My experience with 55s are significantly less... but I’ve spent a lot of time with the 55 devotees, personally. All are rather eccentric.
I remember folks like Morgan Fletcher, Bill Stayner, Schmuck, Luke Porter, Todd Ballard, Brian Koerner and the Pig runs in the Sierra when people smashed the hell out of their 55s on the Rubicon— 1990’s/early 2000’s.
The transition to preservation has been interesting see. In 2004, very few folks bought OEM parts for their Pigs; NAPA was good enough.
The 55 was such a radical design in evolutionary development. It was almost revolutionary...which is super rare for Toyota... And it was mainly because of its aberrant sheet metal choices...you can thank Toyota engagement with their body suppliers— Gifu and Arakawa Auto Body.
Both companies had former Toyota Honsha (the “home plant”, A1 on your data tags, Line 1– A11, formerly called Koromo) plant body/stamping employees who rose up the management ladder and were promoted to run supplier companies that Toyota has financial involvement.
As such, Toyota placed their people into important Tier 1 assembly suppliers with various expertise in structure and putting pieces together— consistently and efficiently.
Both Gifu and Arakawa are super good at their assembly processes and follow to a T the nature of what they learned early on at Honsha stamping/body— think late 1930’s, through the war period and into their first testing of the Land Cruiser utilitarian vehicle in the early 1950’s.
The 55 design period was exciting at Toyota.
Roughly 1960-1977 (the Oil Wars during the end of that time period significantly stressed development investment at Toyota).
That 17 year period was the most important pre-electrification time frame for Toyota.... The company created and perfected the narrative and lore of their philosophical worldview. Once they made it into a story with a philosophy, it sucked you in.
They won the Deming Prize, many of their preliminary ISO certifications were achieved further integrating Toyota into the scientific/engineering world...
Ohno was at his peak before his stagnation and horizontal move to executive management by the mid-to late 1970s.
Toyota instituted the 10-digit part numbering system (10/1963)— two year before their 1965 Demong Award—and made their suppliers either adapt Toyota’s or develop their own mimicking Toyota’s— Nippon Denso and Aisin Seiki Corporation were good examples of suppliers that perfected Toyota harmonization/rationalization activities and developed their own name and reputation.
The 55 was a product of this time.
Interesting stuff of course. I could waste a lot of peoples’ time with this stuff.
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