550hp 2JZ 1978 Hilux Build

The cage and parachute I can accept, the filled block is where I draw the line

 

Looks like there's damage to the front passenger side strut area

 

I appreciate it for what it is. That's nothing more than f-around money needing a place to put on a show and to continue sinking more f-around money into.

 

Sold for $59K
WAS about 30 minutes from me.

 

I agree. If a guy is willing to take a chance on a pre-built race car, it might be the way to go.
I still have the go-fast bug, but the competitive racing bug flew for me a couple decades ago. I want a fast street car that can go around corners. (It still might have a cage though.)

 

I love racing, but it's hard to justify how insanely expensive it is. My buggy could've made it to a couple races this year, but I just wasn't feeling it, every time I go racing there's a host of things that need fixing and stuff just gets beat up. You can own some fast toys, not go racing, and buy more fast toys with the money saved

 

Interesting build. 2jz short block + 1jz head = 1.5jz engine build in a 97 tacoma

https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1997-toyota-tacoma-45/

 

I've seen people do the 1.5JZ, I think in both configurations of which side is block and head. I'm not sure why you would do that over just a pure 1JZ or 2JZ. I see things claiming the heads of the 1JZ flow better, but no actual facts and testing to show that. It's like arguing the GE vs GTE head flow since they're slightly different. I think it's neat though, but why go to that effort of swapping parts when you can get a 2JZ for sub $1000 since they came in nearly everything in the early 2000s.

 

My thoughts exactly. Totally agree man.

I think the main appeal and probably what started it was being able to have a bolt in displacement increase in factory 1jz cars. Such as jdm mk3 supra, soarer, chaser. Blow a bottom end or simply want more displacement? Bolt the 2j block in under the 1j head. No need to change wiring or literally anything else. Kinda neat. But also pointless in my opinion if you're doing a swap or starting with a blank canvas.

 

Truck is running great! Been taking it for a bunch of drives and at this point pretty comfortable to fully open the tap on it. Went to the car meet in town for my once every 4 months visit



I still need to get a dash hooked up, but the truck has failsafes for oil pressure and temperature, and it's absolutely locked in on both so most of the time I just drive around with no gauges. By this point I probably have 200-300 miles on it, and the gears are well enough broken in compared to the instructions of "please at least drive around the parking lot before hitting the strip". I did realize the 9in 3rd member has a level plug on it, the rear end started leaking a little from that plug (which was barely tight) so I popped it open since I had kind of arbitrarily filled it. It turns out that the 9in only takes like 2.5qts of fluid which seems insanely low, so I had it way overfilled by a quart or so.

The passenger fender flaring bar was coming into contact with the tire since the suspension twists so much under power, so I cut some new ones that sit 1.5" taller and are also 0.5" wider and now all the rear tire clearance issues seem solved. The front rubs occasionally, usually just sharp turns and hitting a bump or reversing out of a spot at full lock. Not bad enough to care, but I may like to tweak the fenders eventually for it.

Today going to lunch I had a couple issues with the truck stalling. As I've mentioned before, I thought an electronic throttle body would be needed since if you punched the clutch the rpms would fall and by the time the ECU was trying to correct with timing it might be too late or the truck would stumble a bit trying to bring the rpms back up since it can't mechanically adjust the air intake. Today it was very hot out, and seemed like it was having more issues than normal, both just getting going and died twice from the rpms dropping coming to a stop. I looked around in the ECU Masters software and was able to find some additional settings for idle control.



The truck is setup to use ignition timing to control idle, and before it was just setup to kind of randomly keep increasing or decreasing timing to try and hit the target idle, but I then discovered this table on the right (which is enabled via the correction table checkmark on the left) which gives you an open loop idle correction (compared to essentially the closed loop control before). What's nice about this and how I now have it setup, if the idle falls much at all it can "prematurely" crank the timing to bring it up before the idle has fallen too far. You can see I have it set so by 150rpm it's already adding in 4deg of timing, and by 250rpm it's 7deg. This is in contrast to before, where it seemed to add degrees of timing in a closed loop feedback of adding a degree, then a degree, then a degree, and by the time it had added enough timing to be useful the rpm had fallen so far it was hard to recover. Now if the idle drops much at all it instantly cranks the timing to bring it back around.

The wife and I just went for a test drive and it seemed to make a HUGE difference. I can punch into neutral and the rpms will drop and once it hits 900rpm it is locked in. It also seemed to make taking off a lot smoother, letting the clutch out the truck didn't fall on its face as easily, but it might just have been the cooler weather or me doing it, but that seems like an added perk I wasn't aiming for.



I've also done more research and testing of the boost control settings. Last time we tried to dial in boost control it was very confusing the values for the boost solenoid we were getting. What I realized is that turning boost control to closed loop just activates additional tables that build off of the base duty cycle tables, where as open loop uses the same base tables but there is no corrections applied. This was a bit confusing at first, but makes a lot more sense now. However the truck is still running in open loop boost control right now. Today we made a lot of progress with the boost control and getting the duty cycle table dialed in.



At the end we made two pulls for the draggy and that's the two spikes in the datalog, and you can see the engine is coming up to ~30psi MAP and holding there pretty well, with a max peak of 32.78psi (~20psi boost) which is right where we want it to be. Having the wastegate duty cycle at 50% closed seems to be right where we want it. What I can do next is activate the closed loop mode, and that will then take the base duty cycle table and adjust it like a fuel trim to try and reach the target boost. I'm not entirely sure if that's worth doing, the main issue to overcome is to make the turbo spool fast and then not overshoot the boost target, but if it spools too fast it seems to blow past the boost target. Turning it into closed loop mode might make it too slow to respond (similar to the idle control). Already the boost duty cycle lags behind the actual boost by quite a bit, so it's kind of a balancing act. With all of that said, these last two pulls are really nice, the truck gets into boost and isn't doing the surging it was before as the boost keeps getting pulled back, it's holding pretty flat and there might be a psi or three left on the table but that's it.

And this seems visible in the dragy, we only did the two launches and they weren't great, but there's a few G spikes that are higher than we've gotten before. And this is without launch control or any boost at take off.



The truck is an absolute blast though, and the rear suspension and handling feels awesome. 1st gear of course spins, and 2nd gear can spin too but the whole thing feels very nice and controlled. The slipping in 2nd gear is just enough you can feel the rear end step out a little bit, but it doesn't want to get crazy, just the right amount to make you smile and not be scary. It's a lot of fun just since it's so small and lightweight too. It's not the fastest thing, but it needs such little throttle and braking to get a huge response, it just ends up feeling so effortless to do what you want. Like it'll hit full boost at 60% throttle and 4000rpm, so a little throttle gives you a ton of feedback, and the brakes are a hilarious combination of having good feeling and just being so incredibly overpowered that you never worry about braking performance. It never feels like it's working hard to do what you want and that makes it a blast to drive!

 

⅛ and ¼ mile is where the jz shines let 'er eat

 

I don’t know about you, but I live my life a 1/4 mile at a time.

 

https://youtu.be/IIM_gt1c-_c

 

Congrats! Nothing better than working through bugs and getting the product you envisioned and hoped for. Such a cool, unique ride.

 

Listen to her choof

https://youtube.com/shorts/h-zPkyYeZ0w?si=trhqRTw6cHT0XNzl

 

Turbo noises are the best noises. Slapping gears makes them so much better than my silly auto.

 

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t spool it up and let off just to hear the noises.

 

That thing is awesome. What a difference that 4 link made. The video of the early pulls, holy crap the leaf springs on that poor little rear end were holding on for dear life!

 

Over the weekend I added two big upgrades to the ECU, a full time data logger (since it for some reason can't do that inherently) and a bluetooth canbus module. The data logger is nothing exciting, has a memory card (and its own bluetooth connection) and just constantly records as long as the ignition is on. It's a pain to always carry the laptop around, and the one time you don't is when something hiccups and now you can't look back to find it, so big upgrade right there.

The canbus bluetooth module has been on my desk for awhile. I think I had posted a long time ago but I wanted to build my own dash, and I had gotten the app "Real Dash" running on a raspberry pi and having bluetooth was the final thing to do, and I got it working! I was going to run two screens but it was kind of a bitch, but I found a wide screen 12 x 4 display on Amazon for $130 and it got here next day, and today I rigged it up!

This was my initial plan was to lay the stock bezel over the display.





But the display actually ended up fitting beautifully by itself in the dash. I absolutely hate the look of tiny displays crammed into a huge cavity, which was why I wanted to reuse the stock bezel. But after comparing, I really liked how the display by itself was going to look, plus would give me a lot more useable screen real estate.



I cut out a quick overlay and it just clamps the display in place and was really easy and looks pretty good for minimal effort actually!



I have a multi port USB outlet I added, the display takes one power port, the Raspberry Pi takes another power port, and then an HDMI goes between the two. I don't know anything about programming, so a lot can be fiddled with. Right now the Pi seems to get power and automatically boot up, and then I have a start up program that boots directly into the dash. Only caveat is I have to (or should) power down the Pi physically before turning the ignition off, but not a big deal since the turbo needs to cool down anyway.

Real Dash is like Torque Pro for a phone on absolute steroids. Everything is completely customizable and there's a bunch of user configurations to download. It pulls data via bluetooth canbus from the EMU Black. I need to add a GPS module to the Pi, but there's presets for maps and everything.



Here is the preset I grabbed and tweaked and was most in line with what I wanted for displaying extra information:



And what is extremely cool, besides everything else, is since this is a tiny computer running Linux, I can pull up a movie, browse the internet, it's essentially a laptop shoved into the dashboard and it talks to my ECU. I don't think I can tune through the screen since ECU Masters doesn't have Linux support, but that is really the only limitation with it. I have a lot more to play with it, but right now it's showing everything I want with bar graphs and texts and has medium and critical warnings set up. Speed doesn't work since I need GPS still, and "boost" I can't tell what it's talking to. There's also MAP but it likewise seems slaved to whatever "boost" is, and it's not what the real MAP/boost values are but that's probably buried in the variables somewhere, and frankly one of the less important values. Coolant and oil pressure is 99% of what I want. This display is also a touch screen, and while I haven't enabled that yet it will give some flexibility to not have to bring a mouse and keyboard to get around (but with how the boot sequence and power off are set up, you don't need a mouse or keyboard anyway).

Huge progress and was actually a lot smoother sailing than I thought it would be!

 

That's just freakin' tech!

 

Love it! One thing I did for a for a diy tablet head unit was a wireless keyboard w/mousepad in the glove box. Logitech makes a nice cheap combo unit

 

That’s beautiful. Has me thinking about a dash for my blazer that doesn’t involve the four figure fancy Holley dash.

 

That's what I was thinking, grab one of the fold up keyboards.

I'm all in probably $400, and that's just the Bluetooth canbus adapter, the Pi, and the display. The program itself is free or there's some add one you can pay for. The original reason I started researching this was a dash large enough to fit behind the stock gauge cluster was $2000+, and even then was too small since the dash hole is so huge. I have a Holley 7" dash on my buggy which is fine but nothing particularly special and really expensive for how small it is. I recently came across the Haltech IC-7 which is pretty huge but it's $2000. Aftermarket dash setups are crazy expensive and usually small and you need some janky looking faceplate to integrate, this setup you can buy one or multiple screens that are any size you want. For the price and flexibility I think this is hard to beat.

I'm also wondering if this works with any OBD2 Bluetooth adapter, I suspect it does considering Torque Pro seemed to be able to connect to the canbus adapter too.

 

Now that is friggin cool.

 

I did an Ali Express digital cluster in my GX470 project. Came in at $750. It's pretty cool, but yours is way cooler! I may try something like that in the JK. Mine just does basic readouts and needs a steering wheel controller. Definitely bookmarking your post for future reference

https://youtu.be/JDZae3mMiek?si=L80jIOAlkJ5QkuX2

 

That is sweet! Much faster boot time than mine, mine is probably around 20s to fully boot up, which I knew would be a short coming. The dev for Real Dash recommends using an Android tablet or head unit and then everything is just about as plug and play as possible, but finding a tablet with how wide I needed mine to be wasn't going to work and why I went with the Pi setup.

You should bookmark this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVn9uYfEQrA

It was one of the first things I came across in my research and what really convinced me what I wanted to do wasn't that complicated. His setup is way different than mine, his software doesn't talk to my ECU which is the main thing, but there's lots of tricks and ideas in that video I want to apply like methods to speed up the Pi boot time. It's a good reference video if nothing else, I want to make my own version of that video showing everything I did since it took a lot of learning but once I got it is actually pretty easy.

 

I want this in the tundra lol

 

Last week had a lot going on, first drove to LA on Tuesday for work, worked onsite Wednesday then drove home and got home at 2am, woke up and prepped the Hilux and then drove it for 8+ hours up to Idaho to go dirt biking!



Before I left for Idaho I changed the oil (forgot to change the filter) with some random ass diesel synthetic oil that was left over from the semi, changed the rear diff fluid, put some "Water Wetter" in the coolant to try and help with temperatures and give some corrosion resistance since it's straight water right now, and then built a retarded looking little air scoop above the cab to try and direct some air down around the radiator.

Almost immediately after leaving I had to stop and crank the compression on the rear. With the minibike, some tools, and a jerry can in the bed I had about an inch of up travel and would blow through it hitting anything. The rear shocks having adjustable compression and being extremely easy to access was a life saver, since the alternative was to turn around and crank the ride height back up. Having 80# springs in the back isn't great when a minibike uses up all your travel!



The new gauge screen setup is absolutely awesome. I didn't screw with it any more after the first test drive, but it works great and the current configuration I really like how all the gauges have both definitive numbers as well as bar graphs and colors so you can easily glance at the screen and quickly see if there's issues and roughly where everything is without reading anything. I would like to change the RPM to have a bar graph style also that sweeps across the top though.

The next (and recurring) issue was the truck getting hot, which I suspected would happen since it did before. About 50 miles in I pulled over after the truck started getting annoyingly hot (approaching 220) on a hill, and adjusted the hood scoop angle, and that actually made a pretty huge difference and dropped the coolant temp 7-10deg by itself. The rest of the drive the coolant hung around 208-210 at 75mph which was 2800rpm and where everything felt happy. Otherwise I had no issues all the way up to salt lake city. I had some noise cancelling headphones in, and it was painfully hot, but otherwise was great cruising!



I met up with some friends in SLC, one of which said he would ride with me for the trip (the Hilux and not suffering alone were the main reasons I even went) and then another friend with his GX towed three dirt bikes up. At this point we maxed out the compression on the rear since the truck was sitting so low with two thiccq bois in it plus a bunch of shit in the bed, but the truck actually handles exceptionally well even with such little up travel. There were still a few bumps we'd bottom out on, but 99% of the time it was very plush and comfortable riding. My buddy also grabbed a weed sprayer with water and we used that to mist ourselves for the drive which made life much more tolerable without A/C.



We maintained about 75mph the whole way and got a consistent right at 20mpg. I had the rear tires up to 30psi which seemed to help with feeling the soft spots, but there was a bit more vibration at 80mph (3000rpm). We finally got to camp again around 1am or so since I had such a late start---we didn't leave SLC until probably 6pm. But besides watching the coolant temp, the truck performed flawlessly and was by far the most I've ever driven it for a trip or at one time. We did nearly 600 miles in it and I drove it all the way across Utah. Around 10pm I had my buddy drive it the remaining part since I was dead from driving ~21 hours of the last 48 hours.





We had another friend meet us the next day with a van, and then spent two days dirt biking near Ketchum Idaho in the Sawtooths. One night we went three deep in it and went into town for dinner and also cruised around the mountains a bit and I let the other guys drive the truck. Maybe not the smartest thing to go ham on the little truck when you're 600 miles from home, but she took it happily!







Here's a couple short clips of ripping it around:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/r4ojuVsamhs

On Sunday we headed back south, traded off driving once for a few hours, and then I drove it from northern Utah all the way to southern Utah in one shot and on a single tank of gas. I was pretty nervous driving north, but after how successful it had been and my friends beating on it and the truck not having any issues, I felt a lot better on the drive home and was cruising at 80mph for most of the way and the interstate and traffic through SLC didn't bother me. Once I got south of SLC I did have to slow down since the truck started getting hot again, it was difficult to keep it under 214 even going 75mph. The intake air temp even outside of boost was reading over 100 in a few spots and I think the cooling system was just right at its limit once the ambient temp was well over 90deg and not getting good ram air to the radiator. When we were in Idaho and the ambient temp was below 90 you could go whatever speed and the truck was totally happy and would barely crack 200, but once the IAT started showing 95 or higher the coolant temp would climb quickly. It wasn't a huge deal, just slow down a bit, I'm not sure if the temperature is from getting into boost or from the higher rpms just generating more heat. I think the air scoop made a big difference just because the radiator ends up in this vortex of hot air, so the scoop can flush some cooler air down around the radiator. What I want to do is make a custom molded air scoop that protrudes above the roof and then ducts directly down into the radiator and really blasts it with air so hopefully the fan isn't needed at all, but that is eventual goals.



I also should've put the mini bike on the driver's side since I couldn't see anything out the passenger side and I still have no side mirrors.

I got home with the truck leaning out if I took a sharp corner, but it made it nearly the entire length of Utah on one tank of gas, and ran great the entire time! Nothing broken, it handled amazing, and did everything I asked of it without a hiccup! I would like to add more creature comforts, more sound deadening and insulation, A/C, but ultimately it proved it's back and successfully did 1200 miles!

 

Badass! Sounds like it was a great trip to get more things dialed in...you may need to make a lever activated (or servo-activated) scoop angle adjuster for "on the fly" optimizing! Nice work on going on a real trip in it! AND IT'S STILL A TRUCK! Hahaha nice work!

 

The air deflector was super clever, so was the weed sprayer!