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How to get ~14" of travel out of the rear of a Tacoma w/o coming through the bed!
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We just finished dialing in the custom rear setup we've been designing for the past few months. We originally designed this kit to work on our project '89 4Runner with a coil-over long-travel front end and 3.4L conversion but it will also work on ANY Toyota truck from 84-2004 with a leaf-sprung rear end including Tacomas. We wanted something that would not come into the bed of the truck and compromise the true utilitarian nature of the vehicle.
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In order to achieve our goals we knew that some compromises would have to be made such as placing the lower shock mounts slightly below the axle, so we designed the lower mounts to have integrated skid-plates and double-shear mounting so that they could be dragged over and bashed against rocks all day long w/o incident. We also mounted them as far outboard as was possible for better vehicle stability in corners and to hide them in the triangle between the inside bottom of the tire and the axle housing where they are less likely to get hung up on obstacles. In fact with a spring-under these mounts sit at about the same height as the bottom of the spring pack.
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For the upper mounts, we pierced the frame rails just in front of the factory rear cross-member and welded in a 1.75" diameter piece of .120" wall HREW mild steel tube and welded on two sets of custom water-jet cut tabs. We designed the tabs to wrap around just more than 50% of the diameter of the tube to better distribute loads. Unlike the factory mounts, these are double-shear for improved strength. The upper mounts are clocked up as far as can be to still allow clearance for the remote reservoir hoses just below the underside of the bed. The lower mounts are rotated down so that the shock shaft just clears the axle tube on full extension (droop). This design uses 12" stroke shocks, an 8-leaf Deaver Tacoma length spring pack and some custom 4.5" shackles to get almost 14" of usable vertical wheel travel. In keeping with the concept of retaining full use of the bed for cargo, we also designed everything to work around a 33" tire mounted in the factory spare location! The remote reservoirs mount to the new cross-member and are rotated up so they lay flat with the factory rear cross-member. The tire is removed in these pics to show detail but rest assured it fits very well with a few inches of clearance on all sides. We also relocated the factory rubber bump-stops to the u-bolt plate on our custom u-bolt flip kit.
We just mobbed the truck in Baja and it works super nice in all conditions. We ran well over 100 miles of trails ranging from the Baja 250 race course whoop section to the heavily rain damaged trail into Mikes Sky Ranch and then out the back side over to the pacific coast. After some serious "testing"
we broke the upper mounts but that was my fault because when I installed the swivel 90º's on the shocks, I accidentally slightly overfilled the shocks (wrong piston depth, oops!) so they were hydro-locking a few inches before full compression. Since the bump-stops weren't being contacted the stress was getting placed on the upper mounts and it sheared the cross bar we welded in to the frame. The prototype design crossbar was .090 HREW so since we were redoing that part anyway we decided to jump up to .120 wall just to be extra safe. We also used a longer tube and pierced both the inner and outer frame rail instead of just the inner for even more strength. I'm sure if I hadn't over filled the shocks that the original setup would have held up fine but we figured why not make it even better since it wasn't much more work.
We might be looking into installing this same setup on a Tacoma to possibly codevelop a kit with an aftermarket parts company in the near future. We MIGHT (big might) be looking for volunteers in case any of you are interested in something like this. We would like to do this to a NICE, tastefully built truck that already has a mid-travel front setup (ie: Donahoe's w/uni-ball arms etc.) and 33" tires. No big body lifts please! IF we decide to do this, the volunteer would only be responsible for the cost of materials including water-jet cut parts, 12" stroke Racerunner shocks (remote res. or not), Deaver leafs (7 or 8 leaf bolt-in Taco pack or triple AAL) and Deaver u-bolts totaling probably about ~$1,000. :welder: / labor would be about one full day. Send me a PM with pictures and a description of your rig. If we decide to go ahead we'll select whomever we feel has the most appropriate truck to showcase this potential product.
We are not looking to sell this (or any) product directly as that is not what we do, but if there is enough interest we would like to possibly consider co-branding it with an existing manufacturer (in fact we already have one in mind and they're interested!) since we feel it is has great potential and there is currently nothing out there like this. We'd hate to see a great design only get used on one vehicle!
We just finished dialing in the custom rear setup we've been designing for the past few months. We originally designed this kit to work on our project '89 4Runner with a coil-over long-travel front end and 3.4L conversion but it will also work on ANY Toyota truck from 84-2004 with a leaf-sprung rear end including Tacomas. We wanted something that would not come into the bed of the truck and compromise the true utilitarian nature of the vehicle.
In order to achieve our goals we knew that some compromises would have to be made such as placing the lower shock mounts slightly below the axle, so we designed the lower mounts to have integrated skid-plates and double-shear mounting so that they could be dragged over and bashed against rocks all day long w/o incident. We also mounted them as far outboard as was possible for better vehicle stability in corners and to hide them in the triangle between the inside bottom of the tire and the axle housing where they are less likely to get hung up on obstacles. In fact with a spring-under these mounts sit at about the same height as the bottom of the spring pack.
For the upper mounts, we pierced the frame rails just in front of the factory rear cross-member and welded in a 1.75" diameter piece of .120" wall HREW mild steel tube and welded on two sets of custom water-jet cut tabs. We designed the tabs to wrap around just more than 50% of the diameter of the tube to better distribute loads. Unlike the factory mounts, these are double-shear for improved strength. The upper mounts are clocked up as far as can be to still allow clearance for the remote reservoir hoses just below the underside of the bed. The lower mounts are rotated down so that the shock shaft just clears the axle tube on full extension (droop). This design uses 12" stroke shocks, an 8-leaf Deaver Tacoma length spring pack and some custom 4.5" shackles to get almost 14" of usable vertical wheel travel. In keeping with the concept of retaining full use of the bed for cargo, we also designed everything to work around a 33" tire mounted in the factory spare location! The remote reservoirs mount to the new cross-member and are rotated up so they lay flat with the factory rear cross-member. The tire is removed in these pics to show detail but rest assured it fits very well with a few inches of clearance on all sides. We also relocated the factory rubber bump-stops to the u-bolt plate on our custom u-bolt flip kit.
We just mobbed the truck in Baja and it works super nice in all conditions. We ran well over 100 miles of trails ranging from the Baja 250 race course whoop section to the heavily rain damaged trail into Mikes Sky Ranch and then out the back side over to the pacific coast. After some serious "testing"
we broke the upper mounts but that was my fault because when I installed the swivel 90º's on the shocks, I accidentally slightly overfilled the shocks (wrong piston depth, oops!) so they were hydro-locking a few inches before full compression. Since the bump-stops weren't being contacted the stress was getting placed on the upper mounts and it sheared the cross bar we welded in to the frame. The prototype design crossbar was .090 HREW so since we were redoing that part anyway we decided to jump up to .120 wall just to be extra safe. We also used a longer tube and pierced both the inner and outer frame rail instead of just the inner for even more strength. I'm sure if I hadn't over filled the shocks that the original setup would have held up fine but we figured why not make it even better since it wasn't much more work.We might be looking into installing this same setup on a Tacoma to possibly codevelop a kit with an aftermarket parts company in the near future. We MIGHT (big might) be looking for volunteers in case any of you are interested in something like this. We would like to do this to a NICE, tastefully built truck that already has a mid-travel front setup (ie: Donahoe's w/uni-ball arms etc.) and 33" tires. No big body lifts please! IF we decide to do this, the volunteer would only be responsible for the cost of materials including water-jet cut parts, 12" stroke Racerunner shocks (remote res. or not), Deaver leafs (7 or 8 leaf bolt-in Taco pack or triple AAL) and Deaver u-bolts totaling probably about ~$1,000. :welder: / labor would be about one full day. Send me a PM with pictures and a description of your rig. If we decide to go ahead we'll select whomever we feel has the most appropriate truck to showcase this potential product.
We are not looking to sell this (or any) product directly as that is not what we do, but if there is enough interest we would like to possibly consider co-branding it with an existing manufacturer (in fact we already have one in mind and they're interested!) since we feel it is has great potential and there is currently nothing out there like this. We'd hate to see a great design only get used on one vehicle!
