85 superbobbed 4runner(aka BURNING BENJAMINS)

[Chris S]

Yea Brock this is a off road only truck and I actually have plans at a later date of the Trd super charger if I can find a deal on a used one! The axle gears will be fine at 4:56 for what I do as we trail ride with some technical rock crawling! That's more my speed than hill shooting as you can tell by my parts list!(no big power) my cases will be dual with a 2:28 in the front and a 4:7 in the rear so my final drive will not lack gearing. I figured it up the other day and its like low 190's to 1

 

[Chris S]

While having the engine out I massaged the firewall a touch where the crossover pipe was the closest with a 10# shop hammer which happens to be right behind where the gas pedal contacts the floor board.Also drilled the engine mount bolt holes out about a 1/16" over to help make up for my screw up when locating them on the frame origanly! Got the engine all pm'ed and engine bay painted and I also went ahead and put the body lift on. Put the engine in with the bolts in the mounts(left loose) changed out the rear seal,put in new fly wheel and clutch kit then followed up with transmission. Fortunately the over drilling of the mounts worked like a charm so I centered the tranny in the tunnel and tightened the engine mounts down. Supported the trans with a ratchet strap for the time being!

Before starting the wiring I started putting accessories in the bay. Radiator,fan,heater hoses, ground wire to firewall etc. I never could find out in other 3.4 swaps I read if I could omit all this emission crap so I put it in there as well! Clutters the bay but I plan on hooking up the check engine warning light and having the odb port plug so I really don't want it throwing a code bc of it! A lot of the items I just had to get creative with some metal and a welder to make brackets to hang them from. In this pic you can see I added just 2 mounts to bolt the charcoal canister to

 

[Chris S]

I had to move the battery to the drivers side and the air box to the passenger side. Made my own battery box from some 1/8" wall 1 1/2" angle iron with 3 bolts welded to the bottom. Drilled the holes in the inner fender and used a few washers to level it up.i did this instead of welding it in place for removal in the future if need be.

 

[Chris S]

For the air box I copied one of the build threads I had read and just welded 2 bolts to the original battery tray,drilled the corresponding holes in the plastic factory air box and set it over the welded in studs. Put fender washers on then the nuts! Very simple stuff. Oh yea I cut all the original plastic mounting brackets off as I saw no reason for them hanging off the air box doing nothing.

 

[Chris S]

Also I had to get creative on the over flow tank for the radiator! Not enough room to keep it positioned like factory so I cut the bracket and welded it to a L shaped bracket I made of some thin wall 1/2" wide flat stock and bolted it to the core support! Also made a simple bracket that it sits on from 2 small pieces of the angle iron (same stuff I used for the battery tray) welded 90 degrees to each other with a 1" piece of tube sitting on top that the little rubber grommet (that use to set in the inner fender) will rest in! Only have a pic of it installed but the lower bracket was drilled and bolted on the lower stud that holds the radiator on. I will have to do something similar to this on the other side for the windsheild washer reservoir which to date I still have not done.

 

[dwa2469]

Good stuff!! I can't wait to see this thing on the mountain.

 

[Chris S]

As for heater hoses one of the Tacoma hoses works perfect(the passenger side port) and the other I cut and spliced using the taco lower half and the 22re upper half which goes to the heater control valve. The lower radiator hose was a 22re hose trimmed to fit( best I remember I cut some off both ends) and the upper I made a template with a piece of tie wire and off to the part store I went with it. Local autozone let me browse through all there hoses and I found one that was the right shape and length (left to right) just had to cut some off both ends to keep it parallel to the core support! Last pic will show part no. Of upper hose I used.

 

[Chris S]

Good stuff!! I can't wait to see this thing on the mountain.

Thanks Don! I got high hopes of having it completed by mid summer!

 

[Chris S]

I did wrap the crossover with the high $ exhaust wrap you see advertised on tv when I had the engine out.The clearance between it and the firewall improved drastically when the body was raised and the firewall was massaged. I have an inch or better now at its closest point. Only other thing I can think of worth mentioning to this point is that I used the Tacoma throttle cable hooked to the original 85 gas pedal. I remember having to mess with it a little to make it all work but can't remember exactly what it took but it did work fine! ( think it was just using the plastic insert from the original pedal instead of the one on theTacoma cable). Also I'm planning on just using the factory fuel pump in a home made fuel tank so I removed all 3 fuel lines from the taco and positioned them under the 4Runner as they were under the taco. Simply welded studs to the bottom of the truck and retained the original brackets to hold the lines in place. Bought some of the fuel injected high pressure plastic line(the kind you boil in water) and cut the original pressure line down and put barbs on both ends to convert over to rubber lines in between so I could put the factory tank in the bed for the time being.

 

[TheViking]

Nice build and subscribed

 

[Chris S]

Starting the wiring! This had me a little intimidated but In reality it's really not that bad if you read(in depth) the tech over on YotaTech forums. Again read " wiring theory by the Monch" and "3.4 swaps 101" both from that forum. Most everything you need to know can be sourced there as to what has to be done and it's really well wrote and explained. I was worried going into it because both of these reads I mention really cover the 3.0 to 3.4 swaps but in the end the wiring seemed to be pretty much the same for me or at least it's the same concept for the 22re to 3.4 swap. You do need to get the ewd' s(engine wiring diagrams) for your donor engine,harness and ecu as well as the ewd's for the recipient vehicle. The one for the old toyota's are pretty generalized( but still work) and the one for the newer ones are much easier to read as the one I printed was in color. I actually took the time to cut and paste them to a sheet of card board so it was easier to read and easier to keep up with.

 

[Chris S]

The other info needed will be plug names or numbers and there associated pin outs. I went to my local toyota dealer and they printed the entire wiring diagrams for me on this 01 Tacoma. I gave them the vin and that's all they needed. It was like 30-40 pages when they were done and most I didn't need but had it anyways. Btw my local dealer did this free of charge.
Now I was armed with all I needed to make up my conversion charts I just had to figure out what the hell I was actually looking at. This is really not hard but admittedly I stumbled on this by accident. I guess common since kicked in after staring at this stuff for what seemed to be hours. Anyway I will demonstrate for all the rookies (such as myself )for it will help you if don't know and ever need to diagnose wiring via diagrams on anything!

In this pic it shows a box that represents the ecu. Inside it you will see E5 with the letter A circled beside it, E6 with the letter B circled,etc.... This denotes that the ecu plugs(4 of them) will be labeled a,b,c and d in the wiring diagram. In this example I will use the "sta" wire as its one of the wires that has to be made up in this engine swap. It is the wire that you have to run from the starter trigger wire to allow the ecu to know the engine is being started. Anyway where the sta wire enters the ecu you will see the #7 beside the letter A
A= plug E5
7= pinout #7 on said plug
Very simple but again if you have no background with this it's something that needs to be understood to make up conversion charts!

 

[Chris S]

I won't get to in depth with what all I had to do on this wiring because it is wrote so well in the "wiring theory by the Monch" that I mentioned twice already in this thread. But I will say in general that plugs e7 and e8 on the ecu come from the engine harness and you will do nothing to them besides plug them in. Most of the wiring that's left to be done has to do with the gauge cluster itself and you will need the donors body harness plugs to complete this. I simple cut mine out from under the dash of the taco leaving around 12-14" of wire to work with. Depending on what all you want to function there will be between 10-20 wires that need to be found and made up to ecu plugs E5 and E6.( theses plug names may differ depending on what year your donor is) if your retaining your factory fuel pump setup you will have to address the cor relay to ecu and starter trigger wire which in all my readings seem to stump most folks more than anything else involved in this swap but again it's so well documented in the wiring theory read I mentioned that it was 0 problem for me!
I put the taco ecu back where the 22re one was located in the passenger kick panel. There IS enough length coming from the 3.4 engine harness but I will warn all that it's just enough. The good thing about returning the ecu to this location is most every wire that needs made up for the dash is already there in the recipients body harness where it formally plugged into the old ecu. Read your recipients ewd and body diagrams to determine what wires do/did what. A friend of mine loaned me his power probe which made this task easy to double check the "generalized" diagrams Toyota used in 85'. You could use a multimeter too but most of these wires are seeking ground and are hard to detect with it. The power probe was so impressive to me that I wouldn't give it back to him as the MAC tool man visits his shop weekly so I told him to order himself a new one and Tell me what I owed him!
As far as additional wires ran I had to run a wire in the engine bay from the engine bay fuse box to the new battery location, I tapped into ign2 (keyed power) at the original igniter location and ran it in with engine harness,starter wire comes from battery harness and ran in with engine harness, and I tapped in to new igniter (did this inside cab at ecu) for the tach signal with a wire and ran it to gauge cluster! The 3 wires mentioned in the engine bay were routed around the core support in wire way(black plastic conduit) and brought through the same hole in the firewall as the engine harness. I double wrapped the harness with rubber tape then electrical tape and moved the oem harness bracket to utilize a threaded hole in the fire wall to bolt it to.Pic of engine harness.

 

[Chris S]

This is a pic I screen shot from YotaTech forums "3.4 swap 101" showing what has to be done for the starter signal

 

[Chris S]

After finding and mating all my wires up (temporary twisted together and taped) I attempted to start the engine on my target dat of july1. Turned over but would not fire. Checked the obvious and found that I had fuel but no fire so off to the forums I went reading and studying wiring diagrams! Put several hours into this's on July 2 and figured out late that night that I had not ever done anything for ing2 keyed power. Found it on the 85 ewd on the drivers side engine bay in the original body harness,tapped into it there,ran the wire around the core support with the battery to fuse box lead and starter trigger wire I already had in place ,ran through the firewall with trigger wire and made it up at ecu( which I had the wire there labeled already and waiting for this )
Turned the key and bam my little dirt track sounding engine (uncapped exhaust)fired right up at this point I spent hours undoing tape, soldering and shrink wrapping one connection at a time! As mentioned before I wanted to have the obdll port for future diagnostic so I made it up at the ecu with an inline fuse to properly protect the ecu from defective scan tools( I guess this is why there fused from the factory) and decided I would just locate it behind the glove box since you don't need tools to get to it and it's out of the way of mud or debris! Also I had to figure out how to retain the ecu since the 3.4 brackets are completely different from the 22re brackets. After pondering on this I acheived this by bolting one of the 3.4 brackets on ,marking it to the length to be cut then cutting the mounting side of the 22re's bracket off and welding them together. This is the only bolt holding it in but as you can see in this pic ,it's tight up against the sheet metal stud in the floor that holds the back side of the plastic kick panel in place. This is because of the influx of wire behind it from all the extra wires it takes to complete the wiring. Anyways the kick panel will slide on to clear it making it a tight fit but helping secure it all the same! In the pic of the obdll plug you can see the kick panel is installed and that it does actually fit.

 

[Chris S]

That pretty well sums up the engine swap. I apologize to all that actually read this far that it don't apply to but for the 2% that it may or will in the future I hope this helps!! I'm sure since its been nearly a year I have left out some small details but again read the threads I spoke of and they will hold the answers to any ?'s you should have! Also feel free to pm me (here on hardline) with any ?'s regarding this swap.Again I will say this is not a hard or difficult swap if you can simply read and apply and I would like to think anyone who wrote a thread regarding this swap that I stumbled upon because I would have never attempted it with out y'all's input! The only other thing I will give my opinion on is that I WOULD NOT attempt this swap without a complete donor vehicle. My opinion is that when I drove my crunched up taco in my building that I knew it would run and that obviously because of it running everything needed to make it run was right there in one spot! I'm sure you can source all the plugs,gas lines,harness's,etc,etc... From junk yards or worse yet dealers but the time,effort and money it would take would be horrible! Just saying my .02 cents worth anyways here are a couple of pics of the engine bay! Next up for this truck will be bobbing the rear of it.

 

[bluetoy]

Nice work, and a good write up. Good job man.

I'm pretty sure I used to own that 4Runner. I sold it to my buddy in Ringold, Ga.

 

[Chris S]

Thank you Nick! That sounds bout right on the 4Runner. I bought it from a young man that was fixing to get married 3 years ago. I can't remember his name but I do have the bill of sale in my files with his name on it. I'm pretty sure he said he lived in Ringgold but the truck was at his parents house. He had a second gen 4Runner that had a Lt1 in it (I think) sitting on 44's(I think) anyway he said he was cleaning up his mess at there house bc he was getting married soon and they were on him about it

 

[Chris S]

I actually made many attempts of drawing on the bedside before coming up with the body line I landing on. This obviously is just a personal preference thing but I knew going in that I wanted this truck setting as low as possible and I knew the front would be limited on uptravel because of pan hard/upper link tower to engine issues( still hoping for 4+") but I figured if I was doing the bob I had no excuses for the rear to be restricted by anything other than the length of struts I could package in this thing. I may have got a little carried away with this but again I drew multiple times(had to go to the other side bc I jumbled up so many lines) and this line seemed to flow the best for my likings. The length I decided on cutting the bed off to start came from where I think it will work best when I cut the hardtop down. It's acutall 8-10" longer than the red 4Runner I showed at the start of this thread that I liked so much. As for the top I'm wanting to cut the back windows out of it but my plan is to mate the original sliding glass portion back to the top so after studying that portion of the top this was the length I felt good about accomplishing that task.
After landing on the line I liked I made a cardboard template to duplicate the line on the other side. I undercut this line by 1/2"-5-8" using tin snips and a die grinder then used hand tongs and pliers to bend the excess metal under.( I relieve cut the excess as needed to make the radius) I did this instead of just cutting the line because I found out on my first build when tubbing the firewall and rear fender wells for tire clearance that it's quite difficult to weld thin sheet metal together so this method gives you one more ply to burn through before having to fill holes with weld. Here's some visuals!

 

[Chris S]

Next I made a frame out of some 3/4" X1/8" wall sq tube I had laying around to tie this together. I extended 2 uprights on to the frame ,welded to angle iron and bolted through the frame to support the bed for the time being. These mounting points will probably be cut out (once I get the 4 link on the rear done)and reworked with the tube used in the exo.