The Restoration And Build Thread For My 1992 FJ80

tlin

Adventurer
Get well SCJ!!!! Sorry to hear about the crash.

I'm a relative novice on MTB trails - I often hop off and walk down bigger drops, just not interested in well, going through what you're going through.

Your stories and pics are always great - hoping you recover fast and continue with the adventures.
 

redthies

Renaissance Redneck
Crappy deal! I'm 4 days a week in Whistler BC and was fulltime there for 20+ years. The trails there are VERY technical with a lot of rock and roots. There are also a lot of high off the ground elevated stunts to ride. I've had a few good crashes over the years, including a season ending drop backwards off the top of a log A-frame. 24' to rocky gully. Never a med-evac though! I went for my first ride of the season the other day but just a short flat one to check a tune up. Speedy recovery man!
 

Summit Cruisers Jr

Well-known member
I appreciate it you guys. Today is feeling like the day I will be finally seeing some improvement. It's really crazy it's already been a week. I had no idea a broken jaw was as big of a Pita as it is. I would love to make it out to Whistler some day. We were out hitting huge table tops and Features at Coler Preserve. Then we ate lunch and rode around on some more mellow jumps near Crystal Bridges. Then we went back to the old jump park I've ridden plenty of times without issue and on the last of 3 tables in a row it was like my cranks locked up and over I went when I landed.
 

Summit Cruisers Jr

Well-known member
Yeah that's all I can do. If I didn't find humor in at least some parts of this situation it'd be a lot worse...not that I can laugh with my jaws wired shut. If my jaw is in decent shape there's a chance I could get the wires taken off on Monday.

Anyways, onto the cruiser. After the Spring Break trip and partially during it the idle seemed to develop a small shutter intermittently. I got the cruiser home last weekend and my dad replaced the spark plugs with NGK iridium plugs and also put on a new cap and rotor. While at it he also pulled the valve cover and adjusted the valves and put on a new valve cover gasket as it was starting to seep on the exhaust side of the motor. With all of that the idle is smoother than I can remember it ever being, and it apart from the exhaust and motor noise one could wonder if the truck was even running while at idle. He also put on my new OME Nitrocharger sport shocks up front which has significantly helped handling. It rides slightly firmer but remains very flat through corners.

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Here's a quick clip I took of it sitting at idle

[video]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BSuukeQxGYw[/video]

On a side note, does anyone happen to have a source on these generic led turn signal/marker lights for the Ironman bumper?

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Summit Cruisers Jr

Well-known member
Last weekend was finally the time to swap out the leaky waterpump for a fresh one along with a new thermostat and coolant hoses on the front of he engine.

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I'm also nearly done with the drawers. The last of the hardware should be in this week, and I have maybe a good days work to get all of the fitment panels on along with the drawer fronts. Then a good test fit, followed by disassembly and bed liner. I'll likely respray all of my fender flares, snorkel, bumper wings, hood vents etc with bed liner when I do that. I'll also be finishing up the fridge slide pretty soon.

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Summit Cruisers Jr

Well-known member
After finishing class, I dove in to complete a ton of projects last week.

I finished the drawers, I did end up having to rush them more than I would have liked in order to get them bed linered before going to Colorado, and the monstaliner I had looked like enough to cover it all, but ended up not coming close so I will be tearing them back down here in the future. I have a few smaller changes and adjustments to do to perfect them, and I am going to respray them completely along with all the bed linered parts on the cruiser.

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I also finished up the fridge slide, relocated my rear 12v outlets higher up so they could be used with the side wings on the drawers down. Luckily I saved some old plastic sheets from a Metolius hang board I bought just knowing they could come in handy and they finally did. Then I modified some hinges and trimmed them down to fit on some tabs I left on my yeti swing out knowing I would eventually like to add a table. For now I'm just using a limiting strap, but I will be figuring out a way to ditch the paracord in favor of something that holds it from the bottom.

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Then to prep for a trip to Colorado I mounted up the tent, changed the oil, checked fluids and brake pads, and did a couple smaller things. The morning before I left I had run to ACE to get some longer bolts for my rear bump stops. When I got home and worked more on my drawers I couldn't find the screws I had bought to attach the faceplates to the drawers. While driving back to ace my brake pedal seemed a little softer than normal so with no one around and a couple miles from home, I mashed the pedal and all of a sudden nothing. Driver's front brake line blew. Luckily this was still fairly early in the day and I was able to find a guy who made two new even longer length lines for the front. This time I decided against going with stainless braided lines at the recommendation of the guy who builds lines. He told me that he sees them fail more often due to having to use a collar on the line to get it to the correct thickness to crimp down the end fittings.

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The next day, myself and two friends left for Colorado. We picked up another in Buena Vista and met a friend with a 100 series to run Tin cup Pass. We didn't start the trail until about 10:30pm. We then set up camp at the summit in high winds and sleet. Then within about 30 minutes the storm passed through and it was great.

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My friend woke up to a fully flatted KO2. Wonder why ARB has sliders that flex this much...

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Now we are in Crested Butte getting ready to head down to Telluride.
 

Summit Cruisers Jr

Well-known member
After driving to Crested Butte, I discovered one of my headlight bulbs was out. On a day trip to ride at Hartman Rocks in Gunnison, I stopped at an auto parts store and picked up some ATF and a headlight bulb. Later that evening I went to replace the headlight bulb just to find a perfect one in the headlight. Now I wasn't very happy knowing I had some interesting wiring issue going on. I also forgot to pack my voltmeter....Luckily a friend traveling with us had one and it seemed like we traced it down to a corroded ground wire on the inner fender. I scuffed it up and all worked, or so I thought. When we left Crested Butte for Telluride I noticed my headlight had gone out again. I scuffed up the ground even better and checked over the connections for corrosion. Nothing fixed it and at that point I didn't really care as my bumper fog lights and driver's side headlight provided enough for me to see.

Upon arriving in Telluride, we stopped in at a bike shop and got a few things and then went to the blue corner house for $1.50 tacos which were awesome. Then we grabbed the bikes, rode a little bit from mountain village back to town and stopped by that same restaurant for the $1 wings. After a successful day dodging rain, eating great (and cheap) food, we left town for Alta Lakes to go to our favorite spot on some rock pile overlooking Sunshine peak and the entire surrounding area. Much to our dismay we saw "Campsite Closed" signs everywhere on the drive up to Alta Lakes. None of us were in a great mood about that so we continued up to the lake and the only spots suitable for our two trucks and RTT were right next to a row of port-a-potties. No way were we camping there so we kept driving around hoping to find an old mining road. We came across Gold King Basin not too far from Alta Lakes, and it was definitely a great place to camp.

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It seems like usually a day or two into the trip and we are emptying out the cruiser to sort through the unorganized pile of gear. The drawers made it so easy this year and we had four people's stuff in the cruiser compared to the usual three.

The next day we dropped down into town and grabbed breakfast at Baked in Telluride and planned out our day. We decided to get some more biking in, and then hit Imogene Pass to get to Ouray. Imogene Pass was awesome as always and apart from what looked like a huge rainstorm moving in on us as we were on the summit, it blew off and the drive down the pass was beautiful.

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Not sure how this happened. The guy said he had help on the way. We took the picture at a spot just 10 feet up the hill where at least 6 vehicles could have been parked.

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We drove up the "Super Secret Road" in search of our favorite campsites and made camp with plenty of time left in the day to watch the sun gracefully dip behind the mountains that lock Telluride into its valley.

That night was the first night I had slept in the cruiser and it was awesome. It was slightly cramped with the fridge freezer, but not as badly as sharing the RTT with two others. I awoke to the sounds of grazing animals and dogs barking way out in the distance. Upon grabbing my camera and zooming in, I saw what looked like over a thousand sheep being herded towards Silverton over the mountain tops. We had seen a guy solo camping the night before with what looked like a more permanent tent set up that was even complete with a chimney.

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As we cooked and ate breakfast, we continued to watch the sheep push onward across a neighboring mountain. It was truly amazing, and I had no idea that that was still really a profession. We had also seen a small cattle drive while leaving Crested Butte, but I would assume they were just changing fields or not going very far, but it was very cool nonetheless. Once we were done and packed up, we headed for Silverton and then onto Durango. Upon arriving in Durango, we grabbed some pizza at Home Slice and headed out to ride Horseshoe Gulch. After a good day of riding and hanging out on the river, we had to grab dinner at Gazpachos. With our bellies boiling with red chile and salsa, we made our way up La Plata Canyon to camp with our sights set on riding Phil's World early the next morning.

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Luckily it was overcast and misting during most of our ride out at Phil's World at the trails were prime hero dirt. From that point, a couple of my friends rode back to Oklahoma with our friend and his 4runner, and myself and another friend drove up to Boulder to look at a triple locked cruiser that my dad was interested in buying. Oh and we also were trying to be at the bank by the time they closed in Pueblo that evening. Honestly, driving from Oklahoma may have been quicker, but we made it, and ended up bringing that cruiser back for my dad to build up and play with.

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On the drive home, roughly 30 miles from Salina, my cruiser finally rolled 400,000 miles which was oddly satisfying. Sad in a way to end the 300,000 era and start over again, but I am sure the next 100,000 miles will bring even better memories! The trip was roughly 2450 miles and the cruiser averaged 10.5 mpg.
 
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Summit Cruisers Jr

Well-known member
Since returning home I've full detailed the cruiser and it will be getting ready for freshly bed linered parts and a nice buff and wax. Crazy this paint has now seen about 100k miles.

I also gave the underside a thorough cleaning that I've been wanting to do for quite some time.
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Next small things I am going to build/do include building more permanent metal mounts for my rear attic rack. Zip ties have done the job for quite some time, but they have a slight wiggle to them and it's time it gets bolted up nice and solid. I am also currently building another batch of swing outs, and will be putting one on my dad's new cruiser so I will likely come up with a way to mount my hi lift on the rear tire swing out and get it off the front end. That's how I always wanted it, but haven't ever had a chance to move it.

We also started finally rebuilding the power steering gear box. Upon reassembly, we tore the big teflon ring as it dropped into its final position so I am waiting on a new rebuild kit to come in before I can put it back together and once again drive a drip free cruiser.
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The gearbox is all back together and doing great. Steering feels a little more precise now. It's slightly pulling to the left so I have some investigating to do. I also dealt with the leaky rear quarter panel. I found that water was coming in through one of the belt moulding clips and the gas filler surround screw inserts. NP1 smeared around both fixed that up nicely.

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I've also been chasing down a few squeaks that seem to have developed with the drawers. One of the bigger squeaks I have found was the ARB fridge tie downs squeaking on the fridge so I added some felt to the inside of them and it helped tremendously.
 
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Summit Cruisers Jr

Well-known member
I've done a few little things on the cruiser lately and found a couple of issues.

The rear cargo shelf has always been held on by a bunch of zipties and had a slight wiggle to it. I wanted to fix that and make it as solid as it could so it did not produce any squeaks. I cut out and bent up some new mounts and bolted it in. It's now awesomely solid and I can actually pull my weight on it and slide into the back on top of the drawers.

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It turned out that my squeak disappeared as soon as I removed my fridge slide. I had put it on the drawers before everything was fully cured and it had a squeaky paint sound. I'm not sure if I am just going to coat the bottom of the slide base in felt/carpet or coat the drawers in carpet. The black bed liner shows a lot of dirt and doesn't cut down on any noise if things are on top of it. It's also now pretty scratched up after only one trip.

If I carpet my drawers I will be taking them apart to do a little fine sanding. I also seemed to have an issue with one of my accuride slides having more play than the other. I'm not sure what to do about that, but I did try and add more rubber to the bump stop in the slide to no avail. If anyone knows how to fix this please let me know! Here's a video

[video]https://youtu.be/oL2UcyYbV44[/video]

My rear receiver relocation set up really took a beating this year. I noticed it had started developing some play last summer in Wyoming, but I rewelded the broken welds on the sleeved part. It has since cracked again down in there allowing the 1/4" plate to bow slightly over time to the point that it has now started extruding crossmember metal where the 4 bolts have nuts on the back side from the constant up and down bouncing from 4 bikes on rough trails. The Northshore rack developed some play at a couple pin spots as well so I will cut addressing that shortly. I am going to rebuild it out of 1/2" angle iron and use an 18" long tube with scab plates back to my inner support bar. I think my current one is only 6 or 8" and gets a lot of leverage acting on it.

I have also taken the hi lift off the front bumper. It's always kind of bugged me, but that was the best place for it. Now I'm looking to place it on my swing out. I'm going to play with spacing my wheel out with a spacer to see if I can make it work without having to cut it up.

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I'm also now considering the next major upgrades/mods. Part of me really wants to buy a stage 1 slinky set up, but another part of me says I wouldn't be as happy as buying a stage 4 so I could save for a lot longer and eventually go for that which I'm still not sure at the end of the day I could justify that much money on suspension. At the same time, I would never need another suspension and rebuilds would keep it running like new.

An H55F swap is kind of a dream at that price range too just to get as much power out of the 3FE as I can. Sourcing everything and actually going through with it would be a lot of work. I don't know when I'd be able to have the cruiser down for a time long enough to do that, but it would be pretty fun have a 5 speed.

I'm also watching nearby Craigslists in hopes I can find a locked full floating rear axle. I would love to swap that in along with the rear disks.

Kind of unsure what to aim for next. Everything is pretty expensive at this point since I can't build these things and I can justify each one of them in their own ways...
 
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Upland80

Adventurer
Looking good! Out of the three options, I'd go for the full-float rear axle. Stage 4 slinky is just way too much money IMO. The old ARB springs, TJM, Dobinsons, Tuff dog, etc. paired with decent shocks are a very respectable setup, but lack the "WOW" factor of the slinky...I get it. Engine swap is a whole different level of commitment, money, and frustration. Full float is a honest upgrade with the added benefit of disk brakes F/R.
 

Summit Cruisers Jr

Well-known member
Looking good! Out of the three options, I'd go for the full-float rear axle. Stage 4 slinky is just way too much money IMO. The old ARB springs, TJM, Dobinsons, Tuff dog, etc. paired with decent shocks are a very respectable setup, but lack the "WOW" factor of the slinky...I get it. Engine swap is a whole different level of commitment, money, and frustration. Full float is a honest upgrade with the added benefit of disk brakes F/R.

Yeah I agree with that. I'd buy a full floater today if there was one, but even while keeping an eye on local classifieds and parts yards, it could be awhile before a full floater shows up. Not a lot of people willing to ship and I'm not sure I'd want to buy one without seeing it first hand as I don't want a rusted solid one. Even less likely for one that is locked shows up at pull a part but one can hope!

I agree with stage 4 being a lot of money as well but I think the price just dropped with the new distributor so that makes it a little more tempting. Especially when I'm not overall thrilled with my current set up and have gotten some seat time in some mid travel Tacomas with Kings and current 4runners. Granted those are all IFS and I have no experience with a high end solid axle suspension.
 

Summit Cruisers Jr

Well-known member
Late in the day last Thursday I went out to the Ouachita National Forest to camp and wheel with some friends. I ended up getting bored of the tight tree trails/gravel roads and saw a road sign that said Hot Springs, AR was 40 miles away. When I went to look up prices for the park I saw that the Southern Cruiser Crawl was going on that same weekend. We ended up driving there to wheel Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately we then headed back to OKC late in the day. I had a couple of weird issues develop that I'll need to diagnose. The 3FE was intermittently struggling to start up. I'm not sure what was causing it to back fire and sputter until I rev'd it to 1500-2000 rpms for 3-4 seconds but I cleaned the air filter and checked for vacuum leaks to no avail. Secondly, my AC clutch locked up. Since getting back to Oklahoma it hasn't done it since..

After a lot of super dry and dusty trails and roads I had dust everywhere in the cruiser and spent a solid day just cleaning the interior. I gave it a wash this morning and will likely start taking the flares, bumper wings, and swing outs off this weekend in order to repair them and coat them in monstaliner. While they are also off I plan to give the cruiser a nice buff and wax as it has been several years and the clear has lots of pinstriping in it. Luckily, I have realized beige might be the best color for an off road vehicle. It is the same color as dirt, and scratches appear the same color so you'd never really tell it has pinstripes and scratches unless you're looking at the gloss black around the windows, but it should all buff out with a little elbow grease.

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Summit Cruisers Jr

Well-known member
I pulled these pics from post #5 on page 1...

Dune Beige 416 right? I'm debating that or the newer Beige 464 for my 100 series. What color are the wheels? They look like a dark grey? I think black would look ok too, but my wife hates black wheels and the grey looks like a good compromise.

Missed your reply somehow. I'm fairly certain it's 416 based on how it looks. My dad's fj40 he painted is a 1980 which would mean the 464 code, but he thinks he just had the paint mixed up according to dune beige. That or he may have matched it to the inside of the gas cap. The wheels are VHt graphite gray. I really dig gray wheels vs black. It kind of shows the wheel design better than just having some bro-ish black wheels.

Anyways, tonight I cut out some inner drawer liners from some diamond plate fatigue mat I bought at Home Depot. Looks a lot better than scraped and dirty bed liner.

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