Happy new year! I hope everyone had a great celebration in whatever fashion suits your fancy.
For me, it was a quiet night in with a surf and turf, lobster and steak dinner with my wife and son. For dessert, my wife’s home made cheesecake!
Just when I thought the weekend couldn’t get any better, I had the chance to finally do some work on our 5th Gen 4Runner. Of course, as luck would have it, I picked one of the coldest weekends we’ve had this winter! Fortunately, I had enough forethought to buy a propane heater for the garage, which will serve it’s purpose well this year because I’ve also got a lot of house projects going on this winter.
So, while I had some down time, I took the opportunity to install the SPC upper control arms that I’ve had since Thanksgiving. I picked up a set for both my 4th and 5th Gen from Chas at MRT Motorsports. My intention was to get those on this weekend and then have the 285/70/17 (33in) Falken Wildpeak AT3W tires mounted balanced and realigned next weekend. But, even better, I got to do it all.
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| Comparison of Old and New |
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| Driver’s Side Bracket |
Since I’ve already installed UCAs on my 4th gen, this time around was a breeze. There was no rust to contend with and the only tricky part was around the main bolt removal. On the driver’s side, there is a bracket that is in the way of the bolt head, so rather than taking the battery out, I just took some pliers and bent it upward to clear (Pictured). After re-install of the UCA, I bent it back, no problems. On the passenger side there were some hose brackets that I unbolted and moved out of the way to finagle the bolt in and out.
After I got everything all buttoned up, I loaded up the trunk and headed to the WalMart down the street. After about 25 minutes of waiting they came to me to say they wouldn’t mount the tires since it doesn’t match what’s in the door jamb…Well, they just lost my business forever. I’ve had all of my tires mounted and balanced there in the past, and being that I have a Limited with 20 inch factory rims, none of my tires have ever matched the door jamb. Oh well, at least they were nice about it.
So, in search of a shop to mount and balance, I came across a small shop that was not only willing to mount, but they would align me too. That’s something I’ve had trouble with for a lifted truck and UCAs. I had to plea with my local Toyota dealer (Darcars in Frederick) to do my 4th Gen, but luckily the service manager had a 4Runner too and was on T4R.org, so he worked everything out for me.
A couple hours later, the truck was ready, and it looked awesome! I was having serious tire envy. I’m going to need to up my tire game on my 4th Gen 😏
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