hood

Rear firewall design and fabrication

When you own 3 1/2 Hiluxs,

Here's my wellside trailer, all Toyota!

90s Single cab chassis, cut off from behind the cab. Factory lsd (not ideal I know) 01 wellside. Factory wheels blasted and painted to match the truck. Spare wheel winch and a 22r engine mount fitted in the tool box to secure the factory Hilux bottle jack. Tail light loom is all Hilux too. Even a bottle opener in behind the fuel door haha

Wof'd and reg'd too.

I had a local engineering firm build a cage to suite tip runs and firewood missions.

My mate helped me out with this, tried keeping it practical and agricultural lol

Future plans include fitting a factory Toyota tow bar and chrome bumper. I've got a diff housing I'd like to convert into a new axel to get rid of the gearing. Then strip it all down for blasting and painting.

Overall I've had a lot of fun coming up with ideas for it and piecing it together, tows nicely too and gets a few laughs and thumbs up!

The body drop equates to a 3-1/8" (80mm) drop. Relatively pretty big on a Toyota and cut into the rocker panel

Here's the sill panel folded up and construction of the floor structure

I went through a faze of buying and selling wellsides, all of the Toyota variant, mainly the later 98-04 shape, from S/C, D/C and X/C.

I'd part them out, either sell off the tuff deck, keep the tailgates (I collect those for future dream shed art) cut tail light buckets out and then occasionally keep the good ones.

Here's one of those said good ones, and the final wellside for RDGR8R. 

I picked this up through a work colleague, he said he was keeping it for a spare, I told him it was off to a good home, and later @RXFORD was kind enough to cut it up, I.e get surgical and removed the bedsides.

I'm going back to a Simi factory look, I like to refer this to a Japanese minitruck style, heavily modified with subtle factory tones.

I'll get Matt to build this tray around the factory sides, incorporate my old combo skin, fab some nice swaged inner lining, keep the orginal plastic stone guards, and potentially the OG fuel door?

Z'd front clip update,

On a Hilux, unlike a Mazda b series when they are laid out they dont lay a full chassis rail, the back half does and then they sit on the engine cross member.

So to get around this the front section of the rails are lifted, and the frame horns on the front are lowered to accommodate.

Im not sure how much of a raise Matt went with on my chassis, but here you can see what's involved with the process, and then final fish plates welded in too.

Also I actually had some frame damage that was pulled, either from a previous collision while it was on the chassis table.

The motor swap!

I've always intended to swap the orginal 4 cylinder 22r out for a v8, and particularly with a manual behind it.

The orginal engine was pulled and sold off, I had a pretty good run with it, I think it got up to 370 thousand ks, at least 20,000 with a timing chain rattle that eventually wore a hole through the timing cover and mixed oil and coolant together Haha 

Simon from Maxfab in Tauranga orginally welded it up and and the old man fitted a new timing chain, tensioner kit that got me rolling for a number of years.

The old 22r fetched a pretty decent price of $700 that was sold on trademe, and the old g52 5 speed got me $250 trade in towards a brand new r154 5 speed.

Matt found a Soarer that was getting wrecked at Zebra, he tried buying the whole car and was declined, and also he wasn't allowed to hook up a battery to check the mileage out, so I believe I paid $800 for the complete motor/trans etc. A bit of a gamble at the time.

A bell housing was sourced and the motor mocked up.

A couple of years or so down the track a complete 2001 Toyota Celsior equipped with the 4.3l 3uz came up on marketplace for a steal so the whole vehicle was purchased for the motor.

Best way to carry out a conversion by far, Matt took a bunch of parts he wanted and the rest was parted out, and I made my money back plus more in the kitty, sweet!

The Celsior came with a crazy amount of receipts and service history, these were well over $100k new back then

This meant my old 1uz became redundant, and was sold on. I ended up making some coin on that too and sold it to a guy down the line who was going to fit it to a plane out of all things, crazy right! Any how I've attached a clip below from one of his previous 1uz driven planes.

Here's the start of the tear down, and commencing the body drop.

The WOF eventually ran out so Matt kindly headed my way to collect the truck, this was back in January of 2017.

The body drop was started when Matt contracted out to Custom Metalshapers in Auckland, he got off to a pretty good start and the bulk of the labor was carried out within. If you've ever managed to step foot in this shop there's a large array of impressive tooling for sheet metal fabrication.

More on the body drop on another installment of this build thread 

Billets!

Every die hard minitrucker needs some polished aluminum jewelry to roll on, and these were a cool buy!

Virtually new 18x8 Boyd Coddington Blasters, I believe the offset is +38 same specs as the BA Falcons that I rolled for many years.

@RXFORD persuaded me in getting a set, so I obliged and found these in Australia.

I had a mate in our worldwide club Severedties from the Australia chapter pick them up for me. Orginally found on ebay.

Any how one year myself, Matt and two fellow club members flew over to Australia to attend one of the premier minitruck shows, and together we brought the wheels home with us.

They were still in their original boxes and only weigh 12kgs each, so ideal for checked luggage for the flight. We had a bag and a wheel each! I wish I caught a photo of them going through the xray machine at Sydney airport!

Any how, later that year I trial fitted them to the truck.

Not bad!

And to cap of this evenings updates, here's some more recent shots of the truck before it came off the road.

I had a pretty good run over the years with the Five O, I lost count of the many times I was pulled over, but my attitude always got me across the line. I did have a run it with one cop who issued me with a warning and then the inevitability struck me when I made the decision to pull it off the road for major surgery, call it the road to what I envisioned many years ago. But with a far better outcome thanks to the wizardry from Matt K at his shop Tin Tricks.

Prior to Matt taking the truck on, it failed its last wof. Turns out the old boy who I used to take it too sold up his shop and retired, but he let me get away for many years with not having the suicide doors certified. The new owner of said garage knocked me back on this and requested an updated cert. 

I was at the point of getting Matt to restore my 40 series left hook pick up, or carry on with further mods on #RDGR8R. The latter was decided.

Stay tuned for the next round of updates which involves the body drop, and motor swap

With many years of cruising, several upgrades followed, and I developed a friendship with Matt K @RXFORD when he started branching out on his own.

Matt converted an old Sanden Aircon pump to power the air supply, he also fabbed up some aluminum gauge holders, and a lazy Susan spare wheel mount haha.

I also had a pretty decent stereo set up installed by Madsoundz in Tauranga.

In later years followed, a 4runner front clip, full shave and suicide doors. And I had an imported Grant Kustoms rear cal combo skin fitted 

I have a love/hate relationship with these doors. They have swung open whilst driving due to faulty latches in the past. It was a bit of a disaster with cab damage that required some panel work. I'm still going to retain the door position but going back to stock latches and some added safety measures.