New to me LX470

[krispykritter]

Left the kids with the parents and took a short excursion to yellowstone.

One our way down the canyon to west yellowstone

Wife playing in the snow

Made it to the park

One of the falls during the snowmobile trip

Our snowmobile group

 

[krispykritter]

Sunrise over Earthquake Lake, MT. Very cool timing on this shot. Most of the touristy stuff was closed but a few of the roadside info stations were open.

Went to drive around a car I thought was parked in the middle of the parking lot, but was actually at the edge. I drove right into a small ditch. I got SUPER lucky and the LX drove out once I locked the center diff and let ATRAC do it's thing. Left a deep hole behind for other people to laugh at.

Visited Mount Rushmore:

and the Badlands. The scenery at the badlands was awesome, being half snow covered but also super desolate. Very cool place. I'd love to go back and do some hiking.

And got iced over in Kansas city. You can see all the icecicles on the back of the bumper, and the broken ice on the tires. This was a rough drive for the first couple hours.

 

[krispykritter]

Leaving Kansas City. This was crazy as the car was covered in sheets of ice, so every now and then, a big pieces would fly off and it sounded like total destruction. We stopped several times to smash as much off as we could to try and avoid big pieces hitting the cars around us.

Visited Gateway Arch. There were sheets of ice getting blown off by the wind, so you had to kinda keep looking up to make sure there wasn't something flying off!

Of course, I had to grab every local beer I could manage to find along the way. These are all the uniques I had when I got home. My favorites were Sticky Paws, Copper Mule, the Vanilla Coffee Porter, and the Snake River Pale Ale.

...and we got to add a lot of new stickers to the LX.

All told, we had a great trip. Lots of trying moment with the kids but they really handled the whole thing pretty well. We brought tablets and books and some toys for entertainment, and did a lot of stopping and stretching. Obviously we avoided any places where there'd be a lot of people and stuck to outdoors stuff as much as possible. Lots of pee stops on the side of the road as well. Some states had all their rest areas closed, others some open, it was a total crap shoot.

The Lexus did great. Somewhere around 6200 miles total - started at 156k and got home a little over 162k. I think we averaged around 11.5 mpg while towing around 2200 lbs. GCVW was probably in the 8500 pound range. Usually I could manage most hills in fourth gear at 2500 rpm which is about 65 mph. If we ever dropped to 55, I'd let it shift down to third and spin around 3500-4000 to make it up the hill. It was amazing to feel how much power came back when we finally made it down near sea level again!

The coldest morning we had was -4 degrees, and while it made some different starting noise than I was used to, the LX cranked up fine.

We used a Jackery portable battery to power the fridge in the back of the Lexus overnight, and the trailer deep cycle kept the bigger fridge/freezer going. We did have some trouble with all the onboard water freezing solid, but I drained the hot water heater and sink lines as best I could, and nothing broke. I did worry about the contents of the fridge freezing, so I had a 12v heated blanket thrown over top to the fridge to keep it warm on really cold nights.

I took a set of chains but fortunately never had to break them out. The Cooper AT3s handle the snow okay - they weren't great but there weren't terrible. They are mud and snow rated, but not severe weather. I'd do it again if I was visiting snow, but likely get something better if I lived in it.

The trailer never had a single issue. Just followed us along the whole way. Pretty proud of that since I built it completely on my own.

 

[krispykritter]

Lots of frustration this weekend...but first, the parts that went well.

I finally bought a midland GMRS radio. I hid it in the dash on the far passenger side. I wanted to be able connect it when I wanted to use it, but put it away when I don't need it.

Here's running the wires:

Hidden in the dash:

Ran the cat5 to a bulkhead connector:

With the headset connected:

And then added a panel mount bnc connector to the rear passenger side so I can add an antenna whenever I want:

 

[krispykritter]

So then, on to the subwoofer. Put in a skar 6.5" woofer:

Had to trim the ribbing in the box to allow the woofer to fit, and wired it up in parallel, then installed it again.

Had to trim the front panel as well, to clear the speaker depth:

 

[krispykritter]

Then I started into the amplifier. So, turns out some models of 100 have a radio that passes almost all signals to the amplifier digitally, rather than analog. So, if you take the ML amp out of the system, you lose balance, fade, tone, and volume control. And, of course, I discovered this after I had gotten the new amp all wired in and working. So, I had to figure out how to reconnect all the wires with almost no length left on both plugs. This sucked.

I stashed the old amp in the passenger side storage compartment and extended all the wires to reach, then ran the signals back to the new amp under the seat. Massive massive pain.

Hole cut in back of panel

Big mess of wires:

Two sets of spliced cat5 and power wires:

Hidden amp:

 

[krispykritter]

New amp under seat:

Ignore the nastiness. Apparently someone spilled a drink...cleaned up now. The big thing is the nav computer. I moved it inboard about an inch to make enough room for the new amplifier.

 

[krispykritter]

In other news, in an attempt to avoid some of the issues with the AHC lift, I removed the front blocks but left my ride height the same. When going over the largeish speedbumps here in florida at 'high' speed (around 20-25 mph) I could feel/hear the shock topping out. So, I came up with a new solution:

I cut the upper and lower brackets apart, then trimmed down the upper bracked to decrease the amount of lift it adds by around half an inch, then welded them onto the shock moutns on the control arm side. I'm comfortable with this since new control arms are only about $100 each. I then added the bolt standoff back to the lower bolt hole and bolted it in. Result is slightly less shock travel than the AHC brackets provide to minimize interpherence with CV and shock, but also helps avoid the shock topping out issue I noticed without the brackets. I'll likely tack the rear brackets as well to help them avoid twisting the s**t out of the lower bushings. Pretty happy with this solution for now.

I also finally added some trail tailer extended front sway bar endlinks. I think they're designed for more lift than I'm running but should help anyway.

 

[krispykritter]

Moab Trip

Fins n things:

White rim trail in Canyonlands:

White Rim Trail somewhere:

Camping on white rim trail:

Morning on white rim trail:

 

[krispykritter]

More white rim trail:

 

[krispykritter]

Fun new (probably old) problem: nearly undriveable under full throttle. I started a thread asking questions and did some interesting measurements and took a video (pay attention to driver's front wheel):




That craziness is crazy!

Thread located here.

Measurements post located here.

Short story is, yes, we have bump steer, but it's only 1/2" of toe in with the wheels nearly off the ground. You can see in the video that my toe in is miles more than that.

Some investigation has pointed me to completely dead steering rack bushings. Every time I hit the gas, teh whole rack lifts off the frame and both front wheels toe in a ton. I've ordered new poly bushing and hopefully the LX will be moving under it's own steam again next weekend.

 

[krispykritter]

A few updates: turns out we do actually have about 3" of toe-in when you lift the truck off the ground if you have longer-than-stock downtravel in your front end. It sucks.

The new rack bushings made a large difference but still runs all over the place on heavy throttle. I'll just have to make sure I don't floor it in first. There's not much I can do about it. I'm wondering if my electronic damper modules are toast on the AHC system. It certainly feels like the rebound damping is just not there on the front end. Looking at Techstream while stomping the gas, I see 3 ish inches of lift on the front end, but very little squat on the back.

I've adjusted/played with heights, front and rear pressures, sensors, pinion angles, and everything else I can think of and reached the conclusion that it drives best in all situations with the front fender height about 1.25" lower than the rear, regardless of AHC pressures. It just still gets crazy bumpsteer if I floor it, so I just won't do that.

So, onto another project: roof rack! I wanted a stealth type of rack that mostly sat between the side rails but that allowed me to attach things easier than the standard cross bars. I decided to build my own roof rack out of extruded aluminum and home-made rack mounts.

Ordered a 24" piece of 3x2 3/16 aluminum angle and cut it into four six-inch pieces.

I used some leftover 3/16 steel as my backing plate (the piece that slides into the side rails) and carefully lined up the bolt holes in both pieces:

Then I welded on the stainless steel bolts - I used 25mm length 8mm diameter stainless bolts for this. Once welded on, I cut most of the heads off the bolts as there wasn't enough room for the steel and the bolt heads. Crappy photo, sorry!

The I taped off the threads and spray painted the whole thing. The bolts were stainless, but the weld material and plate were not.

 

[krispykritter]

Here's the backing plates slid in - the fit was damn near perfect. I was very happy with how it turned out.

This all set the stage for the extrusion build. I ordered all the pieces from tnutz.com. I started with an order from 8020, but then realized their lead time was like 40 days, and the cost was around $500. I ordered the same thing from tnutz for $315 and it showed up in seven days!

Putting the side support rails on:

Cross bars installed:

Unsurprisingly, this setup wasn't very quiet on the highway! It howled, actually, not just wind noise. So I used some leftover plexiglass to build a quick wind block:

I'm pretty happy with the result. I'm waiting on a couple more connectors to show up to finish the construction, then I'll re-mount my awning on the rack. Eventually I want to build a cage to carry my traction boards in, which I'll be able to mount directly to the rack. Also, I've got an old plastic shipping box that I've used as roof storage in the past that I'll build mounts for in the future. With the t-nut system, it's relatively quick to attach/detach these things, and the low profile of the rack means the LexusCruiser still fits in the garage.

 

[krispykritter]

Sherpa mount were very close to working but just not quite. They needed to be around an inch longer. Also, weirdly, the holes for the awning to mount to the sherpa mounts were 8 mm, but the holes for the sherpa mounts to attach to the rack were either 1/4-20 or M6. Either way - smaller than the holes to hold the awning on? Strange. So I went ahead and drilled them out to 8mm ish.

I fabbed up some quick aluminum angle extensions to move the awning out to where I wanted it (got to use some scavenged angle from a previous project):

Also, made a new wind deflector that's the full 48 inches wide:

 

[krispykritter]

Finally fixed my carolina squatter issue by replacing the AHC t-bars with OEM non-AHC bars. The amount of preload needed to both lift the truck and support the extra weight I have apparently just makes them way too preloaded for good road manners. It doesn't help that I have extra droop thanks to the AHC spacers.

I also modified some brand new Nitro UCAs to work with the front AHC sensors and got those installed.

The only thing I have left to do on my suspension list is find a way to make the rear spacers work better. I don't like how much pressure they put on the bottom bushings, so I'm thinking I'll weld some sort of extension onto the end of the shock itself. Something to figure out once I get done with Christmas and moving across the country.

 

[krispykritter]

Big news! I've moved to Denver. Long drive towing a very overloaded trailer, but I made it safe and sound. Just me for now - the rest of my family will be coming out sometime this summer, likely in July.

Looking forward to meeting some of ya'll over the next year! If you see a while LX with Florida plates, odds are it's me. I've got a rental house in Westminster.

 

[krispykritter]

Went out exploring, 4wding, and hiking this weekend. Eventually got to a point on a trail that was slick and off-camber enough to keep pushing me towards a tree/bit of a drop off. I didn't want to back down the whole hill as having the stronger braking wheels uphill while reversing is a recipe for disaster. We ended up using the winch to do a u-turn.

Not many pictures but I spliced together the dashcam video.

Aaaaaand I bought the LX some new presents:

 

[krispykritter]

Made another trip out to Rainbow Falls with a friend, and rescued two new friends!

 

[krispykritter]

Flexing out the AHC:

Bronco stuck when the ice gave way:

More flexing:

Climbing some rock steps, where the fat 100 had trouble climbing a large step near the top. Took me a few different lines before it made it up.

My buddy's third gen. I didn't even notice the random 100 series in the background when I took this photo. Is he one of yall?

 

[krispykritter]

Minor update: went camping and 4wding a few weeks ago at the gulches - Metberry, Longwater, and Hackett.

Longwater:

Camp along the main road:

Metberry:

Hackett:

And my husky found a particularly interesting spot to watch us struggle up the big rock on longwater: