Update
I've played with a few things lately. I wanted to get a bigger voltage spread for my TPS so I picked up an Autozone part that another 4bt'er had used with his 4L80 tranny. It's a sealed unit and uses a three prong weatherpack connection. I meandered through the junkyard looking for connections and finally found matches on GM vehicles in the early 90s. The TPS hook up has specific slots in its prongs so it mattered what kind of connections I got. I found the jimmy/blazer/s10 with the v6 had the connection I was looking for and I grabbed a couple of them along with the best looking TPS as a back up even though it's a little different than the autozone TPS. I made up a little bracket and got some rod ends to make a connection to the throttle arm.
This got me from a 1.6-3.8v spread from my last set up to a .7-4.3v spread. The tranny map was off now and I needed to re-tune the shifting. Family was in town during the holidays and we went out one day to play (they brought a laptop). I found that most of the shifting was being done on a small part of the map and I figured it was partly to due with how I mounted the TPS. The TPS arm and the throttle arm travel in different arcs so I figured there might be some mechanical advantage going on meaning small inputs on the throttle arm meant bigger changes on the TPS arm. Plus I was getting a little binding during arm travel. I decided I wanted to redo my mounting so I didn't do any fine tuning on the map.
I positioned the TPS to try and keep it in the same plane. I tried a couple different combos between the TPS connection to the throttle arm and the throttle cable connection to the throttle arm and ended up drilling in a new hole in the throttle arm to connect the TPS to get them closer together. This seemed to be the best compromise although not perfect.
I needed to relocate my return spring so I threw it on the other side of the pump and throttle arm and seems to be doing fine there. I get no binding with this configuration. After some adjustments I got the spread to .4-4.74V. I was able to get the entire range of travel on the TPS (0-4.74v) but the optishift controller needs to see at least .2+ as that's as far as it reads down and per the manual anything lower than .3 sets off fault with the TPS input thinking it's failed.
I suppose ultimately I could extend the arm on the TPS and remount the TPS so the arc paths match up even better but it's already better than I originally started out with so this is still an improvement. I've done some minor tuning to the map and am making small adjustments to dial it in.
I did another alignment since I was starting to get some wear on the outer blocks (indication of too much toe-in). I had researched without any real definitive findings that bigger tires need more toe-in. So what I did was take off my tires and set up my alignment bars with marks for a 30" tire (factory-ish size) and 37" tires to see what the difference was when making adjustments. First I found that I had way too much toe-in, about a 1/2" too much. I also found that a half turn on one of my rod ends equaled ~1/16" @ 30". So I set it to 1/8" @ 30 and that gave me around 3/16 to 1/4" of toe @ 37". I rotated the tires and having driven it for the last month like this it has made it an alright one-hander down the road. I am happier with this and may even try a half-turn less toe-in down the road to see if there is any difference. So it seems to me at least on my set up that setting alignment for the stock tire size and measurements will produce good results for an oversized tire. Naturally the difference for toe-in on a larger tire will be more than the stock size since the measurements are taken further from the center line.
I'd been running this broken taillight for 2 years and I finally did something about it. I broke it before I had made my protection. I didn't really care about having a factory toyota part so I picked up a driver front and rear lens from
FJparts.com for a great price.
They was some damage to the body when I broke the lens that might affect the seal.
I pounded it out a little to make it a little more flat. Then I cleaned up the housing and rubber gasket that I reused since it was still good and screwed it all back together. My protection made it a little tight to get things in and out but it wasn't too much trouble.
The rubber gasket seals better now.
I had a chip out of the front lens so I replaced that one as well. I'll have to repaint my headlight trim this spring.
After looking at those shiny new lenses I had to clean the other side so I took those lenses off and scrubbed them clean inside and out. I replaced any burned out bulbs and tested them afterwards.
I started thinking about my fuel filters and did some research, actually quite a bit of research trying to find nominal and absolute specs as some kind of comparison between brands and models. Basically a nominal reading is 50% capture and an Absolute reading is a 98% capture at whatever micron rating. It's more detailed than that but for a snapshot this works. I was currently running a Wix/Napa (3)3244 with nominal of 19 micron prefilter and a Fleetguard FL1251 with an absolute of ~20 micron as my main. Technically my pre would be a primary and my main would be a secondary filter in certain circles. All the common rail guys are really needing to filter stuff out so it doesn't mess up the pumps so those guys are after 2-5 absolute micron ratings. For me I wanted something down around 10 micron and if at all possible to have it step down from my prefilter to my main filter. My pre has a 1-14 (very common) thread and my main has a 16Mx1.5 thread so I had some options. I looked at Baldwin, Fleetguard, Wix, Donaldson, and CAT. IMO Wix are decent, Baldwin and Fleetguard are good, Donaldson and CAT are better. As far as construction I think CAT filters are the best but I had the hardest time finding any real part numbers. CAT and Donaldson have a factory together and I ended up finding a dealer just 2 miles from my house for Donaldson so I decided to try them out. Both are fuel/water separators and while it's not necessary to have two water separators I figured it wouldn't hurt.
For my pre I'm using a Donaldson P551000 which compares to the Fleetguard FL1000 and the Baldwin BF1259. It is 10 micron absolute. As you can see in the pic that it's almost twice as long as the Napa I was running. If you are worried about flow through a tighter filter a trick is to get a longer one that has more capacity.
For my main it got harder because of the metric thread so there didn't seem to be a clear choice. I didn't have to keep it the same brand but that was easier for buying/shipping purposes. I choose a Donaldson P550588 which is 3 micron @ nominal. That's the only info I could find and I'm hoping that its absolute is just shy of 10 micron. It is just a little longer than the Fleetguard.
I filled those up and installed them. You can see that my pre hangs below the frame but it is not in danger of touching anything so it's safe there.
Since I was coming from ~20 micron filtration I was curious if I'd get any starvation issues and there are none. Starts and drives like is has before.
Santa brought me a spindle so I'm going to make a rear tire swing-out. I've got an idea of what I want to do and I'll be redoing half of my rear bumper. I just finished building a lean-to off my shop so that I can have a dry place to cut and weld metal outside. I don't enjoy grinder dust on all my stuff so I plan to keep that outside. I also got a chance to do some snow wheeling two days ago and had a blast. I set my tires at 7 psi and did well for a while but then started digging in on one of the roads and needed the strap. We rechecked and I had 10 psi so I dropped them to 5 psi and that worked better. It was the deepest snow I think I've ever been in. Sorry no pics, it was night wheeling.
