ARB Safari Snorkel
DSC_3765 by
Tim Souza, on Flickr
Snorkels are a polarizing item, some think they are functionally unnecessary, others just think they are plain ugly. Me? I think they are endearingly ugly. This wasn't a mod that was originally on the to-do list, but I stumbled into a situation that was right.
A guy on Craigslist an hour away from me was trading in his truck and was looking for a MGM colored, passenger side fender to trade for his fender and snorkel. Although the rest of my truck got pelted by hail, the passenger side fender was the one piece of sheet metal on the truck that saw little/no damage. There were a couple pea sized indications, but only if you look at it from the right angle. He was cool with it, I was cool with it, so I went up with cash in hand to do the swap.
Everything was going pretty smoothly on snorkel install lite until it came to disassembling the antenna to actually remove the fender. Namely, this little bugger wouldn't budge on either of our trucks.
DSC_3766 by
Tim Souza, on Flickr
We tried penetrating oil, ground down vice grips, and a hammer and screwdriver with no luck. The local auto parts store couldn't help, and neither could the local Toyota dealership. Guy said his techs usually just use a hammer and screwdriver and knock em off. No matter what we tried the nut was just getting buggered beyond all repair; in a last ditch effort I started taking apart my dash in hopes of tracing the radio wire to a disconnect.
This actually proved to be the ticket. For anyone who gets stuck here in the future, the antenna cable runs through a grommet in the firewall and goes into the cab behind the passenger kick panel area. If you remove the glove box you can reach back and feel it. It's taped to a cable holder thinger down there, then runs up along the a-pillar and has a plug behind the a-pillar trim. If you pull all that off you can extract the cable, pull it back through the fender, and free it all.
Things moved along decently after that, it's just replacing the 12,000 bolts Toyota uses to hold the fender on while doing your best to maintain some semblance of panel gaps. We ended up swapping air intakes as the newest version of the ARB has you cut off the intake nozzle where it goes into the wheel well, you can see the hose clamp in the picture below where it meets the rubber duct that runs to the snorkel.
DSC_3767 by
Tim Souza, on Flickr
It took us about three hours to get everything swapped over and mostly buttoned up. I still haven't installed the a-pillar support yet, when that time comes it'll probably be with double sided tape instead of drilling into the sheet metal. In any case, the truck is going into the shop shortly to repair the hail damage and this was an affected area, no sense in making work for them. It's pretty rigid on it's own of course and stays put pretty well in the wind, just a bit of wiggle to it.
DSC_3770 by
Tim Souza, on Flickr
Backing up a bit.
DSC_3769 by
Tim Souza, on Flickr
Contrary to what some have reported, I noticed no appreciable increase in fuel economy. I also noticed a little increase in noise, both at WOT as well as traveling highway speeds in windy conditions. Not a ton, but a little bit.
I personally like the larger size of the Tacoma version as well as how it plumbs into the stock air intake. I was never a fan of the old cobbled together one, or the Airflow version for this truck. The only disappointing thing is nobody has approached me to ask ****** it is. I've been working on the myriad of fallacies I can tell them.
