550hp 2JZ 1978 Hilux Build

AWD will be the next upgrade after the rear axle, but that will be all custom parts and completely replace the entire front suspension so will take awhile.

 

Holy Moly what a fricken ride!!!! I bet everyone around you were totally in shock to see all this happening and then the look of surprise on your face as you wiz on by!!!WOW!!! What a ride! Glad you and everyone around you are alright and no one was harmed.

what a circus ride!!! It was OK till it wasn't!! HA!!!! Back to the shop.

 

Wow! When I first saw that axle wrap I thought you could weld up a quick traction bar setup. Man...glad your ok and it sucks having the tire other stuff wiped out. The learning curve... it's a beast!

 

That was my biggest fear when we were road tripping to AZ and back. Glad you are ok. That could have gone a lot worse.

 

You do keep it interesting and entertaining there is no doubt about that. HA!
Hope getting back on the road goes smoothly!

All The Best

 

If you need a second

 

Perfect for a four rotor or hayabusa or 1uz build

 

I'm moving back to Aurora in May. If it's still available then, it'd be a tempting grab!

 

All that hard work . . .

I had one in red right out of highschool. Lowered that thing and drove the shit out of it. Sold it and bought an '83 4x4 short bed, the absolute best truck I have ever owned !

 

Always good when stuff is falling out before you even pulled the diff







Quick Performance is wickedly quick! I got another tracking number, and I think it's for the axle housing already! Should be here later this week. With the rear stripped down I'll now scan the back and throw everything into CAD to design the brackets, figure out axle placement, look at suspension geometry, and size what shocks to buy. But first I decided to scan the front right again so I can compare them in CAD and see what's bent since visually everything is fine.



Overlaying the two scans is a pain to actually get very close. This position seems the most correct I've come up with, and roughly matches the ball joint position difference I got with the tape measure.



The gist of it is, I think both upper and lower control arms themselves are bent and that results in the hub being pushed to the rear over an inch. I was hoping to find a set of new arms, but so far haven't found anything. For $150 there's a couple options on ebay of used nasty looking arms.




If I can't find any new replacements, I think I will just cut the front of the control arms, bend them back forward, and then weld the arm back together in the correct position. A bit janky, but we're not looking for perfect handling, and the whole front suspension will get deleted in the future anyway.

Next up will be scanning the rear and hopefully this weekend figure out everything to buy for the new axle!

 

That's some gnarly damage, glad you made it through without injury. Are you going to link the rear so axle wrap doesn't bite you again? Or get traction bars of some sort?

 

Yea it's getting linked for sure. Will eliminate axle wrap, and give lots of setup options and adjustability. Traction bars (and ladder bars, and some other styles) have their place, but in my opinion they are a band aid and at the end of the day are not that much different from a materials cost than just linking the rear. In this case there is no reason not to link it, it will (should be) superior in every way and I don't have any constraints that would limit it being linked.

With that said, I still have a lot of homework to figure out the link configuration and I have zero experience with street vehicles. On the plus side, my Chassis Engineering book will actually be applicable for once! I'm not too concerned, street cars have extremely low travel so it makes the link geometry a lot easier compared to a buggy with 24" of wheel travel trying to keep all the parameters somewhat sane during the cycling. I also don't want to make some swiss cheese brackets with a ton of adjustment, I think those look really ugly and again like a band aid for someone who couldn't calculate the geometry. My plan is to have maybe three adjustment holes on the chassis side links (if that) and call it good, try to keep it as simple and elegant as possible.

I had thought about (maybe talked about) getting fancy in the rear, but I decided against that. There's trivial benefit to getting fancy in the back, so things like cantilever shocks, fancy packaging, watts links, etc. are out. I'll save the fancy stuff for the front end where packaging is tight. The rear will just be a pretty conventional 3 or 4 link with some little coilovers.

 

You're probably already aware, but QA1 coilovers are a popular option on lowered early year Tacoma's

https://qa1.net/

 

https://www.stabfab.com/toyota

https://www.stabfab.com/product-page/toyota-pickup-coilover-brackets

 

OH MY!!!!

 

I had looked at them a few weeks ago just in general, they seemed really expensive for what they were I thought. But it's so hard to tell with coilovers if the price is justified.

All the stuff that guy has is only 79+, the 68-78 trucks have no support hahaha

 

Been a fat minute since I did anything to the Hilux, after the last 3rd member broke life got busy with other stuff. In the past few weeks I've been chipping away at the truck since it needs to vacate the lift.

First my 9" housing from Quick Performance showed up.



I also got joints from Summit Machine who are local in Utah. I've wanted to run these joints for a long time, originally wanted to run them on my buggy. They are not cheap though, but if I did one end fixed and the other adjustable then the price was about the same as running all adjustable heims, and since you really only need to adjust them once that seemed fine. These are their "small" joints. They are rebuildable and greaseable and seemed like a good option for a street rig to try them out.



Now that I had all the parts, I needed to finalize the suspension design. My original plan was to do a 3-link with panhard, but mounting the upper link was a bit tricky and likewise the panhard had a tight window to operate in between clearing the differential and clearing the fuel cell. Because of that I looked at a triangulated 4 link, which in general I've always been a fan of, and that packaged a lot nicer. I did lots of reading and finally just settled on some parameters to get out of analysis paralysis.

This is where I settled for the baseline configuration. I have 1" of adjustment on the frame side uppers, and 1" on the axle side lowers, so I have 4x different options. All the other locations were just an afterthought of having room to add another bolt hole.




This was all done in conjunction with laying it out in Solidworks:



With all the points setup, I then drew up the bracketry in Solidworks and then exported it and setup the CAM paths for the plasma table.



The axle has an offset diff since the pinion is not centered in the diff, but the pinion is centered with the axle. Because of that the upper link mounts are unique to each side. This is where having the scan was very powerful.




Then off to cutting and welding the brackets together. First weld in awhile looking good!





As time has gone on I've settled on a combination of MIG and TIG for the projects. Some things, like two edges, I can TIG way better than I can MIG weld. But other spots it's way faster and easier to lay it down with the MIG and I can get good welds.





With the brackets done, it was on to prepping the frame. The lower link mounts went in the same vicinity as the leaf spring perches, and those were going to be a bitch to remove and I didn't want to spend days grinding, so I opted to completely cut out the perches and then weld in a replacement plate to get the frame smooth and it worked out beautifully.



Next was to weld in the link brackets.





Axle coming along and has the link brackets all done.



With the axle done, I decided to scan the completed axle and insert it into my CAD assembly to see how the real thing compared to the perfect CAD, which I thought was a fun experiment and yielded some cool results! The green is the new scan, the gray is the previous scan/perfect brackets.





From that I then pulled link lengths from the CAD and started welding the links together. The links are nearly replaceable top to bottom---in retrospect I should've tweaked the design to make them the same length---but the uppers are about 0.75" shorter than the lowers. The links have jam nuts plus an extra 0.25" of threads showing so they can be threaded in, so in a pinch I probably could swap a lower link and remove the jam nut and get it to the correct length to fit the uppers.



I'm using 1.5" x .120" DOM for the links, this should be massively overkill. From some reading a somewhat "large" link for a car is 1.25", so I decided to bump a size over that to be safe. Not a lot of bungs that fit this thread size and tube size, but I got some from WFO Concepts. Essentially everything in the rear is offroad sized hardware, which I think looks cool and I don't want to worry about the rear ever having a strength issue again.







With the rear link components done, I hung the housing so I could figure out how I wanted to do the shocks.



With the shock position and length figured out, I ordered some Viking coilovers. From what I've read they are a spinoff from QA1 and most people like them. They are also wickedly cheap! These are their mid tier valving setup that's a bit more performance focused than their pure comfort lineup. These are 5.75" stroke, have compression and rebound adjustment, and cost $275 a shock! Got a whole coilover for the price of a bump stop on my buggy.



I didn't get any pictures of the coilover mounting, but pretty simple brackets. The axle has a boxed in tower that hangs down pretty far, the front fuel cell crossmember has some little tabs come off. This leaves everything mounted below the frame so if I want to add a floor in the bed it can still be flat. With the coilover mounts done I painted the axle.



And then today finally mounted everything!



You can see the remnants of an original crossmember which sat too low for the upper links at full bump. I'm not worried about deleting it since the fuel cell crossmember which I added to the frame is only a couple inches behind it.







I fought with the rear brakes a bit, and you have to completely disassemble the parking brake drum to get the axle shaft retaining plate in place from what I could figure out. That seemed like a huge pain in the ass, so I deleted the whole parking drum brake assembly to simplify things. I can't actuate the parking brake right now anyway, and having the axle shaft be quick to pull out is a much higher priority than a dedicated parking brake.



The tops of the coilover where the adjustment knobs are is very easy to access. These shocks have 20+ adjustment positions, and by position 5 they are already wickedly stiff. I'm worried even the softest setting might be too stiff for how lightweight the truck is, we'll see when I drive it and do some launches. Worst case I'll tear them down and revalve them, or for how cheap they are just buy some of the comfort lineup.





This is roughly ride height, which is where I wanted it to be. This is with zero preload on the springs, just kissing the spring collars at full extension. This ends up with 2.75" of up travel, and 3.0" of down travel. This is with a single 150 lbf/in spring as I recall.



I am so stoked how it's turned out, it looks absolutely nasty. I saw a mini truck at a car meet a few weeks ago with a similar four link, but I think he just had bushings on both ends with small tubing. The links on this look like she means business, and having the huge billet ends on top of the axle was just coincidence but is pretty cool!







And that wraps up this update, I wanted to post all the pictures before I get too many. I'm on the books for the driveline shop, that's probably two weeks out. Both coolant lines are welded up, one is installed and the other needs some mounting brackets added. The exhaust I haven't touched. Couple other minor things. Truck should be ready to rock by the time I get the new driveshaft, and hopefully (knock on wood) is bulletproofed enough to handle the power for awhile!

 

DON'T LET YOUR NEIGHBOR DRIVE IT AGAIN !!!

 

Hahahaha that got a good laugh. My wife says "slash don't go camping with the boys"

 

Looks fantastic man!

 

Looking bad ass! Like those link ends. Beefy as a MoFo!

 

WOW!!!! Looking good.
Heck of a setup that's for sure.
Very nice!

 

Yesterday finished up the cooling lines and tackled the exhaust. I ended up cutting down the passenger side coolant hardline so it would line up with the softline a bit better, and then cut and welded new brackets to locate the hardline where I wanted. For the exhaust I ended up replacing nearly everything with the exception of right next to the front V band and the outer foot or so where it curved into the bedside, only because I didn't have any more curved exhaust pieces to make a new tip. I ended up splitting this section of the exhaust that goes from the in front of the transmission crossmember all the way to the back, into two sections with another V band. The front section is just a 4ft straight piece effectively and ends right before the rear of the cab. This makes putting everything together a lot easier compared to last time trying to snake the exhaust around the coolant lines, bedside, above the trans crossmember, and into two exhaust hangers. The rear section curves up at 30 degrees right into a Vibrant resonator muffler thing, and then does a normal 90deg turn into another straight and out the bedside. This is a fair bit simpler than the previous setup that did a funky compound curve to clear the battery. I'm hopeful the resonator muffler thing quiets it down a bit, I'm fine with the truck being loud at full throttle, but right now it's too loud for me just cruising around--like I wouldn't take the dog with me ever in the truck. We'll see if it does much if anything, of course most reviews are how it's loud compared to whatever other system people had, not people going from straight piped to adding this muffler. It's also pretty small so I don't have high hopes, but you can only fit so much without looking weird or getting crazy.







Today I screwed around with the front suspension, and got it mostly together then pulled parts of it off again to change my plan for it. After some measuring I should be able to fit the same Viking brand coilovers the rear has without really any modification. The front shocks don't seem to be blown, they still have nitrogen in them, but they are really soft. Additionally the stock spring setup is a complete pain to install, it's like 4" too long, so it's really awkward to get the spring in. The best method seems to be unbolting the LCA from just about everything and then compressing the spring, then jacking the LCA up to bolt it to the frame---it's a cluster and sketchy at best. I'm hoping by shoving some coilovers in it will make installation of the spring less sketchy, plus have compression and rebound adjustment and be able to dial it in for the increased weight of the motor.



My current conclusion, maybe coming full circle, is that the LCA is bent. I measured stuff AGAIN and the UCA all seems to be in the right spot, and the LCA mounts seem to be in the right spot, but the LBJ is 1+ inches rearward from where it should be so it has to be the LCA is bent. I think I will just fork over the $100 for the one LCA on eBay (even though it's way grosser than the one I already have) and see if that fixes the alignment. I'm also going to order a proportioning valve, AN3 brake lines to replace the rear brake lines, and then some other components to refresh the front right while I have it totally torn down. Now to wait for parts!

 

Hard at work...looks fun though!

 

Looks so damn good my friend! I want a cool exiting exhaust lol. Those summit machine joints are great ran those when I had a wrangler. Work amazing

 

Your exhaust is exciting already! It doubles as a lubrication system

 

lol you’re not wrong

 

I put a vibrant resonator in front of the muffler on my Tacoma that had lt headers, and full exhaust w/cat delete. It helped, some. Wouldn't call it quiet though. What really helped was adding back the factory midpipe w/cats lol.

 

Another update, not quite driving but nearly there!

After the last update, the main remaining task was the front suspension. I ended up ordering some coilovers from Viking which didn't show up until a couple days ago.



I still had to address the passenger side being bent, and it turned out the LCA I ordered on eBay actually had been sold already. I tried to track down another one, but in the mean time did MORE MEASURING and pulled the driver's side off to bolt back to back with the passenger side to confirm the LCA was bent.... and it wasn't! At least not a meaningful amount. After MORE MEASURING what I concluded was that the UCA seemed to be in the correct location, but the LCA certainly was not, and the bump stop was not in the correct spot either. What I think happened is that the entire subframe kind of rotated around the axis of the hub, with the UCA staying in the right spot and the LCA getting shoved backwards. I also think the frame deformed since using the front tow point location seems extremely inconsistent between the two sides.

With all of that in mind, what I decided to do was to cut up the LCA mount and make it adjustable so the LCA could be moved back to the correct position relative to the body mount at the rear of the wheel well. The body mount there seemed far enough back that it was the same between both sides and would serve as good reference geometry. I then took the huge bolt/pivot for the LCA and chopped it up and welded some brackets to it with slotted holes so I could rotate the LCA, move it front to back, and to some extent in and out so caster and camber could all be adjusted. I don't have any before pictures, but this is how the passenger side is now:



Not sure if this will be strong enough and I'll need to run a brace between the two sides, but I think it should be fine. As for maintaining alignment, I may end up tack welding the plates to the subframe once I get it on an alignment rack. I used a tape measure to the body mount and a level gauge on the spindle to approximately set the LCA to the same position as the driver's side (hard to see much in this photo since everything is the same shit color).



That photo was from the final mockup and torquing. After making the LCA mounts, I mocked up the coilovers which seemed to fit beautifully! The first thing to change was the new coil springs were too small for the coil buckets, but too big for the spring perch to properly seat at the end of the coilover. The coil bucket is tapered, so you can't fit the coilover in as a fully assembled unit, and instead the coil spring has to sit in a feature inside the bucket but that feature is meant for a much larger spring if that makes sense. This was easy to fix though, I took the spring seat for the coilover and machined a lip around the outside, which then aligns with the stock coil spring seat:





This works out very nice, the bottom of the coil spring still sits on the coilover, but the top of the coil spring sits against the stock coil bucket and the end of the shock eyelet goes through the stock eyelet hole. It ends up being a bit of a hybrid between a stand alone coilover and a coil and shock factory setup.



The lower coilover mount took a bit of thinking, but I ended up with a very elegant design. The bottom mount sat just below the LCA, and if you could run a rod through the eyelet and drill two holes where the factory retaining bolts are, you would be done! But the factory retaining bolts are nearly the same size as the 1/2" rod for the coilover, so that doesn't really work. What I ended up doing was using a small 1/2" rod, and then a bracket that wraps around it and holds it up tight against the LCA and retains it from sliding out either side.



This is a beautiful solution that is really simple and and really easy to assemble. The coilover ends up being the absolute perfect length where it tops out the same time the factory droop stop engages, and has plenty of up travel so the factory bump stop works.



Not a lot of work, and this is a 100% bolt in solution for the truck. It's now on coilovers with spring adjustment as well as compression and rebound adjustment, and uses the factory bump and droop stops!

With all of that said, two current issues to solve. The springs are WAY too soft, I think I multiplied instead of divided somewhere I ordered new springs today, the 250 springs up front are getting swapped for 750s. And then the suspension seems to be bottoming out on something besides the bump stop.



I think the coilover body is hitting the upper spring perch. I did open up the center bore on the spring perch in anticipation of that---to be clear, what I think is happening is since the upper spring perch is essentially "floating" around the shock shaft (since it's located on the stock frame spring perch) as the suspension cycles the shock shifts over but the spring perch doesn't move with it like a normal coilover, so the shock body ends up hitting the spring perch and that's what's bottoming out I think. This should also be easy to solve, I just machine out the center bore of the upper spring perch more. As I said, I DID do that, but just an arbitrary amount thinking it didn't really need to happen. I have a LOT more material I can remove, something like opening the inner bore to here:



It does work out that I had such soft springs in, since I would not have found this bottom out issue without driving and bottoming the suspension dynamically. I had considered buying super soft springs (like tender springs) just so I could cycle the suspension with the upper perch and make sure it clears (can't really cycle it by hand since you have to hold the upper perch up inside the coil bucket). Sucks I bought the wrong springs, but works out it helped reveal another issue.

Another thing I did was I threw some big gussets on the front crossmember since it was cracking off of the subframe. I have a rear gusset that goes vertically up towards the engine mount, and a forward gusset that ties in along the length of the subframe. Some pretty nasty welds (somehow this picture makes them look worse than I thought hahaha) since everything was gross and I could barely reach any tools in to clean it, but I got good enough welds up in there for the time being. Both sides are gusseted and I think this will make a huge difference for the front end.



Other minor things I've done, the rear relays have been replaced since they had been destroyed. I added limit straps that just mount janky style to the shock bolts. Rear axle has gear oil in it. I ran AN3 brake lines from the master to the rear (will do that up front eventually too). At this point the rear end is completely done and just waiting on the driveshaft.



I should have the new front springs by the end of the week. Fingers crossed I get the driveshaft this week too! Then she's ready to drive I think. And since it's been awhile and I don't think a full engine bay photo of how it's currently configured was ever posted, here is the good ole 2JZ



I didn't expect to go from the engine build phase to the suspension phase so quickly, but there are a LOT of upgrades over the past couple months and the truck should be in a very good spot now. Hopefully it will be back to the point of being reliable and fun like it was a year ago!