Home Forums Gear Hunting Trucks and Four-Wheel Drives Oooooo I gotta new project

Well at least you didn't lift the front of the truck off the ground with the skid steer because you forgot a bolt of two.

You should be able to find T-case for that tranny pretty easy. Getting it to fit the yota might be something else though.

Well at least you didn't lift the front of the truck off the ground with the skid steer because you forgot a bolt of two.

You should be able to find T-case for that tranny pretty easy. Getting it to fit the yota might be something else though.

What year truck is your tras out of? The later 70's were hyd. clutchs. I know 1980 had 'em.

i don't believe they had the hydralyc clucth in 70's but you can go any way you want easy enough

Sounds like a pretty cool project! I would have to think a re-built 4 banger would do it all in that little rig?

he needs the extra ponies of v8 or v6 for turning the bigger tires that will eventually be under this truck

Transmission is out of a late 80's 1/2 ton according to the guy I got it from.

For the most part the 4banger woulda been fine, I dont need the extra ponies of the 302 for the most part. But I WANT them

my new favorite thread

Cleaned up the headlight rings and the grill, sanded them down and painted them. Kinda some instant progress.

Goona be doing more research than anything for a lil while, until we are back up and working.

you are young aren't you??

good for you man!! Go, Go, Go!!


I remember when i used to tear into projects like you, fun aint it??

Is your 302 a carb unit or TBI or?

You said 80's, guess it don't matter much, you can go any way you want.

Sure is fun to watch/read about your project. Go man go!!

Yea Dave. Kinda a downside to it though. As since I'm the only one in my group of friends that isnt old 'nuff to hit the bars yet. They have deemed me as the drunk retreiver Its got old enough that I'm charging $10 bucks a person now They got the hint and started taking it a lil easier.


Its fun tearing into the project like that. But I just hit the "what the hell do I do now" stage

Goona be running a carb setup on the 302

cool, mind the "slosh"

I wonder if you can still buy a predator carb?

they were real big with the truck builds back in the day... or back in a day

but you can get conventional carbs set up for the rockin & sloshing of a mudding/rock climbing truck too.

Honestly dont know much about carbs Dave. Everything I have had has been injected except for an 85 Ranger. And the only thing we did to it was add fuel

Right now I'm tryin to figure out the whole axle delema. As that depends on wich T-case I use and so on and so forth.

i guessed you as older but that is fine a young man building.Some people build hot rods i used to build 4x4's.I used to have to make quite a bit of my own parts as there wasn't the kits avaible back then

pulled the drivelines and tranny/Tcase. If I pull another tranny by myself I gotta come up with a lil better way to do so. As a floor jack and a ratchet strap do work, but not very easily

While I was underneath it I pulled off the exhaust.

Also Pulled the floor mat and that insulating stuff off the floor boards. It was all pretty damp, found a few spots that were just starting to rust. I chucked that and then noticed some sorta rubber spray stuff on the floor boards. Well It looks like crap so Its goona come off.

What a PITA that stuff is. bogged out my 4" grinder with a wire wheel, so I got out a 6" grinder/wire wheel. My knuckles cant handle the vibrations of it for more than a few minuets though A heat gun and narrow putty knife seemed to work decently. Gotta long ways to go on it though. It will be alot nicer looking with the bedliner in there. Was talking to dad and seems that he has a gun for spraying that bedliner. WTF? He's holding out on me Makes me wonder what other goodies he has stashed away.

I pulled the seat before I started working on that rubber stuff.



Also the grill and headlight rings after the krylon. Much better than the oxidized molded form that it was in.

looks like you are moving right along with this.Don't worry dad's never let you at all the goodies.You have to learn the hard way before they tell you they have the tool for the job

probably an old schutz gun for spraying undercoating. sould work good for spraying rocker guard material. That's pretty good stuff, paintable rocker guard spray.

There are so many "bedliner" materials out these days we could just as well call rocker guard "bed liner" True bedliners or really good ones are polyureas which are a 2 component material usually mixed at about a 1 to 1 ratio & applied with an expensive spray unit that introduces the 2 liquids to the spray gun at super high pressure through heated fluid lines. Like a very high end airless sprayer of sorts. the 2 liquids are introduced as they leave the gun tip, they mix in the air during spray & when they hit the spray target. The set time is often a matter of seconds, very fast stuff, like spraying rubber out of a gun.

Originally formulated & applied as tank linings, exterior weatherproofing like roof coatings & stuff like that. It was in use in large industrial applications for many years before somebody decided to spray the inside of a pickup truck box with it.

Since then the need for a coating specific to truck beds has invited all sorts of products to the market developed or being sold as "bed liners"

Tbear, you have no idea... He did auto body repair for a lil over 20 years. Covered everything from the comercial collision to R.V's, to Paintless dent repair and then the standard vehicles. Was pretty good. When he quit to start up his own business, we got a couple calls a day from different shops that wanted him, thankfully those stopped..... I keep getting the "you did what??" and "why would you do that, that way? all ya gotta do is....." and lets not forget the most popular one "what the hell are you tryin to do?"

Then I have one grandpa that was mechanic since the beginning of time...ok maybe not that long but its close. He dont know it yet but he's goona get roped into this project.

And the other grandpa is an obsessive compulsive highstrung meticulous Italian who was a machinist for about 40years. This is the guy who raised a 1/2 acre yard 1/2" just so it was perfectly level. He also has the straightest ditches in Oregon.

Yea, they all keep swinging by checking out the project and how I'm going about things and then leave with a smirky smile. Dunno if thas good or not Everynow and then They toss me an idea, but I think they would rather sit on the sidelines and watch :grin

Drivers side floorboard is cleaned up. Still got the passenger side to do.

I think I'm goona leave the stuff thats behind the seat and on the back wall though. You cant see it when the seat is in, and maybe it will help deaden some of the sound.

Turned around to grab a wrench and found this thing when I spun back around.

Gotta love him, but damn its hard to get anything done when he's around

Ha!! I got one here at home just like that!!

Is he smiling? I think he's smiling!!

Mr. mud bogger;
This topic takes me back to my first 4WD pickup, a 1980 Toyota that came with a 20R. It was back in a time where most pickups weren�t 4WD and Toyotas had just come out with their version. Actually believe it or not, Toyota trucks were a bit of a rarity up here then.

It was unique enough that one night in 1982, my wife and I were pulled over by 2 young RCMP officers who wanted to know if the truck was stock or a kit and just wanted to look it over.

Anyway, we ran that truck all over 2 provinces for about 12 or so years until the body fell off of it, so I learned a couple things about that vintage Toyota 4WD.

The front brake rotors weren�t overly robust and it didn�t take too much to warp them. I think a few years later, maybe �84-�85 they put in heavier rotors, but it is something to keep an eye on.

The rear spring packs would break the main spring right at the rivet. This happened to both sides on mine and one replacement I bought off a wrecker.

I then got some custom ones made up, which were lighter than the stock ones, so then it had better weight transfer to the rear end and consequently climbed better after that. I think if I would have kept better shocks in the back they would have been less likely to break as well.

I had a serious bush guard fabricated up for it and mounted a 6000lb Warn on it and some Bosch driving lights. As well I ran aftermarket headlights and a couple 5� aircraft landing lights on the headache rack. The stock alternator more or less handled it, well it never died anyway.

I eventually ended up putting a 22R from a 1985 into it before teh body went away, but it was a great truck that led us to many wonderful places.

I hope this project does the same for you and I�ll enjoy watching your progress. Thanks for the thread.

Have fun,
Dwayne