550hp 2JZ 1978 Hilux Build

Anticlimactic post, but the Hilux went for it's first drive this year! I've spent the past week working on the wiring, which is 100% new and done myself. And holy shit, I'd expect something this basic would be easy but there is so much going on. At this point the rear blinkers, running lights, brake lights, and hazards work. I've also run the wires for the low beams and front blinkers but not hooked up yet.

This is the first time out of the shop since the bed sides, and I think only the second time with the new seats. It fired right up after sitting for months, and runs like an absolute champ! I think I figured out how to bleed the cooling system too, it seems like I need to lift the rear end which I'm guessing is needed to get the engine level so the engines rear vent port will let the air out. Ran like an absolute champ though, this thing is such an absolute to drive! I think the turbo is still a few months out, maybe mid summer? Kind of leaning towards getting the EMU Black ECU and doing the wiring for that while I'm doing the rest of the wiring, and then I can get the 2JZ to run correctly before throwing boost at it. But we'll see, still plenty of stuff to install before I should start thinking about buying more. It's Hilux season!

 

Lux-yeah!

 

What an awesome build. Well done.

 

Definitely glad this was bumped. Awesome build.

 

Some build inspiration, if that’s even what you’re going for. It just reminded me of this bad boy!

 

That is very cool! Looks like he solved the radiator issue the same way I did.

 

Happy to revisit this awesome thread!

 

That is badass.

 

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Then it occurred to me that even if I had the bitchen workspace, machinery, and tools, I'd just be a monkey in a big shop.

@snivilous Don't take this the wrong way, but people like you kinda' piss me off! You know... talent, skills, the motivation to actually use them, keen mind for problem solving, blah, blah, blah.

I wanna' take a nap just from reading this thread.

Awesome work as usual man, keep it coming.

 

Hahahaha

 

The only thing cooler than an old 2JZ pickup is an even older 2JZ pickup! That thing is absolutely pristine, though a TH350 of all trans is a real turn off imo, and makes me feel less inferior

Motivation isn't really lacking on the Hilux, it's been my daily essentially all year. For a solid 6 weeks I didn't even touch the Tundra which is the longest period it's ever gone not being driven. Lately my focus has been on working on friends projects, installing a gas heater in the shop, and getting the buggy ready for KOH. I think this spring the Hilux will get some work done, right now I'm thinking I'll supercharge it with one of those dirt cheap GM 3800 superchargers. It'd be way cheaper than a turbo, a lot more unique than most 2JZ builds, more than enough power to make the Hilux scary, and allow for an insane sounding exhaust with no turbo in line. Plus you know I like superchargers but thats for down the line, lately is other projects and a lot of CAD work behind the scenes for those projects.

 

Hilux hasn't gotten driven in awhile and was sitting here until a week or two ago.



In the past (maybe I had posted it) I had the Vibrant AN-20 coolant lines randomly start leaking. I had that happen AGAIN, this time on the coolant line that had been fine so far. One day I was driving the truck, next day come out and there's a puddle on the ground. The coolant lines run ~$250 a piece, and while straightforward to do, I didn't feel like replacing it and had other projects to play with. I finally pulled the trigger a few weeks ago and ordered the stuff to fix the cooling line. On top of that, I decided to fix the radiator that had the hoses going the wrong direction.


Starting with the radiator: the reason I wanted to "fix" it was the water inlet/outlet were backwards. And I can't say I planned what direction they should go in the first place, but it turns out a 2JZ has a reverse flow water pump meaning the inlet and outlet are swapped from what normal vehicles are I guess. What that meant though was the water outlet from the radiator was on the high side and the inlet on the low side, which is fine, but if the cooling systems has a leak or runs low it means an air bubble can form on the high side of the radiator and water will stop flowing into the engine, so the cooling system always needs to be absolutely topped off.

Additionally, since the radiator is at a pretty extreme angle on the rear cage, filling the radiator was a bit of a bitch. I also thought this was contributing to the difficulties I've had bleeding the cooling system, so I decided I would re-angle the filler cap.



I started by cutting the inlet/outlets, the radiator cap cap neck, and then used a hole saw to cut out where the drain plug was an add another hole below the radiator cap.



I had bought a new radiator cap neck to weld in, but ended up being able to reuse the one that came on it. I then welded a tube at the angle of the cage to make the cap sit straight up:



The inlet/outlet I was able to reuse and flipped which side of the radiator they were on. I then cut some filler plates on the plasma table and capped off the original positions:





It turned out pretty good! I had to make a few tweaks to the radiator hold down plates, but otherwise was pretty straightforward.

With the new hose locations, I could now remake the AN lines that had shit the bed. This ended up turning into an absolute cluster fuck. Going back to the original issue, the passenger side cooling line had started leaking originally and I had enough AN fittings laying around to swap the screwed up section with some aluminum hardline. Kind of defeats the purpose of why I wanted the AN line so I could easily reroute it in the future, but it saved me buying another expensive line. The passenger side thus ended up being a couple feet of AN-20 from the engine to a 1.75" aluminum hard line which terminated at the back of the cab, and then another 2ft or so of line from there up to the radiator. Now the goal was to fix the driver's side that had started leaking also, but this time I just went ahead and bought a new AN-20 line (from somewhere else, either Earl's or Fragola, not Vibrant again) and this one is a stainless braided line instead of the nylon braid (as if that should matter). Well it now turned out that from moving the radiator interfaces that the new 10ft AN-20 line I bought was barely too short, and the passenger side short line to the hardline was also barely too short.

Definitely not wanting to buy a 10+ foot AN-20 line, I said screw it I'll just add an aluminum hardline to the driver's side also, same thing running from the ~back of the engine to the back of the cab. Somehow I have an entire box of AN fittings that I've bought and didn't work, and just so happened to have enough AN-20 fittings and weld bungs to make the new hardline which worked out great. I build the new hardline and the new AN sections so the driver's side is good to go. Except literally while I'm under the truck working on it, the front section of original AN-20 just randomly starts leaking. You can't make this up.



That photo is actually wrong, because that photo is from AFTER replacing that front section and this was the replacement piece and it did the same thing and then I got the photo.

I'm standing under the truck, and it just starts dripping out of the complete blue. I wasn't near the line, I wasn't touching any end of it, I wasn't doing anything and it just started dripping through the skin. The fittings are fine, the line just shit itself. The ONLY possible thing I could think of was I was welding tabs on crossmembers for the new hardline, and somehow it shorted through the anodized aluminum fittings into the stainless inner core and that melted everything? Though that's never happened to me with any other lines, plus when I first started having this issue I wasn't welding on the truck but had been driving it for weeks and parked it and came out to a puddle. I even talked to Vibrant Performance and they said the use case and fluids were fine and they had no explanation (or help) for $500 of hoses literally thrown away after 18 months.

Oh and it gets better. I pull the passenger AN lines to replace them, the rear being too short now and the front leaking. And of course one of the AN reusable fittings is seized up and the threads rip out. It's aluminum threads, what do you expect, I can live with that. But I've now had a fitting also get wasted by this shitty line, and now am out of AN-20 fittings so have to buy and wait on parts to show up. Ahhhhhhh

Anyways, eventually get all that shit sorted out.




The one other thing I decided to do while I had it up on the lift was to weld the differential. I figured when in Rome, and the thing can't put power down to save its life. This was an easy hour or so task.



Four driveshaft bolts, four bolts per hub, and then the 3rd member bolts. Spray off with brake clean, spray off with isoproyl, and welded the spider gears together and back in she went!

I forget how fun the Hilux is when I haven't driven it in awhile, I guess all the vehicles I own are like that the welded rear is a lot of fun, you still have to be careful getting going since it'll spin the rears easily but at least forward motion somewhat occurs instead of sitting in one spot, and its a drifting machine now! The manual steering however is an absolute pain as one can imagine. I still have a Prius power steering unit and rack and pinion sitting here to go in, with the welded rear that might accelerate the need for adding power steering.

And lastly, and what drove me to make this post and get ahead of the updates, my neighbor has a turbo off a 5.9 Cummins laying around so I ordered all the goods to do the cheapest turbo build possible Sub $500 on ebay, and I have a turbo exhaust manifold, piping kit, intercooler, blow off valve, and other shit I can't remember. My neighbor is big on diesels and turbos, and thinks the turbo will work great since it's meant for a truck with double the displacement but half the rev range, so the overall air moved will be about the same. If anything he said it will spool up too early. Because the intake manifold currently crosses over the engine so the intake is above the exhaust, I'm going to chop up the intake and make my own setup like you see on fancy Supras. I have the intake from the spare 2JZ (not sure if I posted that in here, but I picked up another 2JZ for $300 that I'll eventually build and just hot swap for the current one), so I'll use the spare intake to cut up and build my own intake and then drop it in.

Exciting times for the Hilux! Couple months down, but it's back and better than ever and in a week or two should be seeing some boost!

 

Well, since it's been neglected a little, shoot me your address and I'll come take it off your hands.

 

Give me a week to double the horsepower and turn it into a proper death machine and then I'll hit you up

 

Hell yes.

 

Odd question but is that your Honda Talon 4 seater behind the truck?

 

No sir, my neighbor was storing it under the covered parking for a bit. I only have the 2 seat Can Am X3.

 

When's the YouTube channel starting?!?!

 

Dude the amount of times I've thought about starting a channel that's literally just the build threads in video form....

The time that must take though, just for the occasional video I throw together from a GoPro takes literal hours and those are like a minute of footage total It would certainly be cool though, but writing novels about how much I hate cooling lines will have to suffice

 

You should! You have a killer recipe right now! A 2jz build would be killer to watch. You have a couple inspirations right around you down in southern utah. I'm sure you can guess. All the adventures you have would be SICK to watch.

Video editing is a time suck, you aren't wrong.

 

It's that time again! We'll call it up till now as "Stage 0", ie getting it run into and functional. Next up will be the next stage, which is making some power baby!

After my neighbor harassed me enough, I bought a bunch of parts and they're starting to look correct:



Right now the plan is to boost the stock 2JZ, and then I'll build my spare 2JZ and hot swap it in, maybe start that once I get the boost going. Right now the plan is to run this HX30(???) my neighbor pseudo gave me which comes off a 5.9 Cummins I guess? And his logic is the Cummins is twice the displacement but maybe half the revs (not really but whatever) so it should pump roughly enough air. At least for what a stock naturally aspirated 2JZ can handle.

Realistically to boost the engine though, you need a stand alone ECU because the stock ECU can't be tuned. So I finally bit the bullet and ordered an ECU Masters EMU Black, plus a flying lead harness so it should be somewhat plug and play of just connecting the stock plugs to the new ECU.



I'm really excited for this. The EMU Black was recommended on the Supra forums a lot, and is common with import guys since it's essentially designed to run a 6-cylinder engine. It has individual spark and injector control for 6 cylinders plus VVTI control which I need (a stock turbo 2JZ is non-VVTI, but the N/A one has VVTI which I'll continue to use since modern ECUs like this can control it). After tuning Tundras and playing with Holleys a bit, I'm excited to tune the 2JZ and learn a new system. It's also extremely small, and has a built in MAP sensor, so I get to delete the MAF along with all the pseudo-drice by wire electrics.

Additionally, I went ahead and ordered some LS coil packs which apparently can fit between the valve covers and that then allows the little energizer box (forgetting what it's actually called) to get deleted since that's built into the LS coil packs. And since the stock 2JZ is a waste spark setup, so two cylinders are always sparking, this ends up converting it to a fully controlled spark setup where each cylinder has individual spark and fuel control, all while cleaning up the wiring even more!



In classic Hilux fashion, there's a combination of nice parts where it matters (imo) and then eBay slapped on it. I got an eBay intake manifold since it was like $400 including a 90mm throttle body, and then this cute little intercooler that barely fits up front. Sadly I had to cut the bottom of the core support out, but otherwise it'd be an insanely tiny intercooler or have to get fancy with where to run one. I also bought a generic piping kit to connect everything. With how it's setup the turbo will feed into the front mount intercooler and then that will dump through the throttle body and new intake, so all the intake shit that used to cross over the valve covers is deleted.

With that said, that fancy looking intake is a bit too long so to keep the headlight intact and be able to run the boost hose, I decided to chop it up to move the throttle body back. I first cut the throttle body plate off, and then machined it down on the mill.





Next I'll cut an aluminum plate to seal it up and weld the throttle body plate back onto the intake manifold. That will oriet it and give me the space I need to clear the back of the headlight.

While on the intake topic, it came with a fancy fuel rail too and it looks like I can reuse the 650cc injectors I originally had on the buggy's LSA supercharger if I just change out the o-rings. I'll probably need to make some custom mounts for the fuel rail since LSA injectors are super short, but that should work great and for the relatively low power numbers I want I think the 650s will be plenty of injector.

And that about wraps up my current state of affairs. Figured I'd get this posted before it really starts running away and getting lots of pictures and shit to talk about, plus I'm sitting in an airport and have nothing better to do.

Right now most of the harness is cut out, I just went to every sensor and left as much wiring as possible and where it met the main bundle just snipped it which was a nice feeling hahaha. I need to get the intake back together, get the coil packs in, and then start running wiring for the new ECU. I'll also clean up some of the other wiring that's controlling the rest of the truck while I'm in there. I'm hoping by the end of the month the truck is running again, and making 6-10psi of boost. With the final goal that the built engine will make like 18psi which should be in the 500-600whp range. Also apparently a stock 2JZ can rev past 8k which is insane hahaha

And then stage 2 will be doing the suspension, rear axle, tires, all of that so it can have some hope of not just spinning through every gear. But to justify fancy suspension and tires I need the power first!

 

And two months later and we're finally making progress! My buddy dropped his buggy off and we built a wiring harness for it, I took my buggy to a race, another guy dropped off a Tundra to modify, but finally I can focus on this again!



First up is to finish modifying the intake, which my God I didn't realize that'd be like 90% of the fabricating needed for this phase of the build. First was welding the throttle body flange back on, which required some filler plates designed and cut out.

I do love aluminum!





Going a bit out of order here with the photos, but on the topic of the intake there was a couple other tweaks. First was welding some filler plates to the bottom which I don't have any photos, and hilariously I then found some block off plates included with the intake (maybe I should look through the box before chopping it up). I'm not sure what the ports on the bottom were for, but they're sealed up now! Next was to add an IAT and MAP sensor bung which involved a little lathe work and threw those on. And lastly was making a throttle cable bracket.



The welds on the throttle cable bracket were gorgeous, finishing out the intake on a high note. I briefly debated doing a drive by wire throttle body, mainly so I could have some different throttle maps to tame the truck. But throttle bodies are insanely expensive these days, a 90mm LS7 one is like $500! And this thing was already cable driven, and I have the "free" 90mm manual body that came with the intake so I'll start there.



I might paint the intake black, but part of me likes the aesthetic of this fancy intake just absolutely hacked and glued back together. I'm not sure how to describe the philosophy, but some tasteful performance and execution with minimal care for aesthetics besides keeping the factory body parts where possible.

Moving on, the "free" fuel rail that came with it I was able to get working with some old injectors from the buggy. They are shorty injectors for a LSA supercharger, so that required some tweaking of the fuel rail, ie sanding a bunch out of the ends and then I decided to straight up weld some brackets to the top which bolts the fuel rail onto the valve cover and works out great!



The injectors are Fuel Injector Connection 650cc Bosch EV1s as I recall. Not particularly huge, but I think they'll be fine with the horsepower goal I have (which requires a built engine so is aways off) and they were "free"! I did have to buy some fuel injector O-rings since the rail side was too large. Even now, it's a bit of a bitch to squeeze them in but with some massaging they slip into the intake and rail side just fine.

Another thing that needed to be done was to get the LS coil packs to adapt in, which ended up being very easy! I used the boots from the factory coil packs, and then designed a bracket with a couple bends and it bolts into the valley and compresses the coil packs and boots down onto the plugs. I also bought TR7 spark plugs which should be fine for as much boost as I'll eventually make.



CX Racing has a kit for like $300+ for this stuff, which is insane. I think I'm into the coil packs like $100 total for all six plus making the brackets and buying a connector kit. Funny enough the other kits out there I just realized look identical to mine. My first bracket I made had the little tabs in the middle connecting all the way across but the plug couldn't fully seat. I guess everyone else came to that same conclusion---though everyone else uses stand offs, which is fine, but this is a simple one piece design.



And finally into the good stuff! Wiring! Yesterday I put all the wires into the ECU plugs. I bought a flying lead wiring kit which was a great investment. All the wires are labeled down the whole length, and there's like 8ft of wiring available. One end is already crimped for the plugs, so you just pick which wires you want to populate the ECU with and slide them into the plug and that's it!



It's actually moving really fast. Today I ordered a bunch of parts. Oil pressure sensor, fuel pressure sensor, intake boots, exhaust piping, turbo rebuild kit, fuel fittings for the rail, water pump, timing belt, etc. etc. Maybe enough stuff that I can have it driving by next weekend? I doubt it, but hopefully I ordered enough parts that it's possible! Today I also tweaked on the wiring more, began wiring up the coil packs, got the injectors wired, tore out all the cluster fuck of wiring I had going to the fuse box before. I'm going to completely rewire the truck and simplify it as much as possible. I'm also going to move the fuse box into cab next to the ECU which will be mounted above the passenger floorboard.

One of the last big things I'm trying to figure out is what to do for a dash. I was hoping there was some kind of cheap digital dash option, like my FJ40 with the Holley Sniper mini dash. But that doesn't really seem to be the case, and it's easy to spend $1500+ on only a 5" dash which seems insane. I found a dude called Tinker Electronics who apparently makes custom digital dashes. He has options from 5 to 10 inch ones, and the 10" is only $600 which is a great price for a full color big dash. I pulled my gauge cluster out and emailed him, still waiting to hear back but I'm thinking it'd be cool to mount a digital dash behind the stock bezel.



If I could have one big screen, and then cut out the center section where the blinkers/fasten seat belt lights are, that would be really cool. Have a tachometer in the middle that rises vertically, or even just warning lights there. And then be able to configure the left and right sides. The guys 10" option is just barely too narrow, but I read he could do custom stuff so we'll see. If that doesn't work out, another option I was looking at is building a custom dash with a screen and Raspberry Pi which sounds somewhat straight forward. Though the video I watched was a 30+ second boot time of the dash, which is fine but kind of insanely slow. It's not like the dash needs to be booted up for the ECU to be able to start the truck, but that would get annoying I think. If neither of those options work, then I'm stuck with either a minimum $1000+ (and may as well just get the ECU Masters $1500 dash that I know works with my ECU) or get this funky ancient clock looking dash:



Which I can live with, and it's hard to justify spending $1000+ on only a dash, but it just looks so cheap (even though it costs $350). And it wouldn't remotely line up with any of the factory interior.

On the plus side, the dash stuff can happen at any time since I can/will use my laptop to get it running anyway. Just seems insane to me how expensive dashes are and how tiny they are. Almost makes me want to just use the factory cluster, except there's only like three gauges so it's kind of useless hahaha

I've started snooping through the ECU Masters software and found a 2JZ tune with some defaults, though I'm not sure how useful that will actually be. I'm excited to try it, lots of cool features like rev limits that come on when parameters are out of bounds, turbo cool down timer, a thing call flat shift where you hold the throttle down during a shift and when the ECU sees the clutch move it pulls timing to limit the rpm increase but keep the turbo spooled, launch control, rolling anti lag, all kinds of cool stuff that I look forward to learning and experimenting with!



Since the ECU outputs CAN BUS signals I was even wondering how easy it would be to install one of these (or other aftermarket ECU) into a truck and keep everything working. I know there's a couple Tundras with MOTEC, but MOTEC requires a lot of fancy work and extremely specific support to be useful. I wonder if this EMU Black or even a Holley could control a 5.7 and then the CAN BUS output could be used by the dash. Anyway, that is all for now, and hopefully lots happens in the next week!

 

The level of skill on display in this thread is amazing! Keep it coming.

 

I kinda like the funky "score board" looking dash. Looks like the home team is winning.

 

That might be the best update I have ever seen. Keep up the good work!

 

And the wiring continues.



The TPS sensor I'm not entirely sure if I'm using the correct center wires. Apparently the N/A and turbo 2JZ had the wiring swapped for the TPS for some reason. Additionally from what I understand there is the primary signal for the TPS, and then a redundant signal that a stock ECU cross references and which the voltage goes in the opposite direction (decreasing vs increasing). I think I used the correct signal wire, so I de-pinned the redundant one and plugged it. If the TPS acts weird then I'll just swap the center pins.



I got a bunch of parts the last couple days. Since mounting of the intercooler will be catching up fast I went ahead and knocked out the new timing belt and water pump. And no good way to catch the coolant, and I didn't want to throw it on the lift so the classic coolant lake formed.



The 2JZ is very cool, all but one of the water pump connections use O-rings. Even the block is grooved for an O-ring!



When I was pulling the crank damper one of the bolts got seized, so in a very smart move I chocked it up on the mill to drill it out.



Which worked perfect! This was before I ran a tap through it and you can already see the threads since I was able to get the drill bit centered up nicely.



The timing belt and water pump went very smoothly, with the bottom of the core support of the body removed for the intercooler it gives plenty of room to access everything in the front which is awesome! Not having a fan and radiator up front makes life so much easier. With that done, back to more wiring.



Hard to keep track of all the stuff I'm changing at this point. One of them was to remove the stock oil pressure switch which just throws a CEL but doesn't actually give oil pressure. From the best I can tell that is the only port to grab oil pressure from, and it's also some weird metric thread form that's nearly a 1/8" NPT but not quite. Lots of people install a "sandwich plate" which is just a block that gives a bunch of ports to plug into, that seemed excessive in my case so I just bought a little 1/8" NPT tee which threads into the metric adapter and into the oil filter bolt. I then have a pressure sensor plugged into that, and the remaining port will be the turbo feed line.



I'm also using another one of those pressure sensors for the fuel pressure, and another one of those tee fittings so I can retain the analog gauge I had before. I wasn't originally planning on doing this, but the tee came in a pair from Amazon and I had the gauge so why not? I actually really like the concept too, for setting fuel pressure or trouble shooting I don't have to run back and forth to the dash/laptop to see what's happening.



One thing I found during mockup is the turbine has a blade that's broken, and from talking to my neighbor (where the turbo came from) he said it's not worth rebuilding since the price of a new turbo is about the same. It sounds like he might have another one laying around, but this turbo will no longer be used at a minimum.



On the note of the exhaust, I patched up where the external wastegate holes were since I won't be using those at this stage. I also welded in the bungs for the AFR and EGT sensor.



While I had the exhaust manifold off I drilled and tapped the holes for the turbo oil drain and installed the fitting.



Something I had found after installing the timing belt was this stupid washer stuck to the backside of the original tensioner pulley. At first I was gonna say fuck it and leave it, but then I started to worry that without using the washer the pivot bolt would clamp the pulley housing and not let it rotate. I tore the front back down, pulled the tensioner and installed the washer, which after looking at it I definitely could have skipped, but now it's back together correctly.



Similarly, after drilling the holes for the turbo drain I drained the oil today with the hopes the metal shavings would go with the oil and I wouldn't need to drop the pan and could flush the pan out with some more oil. Well nothing came out when I drained the oil, and the pan appeared easy to drop so I pulled it (luckily all the bolts are accessible without doing anything, and a bit of a rotation action around the oil pickup and the pan comes right out!) and lo and behold there were a ton of chips at the bottom of the pan.



I also pulled the oil baffle plate and lots of chips there. What's cool is the oil baffle even has a little valley (where the oil chips are) so that the oil drain on the turbo models doesn't splash all over but directs the oil down and to the side of the pan. Likewise where I tapped for the oil drain there were already bosses where the turbo 2JZ drain location was which made it easy to select where to go.



The oil pan is this weird two piece setup, you have the bottom steel pan and then a middle pan between the actual block and steel pan which is the aluminum section I tapped into. Looking up part of the connecting rods and crank are still further back and somewhat hidden by the mid pan part.





The original reason I threw the truck up on the lift was because the wiring was nearly done in the engine bay, and it was time to start running/updating the lines to the rear. I had gotten some AN-banjo fittings for the fuel rail, and since I was changing the routing of the fuel lines now that I had a loop type fuel system instead of the dead head stock setup, I needed to trim the fuel lines down.



Both the AN6 return line and the AN10 feed line I trimmed down over a foot. That is the one benefit of reusable fittings.



Let's see what else... I installed a catch can, I need to get some 90deg fittings for it and a tee so both valvecovers will go into it. I made this cool little bracket for the firewall which also has some bends on the bottom to support the wire harness.



I also got upgraded knock sensors. Apparently the stock sensors kind of suck, so these Bosch ones are common to use. There's also these funky studs from Toyota that I had to get to run them.



On the note of the knock sensors I did have to rewire the knock sensor and crank sensor lines, they are now using the twisted pair shielded wires and I have the shielding grounding the battery. I thought figuring out and mapping the 12V, 5V, sensor ground, and chassis ground would be a pain but it actually was pretty simple. Hopefully I did it right! Most of the engine harness is loomed and complete! Engine bay starting to look a bit tidier!



I need to buy some larger loom, you can see where I terminate where more wires enter the loom and it gets too huge for the 3/8" or whatever I have laying around. I think it's turning out pretty nice! The intake is now all torqued down, same with the exhaust manifold. All the sensors are installed and plugged in. Fuel system is connected (but not wired). Honestly it should be able to run at this point which is exciting! All the wires running down the driver's side are for lighting and coming from the ignition. I have it setup so the ECU harness is totally separate from everything else, and I'm moving the fan and fuel pump relays and wiring to the back of the truck so the relays will be mounted next to the battery so only some little signal wires from the ECU will run to the back. The ECU and all the wiring for it stay on the passenger side, and then on the interior my plan is for a fuse box to sit next to the ECU which is mounted below the glovebox, and all the fuses and stuff will run into the lighting/ignition (body harness if you will) which will run down the driver's side of the vehicle. This is similar in methodology to how I first built the truck, the ECU was totally stand alone and then I added in the lights and street legal stuff after the fact so they're effectively two different systems.

At this point a lot of small stuff left. The biggest remaining tasks is mounting the turbo (it needs to be clocked relative to the header so I'll have to do a custom piece there) and then running the exhaust. I've pulled the coolant line on the passenger side, which I'll probably have to remake, so I can run the 3.5" exhaust tubing down the small space between the frame and body. She's getting pretty close to running again!

 

Hey all, it's Sniv's Sunday Summary!

 

Time for a Sniv's Saturday Summary! After getting busy with supercharged Tundras for the past few weeks, meaning no progress was made on any of my personal stuff, I finally got some time to work on the Hilux!



She's so close to running again! First up was mounting the intercooler, which ended up being simple. One little bracket at the top which mounts where the core support used to bolt to the hood latch, and then a bracket on the bottom that both bolted to the front cross member and had two stand offs so the weight of the intercooler was on the top of the crossmember.



After some going back and forth again on turbos, I decided to stick with this turbo my neighbor had that's a HE351 off a 5.9 Cummins. I already had bought an adapter flange for it, and was debating messing with that since the fitment was screwy and it points the turbo off to the side, but after some discussing with my neighbor decided to use the adapter bracket. The holes didn't quite line up with the T4 flange on the header, but throwing the socket head cap screws on the lathe and pulling a couple thou off of the heads got everything to bolt down.



The intercooler finally could get mounted. Some more boots showed up in the mail to adapt to the turbo and the 90mm throttle body (I had bought this 3" boot kit off eBay with clamps and hoses and piping and in reality ended up using one boot and one piece of pipe from it) so I could finally start putting the intake tract together.



My neighbor had started mocking up the turbo to intercooler stretch, and I finished that off today welding it together and adding the blow off valve.



The engine bay is mostly complete now!



Next up was the exhaust, which is actually the single biggest thing left. I need the exhaust done so I can re-route the coolant line that runs down the passenger frame rail so then I can start it. It's a pretty tight fit between the trans, body, and frame.



Times like this the lift REALLY shines. I moved the Hilux up and down probably a dozen times today. Mount a section of exhaust and tighten it to the turbo, lift it up, check clearances, make piece, lower it, pull off turbo, weld it, repeat.



Not a useful photo, but the exhaust is turning out really nice! It's all 3.5" stainless. I made a bunch of 15deg pizza cuts, didn't end up using half of them, and got it nice and tight but not touching anything.



The exhaust isn't done, but it is routed far enough down I can run the cooling line. I need more 3.5" tubing to run the exhaust all the way to the back, but the hard part is done!

Some other minor things, I ended up spacing the intercooler bottom forward about a half inch. Initially I had made big custom washers to go on the back side of the crossmember, and then with the spacer had to make some more for the front. Before this the intercooler cleared the crank pulley bolt by maybe 1/16".



Now there's tons of room between the pulleys and intercooler, maybe a half inch!



And the best part is the grille still fits without touching anything! It's about as close as possible, but it turned out great!



And that wraps up todays work. I have a list of parts to buy next week, mostly it's the turbo oil lines/fittings and more exhaust tubing.

I also need to build the tune, I've seen some guys offering base maps for the ECU Masters so I'm thinking of getting one of those as a starting point and building off of that. This ECM is totally new to me and a completely blank slate, and I have some extra features like VVTI going on, so on top of having to setup everything from scratch there's other complexity going on. I think getting a premade base map will end up saving a lot of time---hell it took weeks just to get the stand alone wired stock ECM to work correctly and I've rewired the entire vehicle from scratch and added even more sensors and features than it used to have!

I have plans next weekend so I think it will be a stretch to get it going by then once parts show up, but it's SO close! It's going to be so much fun finally having boost!

 

That thing is going to be outlandish!