paddlenbike's maintenance/upgrade log

[paddlenbike]

I've been wanting to start a maintenance/build-up thread for years now, so as I make changes or upgrades to the 4Runner I plan to post them here.

July 2012, 117,213 mi.

Original front brake rotors finally warped so I installed new Brembo blanks from Amazon and Toyota pads. The upper ball joints have been weeping grease so I cleaned everything up and will start monitoring the grease situation.

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-6BaU_saUT1E/UAWJvf3NxvI/AAAAAAAAG5U/Tjd4etck8iQ/s800/DSC_0570.jpg

The Brembos appear to be constructed as well as the OEM Toyota ones and they are nearly 1/2 the cost.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-yyCUoBDqyUw/UAWJwoGkENI/AAAAAAAAG5c/lkZ_I4gpUTc/s800/DSC_0562.jpg

Ball joints "look" okay. Cleaned excess grease and will monitor.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-jWlXnEtvugk/UAWJxyzxNGI/AAAAAAAAG5k/4aJVChiXxU4/s800/DSC_0563.jpg

Everything under here looks good except the stock skid plates, they're getting beat pretty bad.

Needed maintenance:
re-torque SC & tensioner
bleed clutch fluid
lube universal joints
pass side rubber fender liner missing

[YotaFun]

No Tundra Upgrade?
Ball Joints don't look to bad at all, I have seen plenty seap for long periods of time.
Unless its leaking badly and has play its not to much of a concern, it it starts to have any play then def change it.

[paddlenbike]

My brakes are strong, so I didn't see the need. If I ever have braking issues I will certainly look toward that upgrade.

Is it usually the upper or lower ball joints that fail on these?

[YotaFun]

Lower are usually ones to fail since they are the load bearing Ball Joint.

[Crinale]

if the lowers fail more, why don't companies make an easy uniball upgrade like they do for the uppers? (TC, Camburg, All-Pro, etc)

[Seanz0rz]

uniball is very subject to dirt and debris entering the sockets. on a UCA, this is usually just dust, dirt, mud. on the lowers its more of the same, but some larger particles are more likely, as well as physical damage from hard objects. uniballs are hard to boot (especially if not from the manufacturer, but a 3rd party)

also, it's not like they fail all the time, but they are much more likely to fail than the uppers.

and avi is right, the lowers take the weight of the vehicle in 3 dimensions, the uppers only control in 2 dimensions, and do not hold the weight of the vehicle.

[Nuthuts96]

just did the brembos w/oem pads on sunday and they are great! had the same conclusion- don't tow much, don't brake hard (use the trans for braking a lot)- they get the job done just fine.

[04 Rocko Taco]

use the trans for braking a lot


Just remember brakes are a lot cheaper than trannies and clutches.

[YotaFun]

About to say the same thing Chris, my front pump in the auto is whining like a pig.
I don't tow at all, and I we all brake alot here.

Another reason I asked why not is my stepdads runner has brembo rotors.
Before the last brake change they started to pulsate so I had to cut them true.
My stepdad is far from the heavy braking type so I was surprised to find that the brembo's did this.

When I can I will be parting together the swap for him.

[04 Rocko Taco]

I am planning a tundra swap in the future, but figured I would do with Brembo blanks for the tundra.

[Obi..]

Side bar note here. I don't know if it's still a standard op procedure (Avy-Yes/No?) but we were in the habit of adjusting the rear brake adjusters easily 1-3 clicks each side at every oil change interval. 4Runners carry more weight and the self adjusters suck anyhow. Don't do engine or trans braking unless like me you have a 5-Speed swap, and even then on my 2nd Gen and a family member's 97 3rd Gen I get easily 2 clicks every 5000 miles. Do it by pulling the ebrake 2 clicks up and so the shoes just go "sshhh-ssshh" on the drums. It solved my warped rotors issue easily.

[YotaFun]

I adjust brakes every other oil change on the 2 4Runner, (mine almost every) and same with my Camry (has rear drum).

But usually the newer cars don't need it till there 15k sometimes there 30k service.
I always do it when I install new from brakes but thats just a personal thing I do.

But it is not a standard procedure, also since the only thing left with rear drums are the Corolla's, Taco's, and Yaris its not really built into our services

[paddlenbike]

I have never touched the rear drums. How would I know if they were adjusted properly? My brake pedal feels firm and I know the rear brakes will lock up when going down a steep hill offroad, so maybe they're fine.

[YotaFun]

My pedal feels firm and my rears work just as yours do too.
There really is no science to it.

How many clicks of your e-brake till it actually holds the vehicle in place?
Jack up the rear end so both tires can spin, and see how easily it can spin.

I usually tighten mine up till when I spin the wheel I can get half a turn out of it.

[CJM]

I have no idea why but the brakes on toyotas are notorious for de-adjusting. I FINALLY got mine dialed in again and the pedal was still somewhat too low, 3 clicks each side and I was golden.

FWIW: manual states looking thru the inspection port the shoes should be about 1-2mm from the drum.

[paddlenbike]

How many clicks of your e-brake till it actually holds the vehicle in place?
Jack up the rear end so both tires can spin, and see how easily it can spin.



My driveway is on a slight slope, probably three clicks to hold. I will take your advice and check it out though.

[YotaFun]

I have mine adjusted so 1-2 clicks holds it even in drive.

Sorry for the off topic, but I remember more why I do that now today.
In the rain, even with a very good tire, the Tundra brakes are just to much,
the slightest panic brake and the ABS is all over the place.
I either have the rear adjusted enough to compensate or keep it in 4WD in the rain so while braking I am not just stopping the tire but the entire drive line.

[Obi..]

*Clarification Post for any Newbs that might see this.*

What Avy's referring to by his click count being different than mine is the 3rd Gens are a center console grab handle for the e-brake while the procedure I described for adjusting used a 2nd Gen Shaft Style e-brake arm. 2-3 for a grab handle's about right, 10-12 for shaft style's for 89-95's only. The family's 97 I use 3 clicks on the grab handle and 1-3 clicks of adjustment on the drums themselves.

**Is that even clear enough? LOL**

[Crinale]

Shane - My taco has the old style shaft too.

[paddlenbike]

117,453 miles; 7/29/2012. Engine oil & filter change; Castrol 5W-30 full synthetic. Maintenance log shows oil last changed on 9/17/2011 at 112,363 miles...only put 5,000 miles on the 4Runner in the past year. With the POS commuter car gone mileage will increase.

Wash, clay bar, hand-wax with old-school Turtle Wax in a tub. Giving up on machine polish and carnuba wax...this combo won't make it two car washes before wax is gone.

Beat front skid plate back into submission, again. It has one hit left in it before it will be so stretched it won't reattach.

Nothing exciting today, but some fun upgrades coming in September!

[YotaFun]

if the lowers fail more, why don't companies make an easy uniball upgrade like they do for the uppers? (TC, Camburg, All-Pro, etc)


Sorry for the off topic here but,

I was skimming through a Ferrari forum I frequent (no I don't own one but some of the resto builds on there are just pure art) and I was looking at suspension work they were doing and notice that they are uniball design and made me think of this comment.

Here is the kicker though, they go after about 20k miles.
I don't know about you but that is a lot of money to be throwing into ball joints every 20k considering mine from All-Pro for the upper where $50 each...

I'd rather stick to the Toyota one and deal with the travel I have and the protection they have with the dust boot.

[paddlenbike]

I am always surprised how frequent the maintenance interval is on the high end cars. Take me for a ride Avi when you get yours. :)

[Crinale]

Desert trucks can do 30k on uniballs if they are maintained well, and I don't know about you, but I'm not nearly as hard on my truck as those drivers are.. I have a feeling those Ferrari builds either use non teflon coated uniballs, or the "going out" they talk of is when the ball starts getting a very small amount of play (uniballs can get really sloppy before they have any threat of failure)

[paddlenbike]

9/23/2012
Added the URD 7th injector kit (Walbro fuel pump not installed yet), wideband O2 meter and new Toyota fuel filter.

The URD install was pretty straight forward. The URD piggy back computer taps the factory ECU in six locations including ECU power, ECU ground, tach signal and it intercepts both the crank and cam angle sensors to allow timing adjustment. The URD piggy back controls the 7th injector, allowing adjustments to the amount of fuel delivered by the 7th injector as well as the ability to adjust timing to help cure the high gear/low rpm ping.

Most installs I have seen have utilized the passenger footwell area for mounting the URD piggyback computer, however my ABS computer resides there and I had to mount it elsewhere. There was room here for my Innovate wideband wiring though. I needed power when the key is the on position (not just accessory) and found it at the transmission relay in the passenger footwell area. Mine is a manual trans, so I'm not sure what this relay actually does and as a result I'm only using this to power up another relay; the actual power for the wideband and oxygen sensor heater comes from a new fused line I brought through the firewall from the battery.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-VJivKiN_NdI/UF_C-Q45h5I/AAAAAAAAHbM/XuWrch_eXKc/s640/DSC_1818r.jpg

The wideband was a mess, wiring-wise. There was a huge six-wire loom that I had to get from the engine bay into the interior and it needed switched power, three grounds (one for the wideband brain, one for the gauge and one for the oxygen sensor heater), another 4 wire loom goes to the gauge itself and I used the glovebox light for the night-time gauge dimming. If you couldn't tell, the photo below is what's behind the glovebox trim. There are a few other things going on here including the switch and LED for the wideband calibration, the boost line from the supercharger to both the URD piggy back and the boost gauge and the output ports of the wideband to allow datalogging on a computer. I tried to wireloom as much of the wiring as I could, but it criss-crosses and changes direction enough that there was only so much I could do.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-BGbiYeiHk_U/UF_C-CfQ53I/AAAAAAAAHbI/Lql38kyy2rA/s640/DSC_1817r.jpg

The actual work in the engine bay was limited to running a new power line into the cab for the wideband, adding the 7th injector into the EGR port of the supercharger (shown below) and installing the wideband ECU.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-enIxD_go3lU/UF_C-PTCcgI/AAAAAAAAHbQ/LGJmYB5GMOQ/s640/DSC_1823r.jpg

I've only put about ten miles on it but much of the ping is gone. I can still invoke some ping in the higher gears at low RPM, so I have some more timing to pull. I also noticed the wideband stays around 13.5:1 through much of a WOT pull, so I need to add more fuel. It does dip down to the high-12s near redline and in the higher gears, so a little more fuel there plus some more fuel in the 3000-4500 RPM area should get it.

[Obi..]

Proof or it didn't happen. ;)
http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/lLnFf0_H8bI/mqdefault.jpg

As far as what you're saying about the fuel mix, the new Walboro should definitely come into play. Let it get some time with that before chasing things further. IIRC you can still run O/E plugs just fine.

[Bob98SR5]

somehow I knew you'd get this b/f the end of the year :p

[paddlenbike]

My truck needed it, the pinging was noticeable.

And sorry, no smokey burnouts from me. :loser:

[paddlenbike]

I am absolutely 110% fed up with Windows Vista. I have hated this operating system since the day I got it and somehow have kept myself from committing acts of violence despite the amount of frustration it has brought me. It has never connected to anything without a fight and last night was no exception. The URD piggyback has a serial port so I bought a serial-to-USB converter that is "Vista-compatible." The installation went fine and the laptop shows it installed in the Com4 port. When I attempt to connect to the piggyback Vista just simply crashes.

So I busted out my old-as-dirt Windows XP laptop, which is the slowest, most miserable computer ever...a Pentium III 350 MHz machine. Strike what I said about being miserable, it's slow but unlike my Vista machine, it flawlessly connects to the piggyback. Not only that but it boots faster and shuts down quicker than my 2 GHz Vista machine...did I mention I hate Vista? The old machine is too slow to datalog, so tonight I will be going home and doing what I should have done in 2007, uninstalling Vista from my good laptop and replacing it with XP. Rant off.

[Crinale]

Windows 7 > than all those.. but for things like that, I would agree that turning your computer back to XP will work better. On your current laptop was Vista a clean/original install? or was it upgraded from XP? Vista has lots of problems when it is an upgrade, works significantly better (as do all versions of windows) as a clean install.

[paddlenbike]

Clean install from the OEM disc. I have to reinstall Vista about every year and a half, otherwise it slows to a crawl. So basically, I always have a fresh Vista install. :bangdesk:

[YotaFun]

Vista was such a POS failure, I am running XP on my laptop at work still, its fast enough, and my mini desktop at home has 7 and with the memory it has is fast enough for what I need.

I would love to get a new computer and send it back to the XP ages, but then again if I can find a laptop with 7 Pro or Ultimate I would be happy with that.

FWIW Toyota up till next year has been using XP on all our computers so you know at least Toyota trusts it lol

[CJM]

Still using XP on every PC we have. I had a really nice (its older now but I digress) XP P4 3.4ghz machine that was all decked out and cutting edge 5 years ago. Shame the cpu went out-good luck finding a prescott cpu too.

Anyways what Im getting at is I have tried everything and stick to XP its the fastest most happy OS next to 98SE or 2000. Im using an old 2.66ghz pc right now and have been for ages-but it does what I want.

Might I suggest you try to use XP on your vista machine paddlen?

[Crinale]

Avy - big corporations don't change OS's very often because of the HUGE costs involved. Also, software is often written to work specifically with a version of Windows (like inventory or database software), which would cost even more money to upgrade to be compatible with a newer OS. So it is not necessarily because they trust it more, just because they don't want to spend the money. My company is finally upgrading to Win7 from XP because we finally got a newer inventory program that is 7 compatible.

Also, XP was a great operating system, in 2003 when it came out. Now it's old and filled with security holes, comparatively. Vista only sucks because venders half-assed all the drivers when it came out because they didn't believe Microsoft when they said the older 2000/XP drivers would no longer work. With Windows 7, Microsoft went back and wrote drivers for a lot of hardware so that it would actually work correctly. Chances are, this Vista laptop is actually legacy XP hardware not designed to run with Vista. Vista is a significant upgrade over XP when you have newer hardware, and the latest service packs (which include a lot of the driver fixes that Microsoft made for 7). That said, 7 is a significant upgrade from Vista as well.

Also, if you are installing the system from a manufacturer's disc, that can explain why it sucks so bad too. That is not a clean install, it is a bloated vender's version.

/off topic, sorry paddlenbike

[paddlenbike]

Not off topic at all, I appreciate the info. I haven't noticed any bloatware on my OEM Vista...on Dell laptops the bloatware is on a separate DVD where they package device drivers and bloatware together. I have heard Windows 7 is pretty good but right now I need the laptop for tuning--my serial-to-USB converter, the URD tuning software, wideband software and my BR-3 OBD-II scanner mention nothing about Windows 7 compatibility. That doesn't mean it won't work, but I think my chances of those products working successfully is better with XP than W7. Unless of course someone can confirm success with W7 and the products I just mentioned.

[paddlenbike]

This weekend I formatted the harddrive on the computer and reinstalled a fresh copy of Windows Vista to give it another chance--sure enough, it let me down again. I reformatted again a second time and installed Windows XP Pro and what do you know, everything is working flawlessly. Vista wouldn't connect to my OBD-II reader, the URD piggyback, the wideband, not to mention it never worked with my printer, or any other device that used anything but USB. So far XP has flawlessly connected with everything and for the first time in years, I can even print. :love: I should have dumped Vista back in 2007 when I bought this PC. Anyways, I now have the tools I need to get this truck tuned.

[paddlenbike]

11/2/2012 - finally completed the URD install by getting the high volume Walbro fuel pump installed. Fuel filter was replaced in September. I haven't had enough road to get the RPMs over 3500 but I can already see my air fuel ratios are lower. They're around 11.8-12.0 at 3500 RPMs where it used to be about a full point higher. More tuning to come.

Cleaned and lubed u-joints. Beat fuel tank skid plate sort-of back into shape. Repainted wheel center caps with Dupli-color wheel coating.