Bayou Kid's GX460 Build

[Bayou Boy]

With my oldest getting his license this coming summer and my mom buying a new Grand Highlander I took the opportunity to add her old 2012 GX460 to the fleet for the kid. The general plan is to turn it from a granny mobile into a super cool car for him to drive that is capable of doing the mild dirt we need for hunting trips and general playing around in Montana.

The car arrived a couple of weeks ago from Louisiana bone stock. Mechanically it is 100% but the tires are up there in age and it needs shocks bad. That works since...why would we keep the stock tires and suspension.

As it arrived on the transport and him seeing it for the first time for pickup.

First on the list was removal of the factory PPF and trimming the running boards.

We added some Wet Okole covers for the front seats.

Tires and suspension are on the way. We are headed to the Moab area in the SuperDuty in the background next week for spring break so it will be a couple of weeks for the next update.

 

[TLar25]

Nice! Lucky kid to have that as his first car! What are you going with for suspension? Everything up to date with the transmission services? I've read the earlier model year 460's have pretty common transmission issues if the fluid hasn't been changed regularly, and maybe even still if it has been.

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk

 

[TLar25]

There's a pretty active group of people on the GX460 sub-forum of mud in case you're not already on there.

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk

 

[Bayou Boy]

Nice! Lucky kid to have that as his first car! What are you going with for suspension? Everything up to date with the transmission services? I've read the earlier model year 460's have pretty common transmission issues if the fluid hasn't been changed regularly, and maybe even still if it has been.

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk

The Eibach Stage 2 kit is on the way.

As for the transmission,it was a little behind schedule when we decided on this move last summer. The I had my mom do a drain and fill and the plan is to repeat that every 5k for a few rounds to get us back in a good place. The car has 120k on it so it isn’t that far behind compared to some.

That said, you hear the same “transmission issues” line with pretty much every car that has a decent following. My opinion is that lack of maintenance across all cars has more to do with that than anything. In general, people just don’t service transmissions on any car.

 

[AggieOE]

Removing that film and restoring the headlights will do wonders for it!
Also, new tires in general can really change the look of a vehicle. Kudos to you for getting him something fun, safe, reliable, AND something to learn to work on with.

 

[Bayou Boy]

Removing that film and restoring the headlights will do wonders for it!
Also, new tires in general can really change the look of a vehicle. Kudos to you for getting him something fun, safe, reliable, AND something to learn to work on with.

I went all out on one of the lights with the 3m kit last weekend. Results were meh. There is some crazing and cracking internally so I'm just going to replace them with new and find a good set of LED bulbs that I can verify have decent cutoffs. It's dark a lot of the year here in Montana so good headlights are a must and these stock ones suck after a decade plus of driving stuff with great LED and HID setups. A good portion of the year his drive to school will be in the dark and we have a ton of deer in the neighborhood so we gotta do what we gotta do.


Need to finish this darn thing up though. This is kind of putting my Carli setup on the Tremor on hold. Grrrr.