
• TiAL F38 Wastegate
• Exedy Stage 1 Organic Race Clutch
  
• 4.56 8.4" Rear with ARB Locker and 4.56 Front gears

 

One of the first things I did after getting the truck was the timing belt and water pump plus spark plugs. That went pretty fast, but I did have to buy a new crank timing gear as mine was amazingly missing a tooth. After that I got the front bumper and painted it, I will try and find pictures of that on my computer at home sometime soon. But here you can see the process of cutting the bumper to fit the winch as well as modifying the winch clutch handle.





And of course the winch install about a week later













I went back and rewired the winch and switched out the weird hook thing for a Factor 55 Flatlink in October 2022.

 

I'm pretty sure at this point, after just installing the bumper but before installing the winch it got to go on its first trip. We ended up traveling to Southern Idaho to check out the Owyhee region and Jordan Valley. I only had the thin road tire from the Land Cruiser, so instead I took the brand new ATs off the LC and used them for the trip.



A lot of the trip was in the sloppiest mud imaginable.


But some amazing views were had.




I look like a damn Carhartt commercial haha






This was where we started our way into Silver City, which is rather hard to time your entry into as the road is often snowed closed.








This was on the road to Bruneau Canyon, which unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of my own for the descent as it is a close thing and opening the door would have been tough.


I will steal one of Ben's images and one of Dan's since Bruneau Canyon is where the trip ended.

 

Immediately after returning from that trip, like seriously it was maybe the next day I hadn't even washed my truck, my friend Jayson calls me and says he bought a truck and needed some help getting it running. So while we were getting his new Chevy project off the ground I got first dibs at what was in the bed... which was this quite beat up 1ton bed slide.



So immediately I took that thing right apart, thankfully at this point early in the pandemic lumber prices hadn't rocketed up just yet. So I went and got a nice sheet of 5/8" plywood and got to work with some grey heavy duty deck paint. The bedslide was for a 6' bed but a fullsize width truck. So it needed a little modification to fit the Tacoma.

Here it is after bolting down the frame and putting the new floor on the slide.


I even used it for a quick job transporting an axle


Then I finally cut down the tie down edge rails, painted them, and added some nice edge guard. Of course the plywood already formed a big crack... oh well it was gonna be abused anyway, I just slathered the crack with more of the deck paint and it has been fine so far. The slide frame underneath is far more sturdy than the trucks bed or frame anyway.


Sits at a nice height in there afterward.




It has since gotten a ton of use and is easily in my top 5 of useful things done to the truck. I really like keeping my truck light and having the COG low and this has helped immensely as I can keep the tent rack ultra low and still access all of my stuff. Here is a recent picture, it's holding a 35" spare, spare parts and tools, full cooler, water jugs, and some other supplies.

 

Okay back to that axle that was in the back of the truck. The long term plan for this truck is long travel so I thought it would be smart to snap up the rear axle I need early on while I could get it cheap. So I went down to the local wreckers and bought a complete Sequoia axle for $150 and two Tundra OEM CVs for $60 and dragged them home. This gives me the CVs I need to modify for the long travel front and a nice matching width rear axle with disc brakes and e-brake.

But first we need to clean it up a bit...




Went to a buddy's shop to plasma the link mounts off the old girl.


Now to flap disc the rest of it into submission








Nice and clean




Time for paint


And for now I have it in my storage until that project is ready.

 

Okay... so it went on a couple smaller trips after this point, one to Hell's Canyon, OR and another touring North Idaho and Northwestern Montana.

I'm not a story teller, in the sense that I go on the trips for my own fun and to enjoy my time there, not to be staging, documenting, drafting, and forging a narrative for someone else to read later. So I take some pictures, sometimes I don't, most of the time I'm content to have lived the experience and that's enough for me. So instead I will just drop links to albums of the trips which are at the very least organized chronologically but may have gaps. I will post a few highlight photos below the album link for those who aren't interested in perusing the whole album.

Hell's Canyon Album Link:
https://flic.kr/s/aHsmVbPiL5







Idaho & Montana Album Link:
https://flic.kr/s/aHsmVbPX1a

 

In October of 2020 I crawled under the taco to remove the rattling muffler and poked a hole clean through my frame... Yeah that sucked. So I knew it needed to come apart so I could fix the frame properly. This was also a turning point in the plan for the truck's build as well. The body was perfectly clean the the drivetrain was low miles so I wanted to leave it mostly unchanged. With the frame needing repair, well that's free license to do whatever in my book. So I first took it up to my buddy's house so we could get the bed free since I knew the nuts in the center rib of the bed had broken from their welds.







Sometime around Thanksgiving 2020 I took my Land Cruiser on Mr. Toad's wild ride through a summer road... in fall. Well in Eastern, WA a summer road is actually a designation of when maintenance will be kept and when the road will be bypassed elsewhere until it can be maintained. So I went full bog deep mode and sent the LC with all three lockers engaged bouncing on the rev limiter through some of the sloppiest mud I've seen in WA state to undo my mistake. Unfortunately when you're nearly up to your rockers, there are other things that take a hefty dose of mud, for me that was the transfer case. So I needed to drive the taco in fall/winter (which I usually don't because mud terrains are ass in snow and ice), so I could take the Land Cruiser apart to fix the transfer case. This sucked because I had to shove a bed back on the taco and put it half ass back together so I could get to work still.

Land Cruiser getting it's moment of attention. Yes, the entire t-case had to come off to change the front output seal.







Finally that nonsense was over with and I could take the truck down again, so I did.





Unfortunately and sorta fortunately, it was now the time to open it up and assess the damage and cut out the rust...






Now time to get the Safe-T-Caps fit up, I relieved them at the arch and then reinforced the new shape since they fit kinda odd at first.




Can see in this picture where I welded on the straps to reinforce where I changed the arch in the caps.


Next was time for even more frame cleanup since the main leaf hanger area wasn't the only problem spot...

 

Great, now I miss my '96 even more. Can't wait to get to the turbo chapter of this story!

 

Most of the frame repair out of the way it was time to put the truck's rear back into usable shape, which means lifting the cab, scuffing and sanding, welding the new leaf spring mount points, priming, and painting the frame.

I did the leaf mock-up location first to make sure the wheels are centered in the arches.




Drop a bed on and see if this position works or not.










That luckily all check out exactly as planned so now it is back into the garage to french in the spring hangers and put back the x-members.












Had to drill the new u-bolt plates for some bumpstops and of course paint them







And finally painting the frame, let me tell you this whole process is a giant fucking pain in the ass to do well.






















Brakes next...

 

Nice! Are you going to do any rust repair to the axel or leafs?

 

I'm going to leave the factory axle alone since it's just surface rust and I'll be replacing it with the Sequoia axle sooner than later. The leafs I'll probably give a paint job to when I add another leaf in, the Chevy 63 leafs are marvelous for comfort and carrying capacity but it's hard to gauge how many full-size truck leaves you need on a mini truck, I definitely should have left the 4th leaf in.

 

Oh for some reason I just forgot, but like right when I got the truck I took the stock split bench out so I could put in a seat that didn't hurt my hips and back.

I cannot stress just how much of a difference this seat has made for me. I am tall and most of my extra height is in my legs. The position this seat leaves me in with my legs having some support under the knees now and the extra bit I moved back from the steering wheel (I always had the stock seat all the way back) has me able to drive for hours and hours now without pain.



The seat is a MasterCraft Safety Rubicon suspension seat with extra angle and the optional lumbar adjustment.

 

So while I had the rear apart I took the opportunity to rip off the LSPV and the extra brake line running to the rear. This eliminates a few leak points, a valve that doesn't really scale well with larger tires and camping gear, and about 13 feet of brake line.

Had to find a good place to mount the new manual proportioning valve.


And make a new hose to hook to the rear brake line junction block on the frame.






I didn't take pictures of it but I also installed a braided steel rear brake line from frame to axle and plugged the LSPV front brake crossover to completely remove that old system and the leftover brake line.

 

At this point I moved houses to a new place with a separate shop building, so things went on a minor hold and thankfully this thing was together enough to be driven to the new place.



After a couple horrible weeks of moving house I got back to work on the truck so it could come along on a trip to the Steens Mountain area in Southern Oregon. To do that, it needs shocks... so off comes the bed yet again.









And it got to come to work with me for a quick test drive.



After work it was a quick trip to the storage unit (that I can finally say I no longer need) to grab the tent, rack, and hilift.





And lastly for a quick trip to the Off-Road Vehicle Park with my friend to test some stuff before the trip.

 

Great work.

 

So at this point it was almost ready to go on its first shake down trip with the new rear suspension and fixed frame. As always there's plenty more to do but it got some minor care in the form of a front end refresh before the trip. Some SAW 2.5"dia coilovers I got to rebuild with @turbodb's help and tools, new set of SPC upper arms that I got super cheap, and some new stock replacement lower control arms since my last ones refused to give up the bushings.

Off with the old...



In with part of the new, I unfortunately forgot to take a picture of putting in the new lower control arms, but I did take the time to clean and paint the frame up here

 

This was all in prep so we could go camping in the Steens Mountains area of Oregon, I didn't feel like many of the pictures I took were worth posting or edited well so I just didn't post many. But I think Ben has a few more that you may want to view I'm not writing in a story here, there isn't one to really be told besides $9/gal gas and having fun with friends.

Steens Mtns and Alvord Album Links:
My Pictures: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjzTmfJ
Ben's Pictures: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjzSddX






By: @m3bassman


By: @m3bassman




By: @m3bassman

 

Took a minor break from the truck after this trip so I could work on the shop and the house a bit. Summers where I live are kinda the time to get that stuff done. So a fence was built around the property and I had a lot of friends over (@Digiratus, @m3bassman, @turbodb, and some local non-TW friends of course too). Did some minor changes to the new gates on the property and motorized them since there's always friends coming and going to work on their projects in the shop. This also felt like the right time to buy something I really don't need but really want.



and of course we aren't about to half ass something like this... so...



Even started on a little NA tune with the new computer

 

I had actually just come across this build thread earlier this morning.

 

So with the deadline for another trip closing in... it was time to make some big changes to the truck. My tires were pretty much toast, just plum worn out, and I have had 6 brand new 315/75/16 Cooper STT Pro tires sitting in my basement originally for the Land Cruiser, so it was time to turn that into something. I'll say now that this is absolutely not a How-To for tubbing your own truck, I am not a sheetmetal fab guy when it comes to work or hobby. I usually only work with thicker metal and this was all done by best guess and luck.

Quick before picture:


Aaannnd we're off to the races, most of the pictures of the process were provided by @Digiratus who kindly joined in to help with the project and photo document. First stop here is to take the fenders off in my case, I have no plans on cutting these front fenders, they will be stored away as is. I have fiberglass fenders provided as a very kind gift from @BartMaster1234.


Stick on a tire and see just how much you really have to cut...


Yeah, it's a lot :/




And those pics were of it at a bit of droop below neutral... that preliminary line I drew was not nearly enough cutting.






Still hadn't cut enough, but the stuff was adding up...




Getting closer...




Okay time to cover the giant hole I made, and yes I know I'm 27 and bald




...and on the next episode we turn that into some sheet metal.