New joiner saying hi! (1 Viewer)

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Joined
Dec 30, 2020
Threads
14
Messages
202
Location
Tampa, FL
Greetings folks, happy new year. I'm the original owner of an '01 LC with 228K miles, and I haven't regretted that purchase for a minute. It's actually my wife's car, and I think she may have changed her will and added that she eventually be buried in it. That's how much she loves her truck.

Up until 3 years ago, we'd not done much of anything to the interior of the vehicle. We've always stayed on top of maintenance and it's mechanically in top shape. But then we ran into an issue that I purposely allowed to mushroom into some updating.

We had been moving house and I was using the truck to transport a lot of our stuff. I had the rear seats pulled and the mid row was folded up so I had the full bed of the truck. I was noticing that the boxes I was removing from the truck after transport that were coming out of where the middle passenger side seat would be (left-side driver vehicle) were very warm on the bottom after they'd been for the ride. So I brought the car in to a shop that I obviously no longer use, and asked them to diagnose. Having half a brain, I even told the guy to check out the exhaust as it was all original at 17 years, 200,000 miles. He lifted the truck up and came back to us saying that he couldn't find anything wrong underneath and that perhaps it's an electrical issue. I had my doubts because I wasn't observing any weird electrical behavior or power drains. He actually told me I should google the issue and see if anyone else is reporting heat the area. You know, where the muffler is...

About two weeks later I'm driving along and smell something burning. Sure enough, that area of carpet was now much hotter had gotten black and the backing had melted. So I got a referral for a good Toyota guy, who told me that it took him longer to lift the truck than to find the hole in the muffler that was blowing up at the bed of the truck. About three days later we brought the truck home with a brand new exhaust, feeling like we'd just driven it off the lot. What a difference that made.

But the heat made a mess of the bed of the truck. After the exhaust replacement I start looking at the back to see what I could do to get rid of the smell of burnt carpet. This happened right at the spot where the rear carpet and the front carpet velcro together and then the rear padding covers it up. So I burned the back carpet and the padding. We tried to locate replacement carpet but had no luck, so I brought the truck to a soft trim guy who does work out of his house that someone recommended. He was able to cut out the burned area of carpet, and patch in a piece of the floor mat from the middle row to fill in where the burned material was. It actually came out a lot better than I thought it would, I was very impressed by the repair. It all gets covered by the rear mat anyway, but even uncovered it looks pretty good. I also couldn't track down a rear mat, but that wasn't too bad of an issue since the soft trim guy was able to remove almost all of the discoloration just with a good cleaning.

I left the carpets with him while I took the truck home and went to work on the bed. All the sound dampening had melted and needed to be scraped. And scraped. And scraped. I wanted every last bit of burned material out, the last thing we wanted was a lingering odor to remind us of this mini disaster. As everyone knows, to get that carpet out, you need to remove the side panels in back. Once I got in there, I got to see first hand a great case of the deteriorating subwoofer. Quite frankly, nothing was left of it. The paper cone had completely disintegrated.

So now I'm thinking..... soundproofing..... subwoofer......

I NEED NEW TUNES!!!!

Like I said, I purposely allowed my muffler issue to mushroom!

So long story short, I dynamatted the back bed and as much of the rear side panels as I could reach. I pulled the subwoofer out of the enclosure and dynamatted the enclosure. But why stop there. I took the tail gate apart and dynamatted the inside, and then pulled all the panels off the doors and did those as well. Note the discoloration from the muffler burn on the right edge of the front carpet. We didn't mess with that area of the carpet other than cleaning it since the rear carpet lays over it.



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Then I brought the truck into Best Buy and had them install a Pioneer head unit where the factory cassette was, a Kicker amp and sub amp (sub amp went where jack is meant to be stored, still haven't figured out where to keep the jack....), and a Kicker sub in the original enclosure. I don't think the sub and the enclosure pair well even though the sub fits just fine. Even though I did the dyamat, the box still distorts a lot. But that's another discussion. We ran a rear camera out to above the license plate, so we have a backup cam now which is great!

More recently we had to put some additional money into the truck. Front and rear suspension were up, and the 20-year old air conditioner had had enough now that we live in Florida.

With all that work done, we decided that at 20 years old we still love the truck and intend to keep it long term. Once we decided that we anticipate many more years to come, we decided that at 20 years it time for a cosmetic overhaul. We brought it to a body shop that we trust that's 45 minutes away, just to know we had the right guy doing it. Every panel came off the truck, all the rusted connectors were replaced, all the door dings and dents (and worse...) were body worked out, prepped, primed, and then a full paint job with top German paint. We got it back from the paint shop on Christmas Eve and were simply blown away by the paint job. It shines like a mirror.

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Check out the reflection of the palm tree:

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Next step, we just put down a deposit on new leather throughout the vehicle. We ordered a kit that should arrive in about three weeks. The shop tells us they'll have the whole truck done in 2 days max.

We also decided to upgrade the steering wheel to the Lexus wood style rather than re-wrap it. So I grabbed one off eBay from the guy who sells them out of Taiwan. $256.99 with free FedEx shipping from Taiwan, and it got here in two days. And it is BEAUTIFUL.

And that's kind of how I ended up here. Through a good case of the "might as wells..." if I'm going to do the steering wheel, then I should probably pull the dash and upgrade the bulbs to LEDs. Start a little googling about the bulbs, and you end up here! Confused about bulbs.....

Nice to join the forum and I look forward to learning a lot here about my truck, and maybe even contribute a thing or two if I can!
 
Great story! Love to hear about people keeping these trucks for the long haul.
 
Nice paint work! Welcome! That's an impressive amount of heat to start burning the carpet!
The scary part is that the exhaust wasn’t running loud. Just hot. My first suspicion was the muffler, but then had a mechanic tell me it wasn’t. It degrades so slowly that you don’t realize how much of a drag it was until you pop the new muffler in and feel like you just added 25HP.
 
Btw, I forgot one important detail. I didn’t do all that dynamat work and the stereo install just to run the 17 year old factory speakers! New JBLs all around!
 

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