Princess Rig: Diesel Manual Troopy-Style Pop-top Conversion and Off to Adventure

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chapel gate said:
gotta say, i love your workshop. working on "dirty" diesels they shoudnt look like a dentists surgery..
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The shop is a nearly 100yr old farm garage/winter seedling prep building on a long dead farm on my dads property. I’ve done a lot of wrenching in here over the decades. I can only clean it up as much as the old man will let me. Lol. He seems to enjoy clutter.
 
Not sure how I missed this, very nice work. Thought I had a bad case of "while I'm in there", but I haven't gone half as deep as you have. Of course I'm not planning to live out of mine either. Keep it up, in for updates !

Jason
 
It is a shame the body couldn't have been in really good shape except for a rusty roof from the rack... I understand your pain. Oh well....

Jason
 
As usual I've dropped the ball on proper updates. No one to blame but myself. Literally. Lol.

So, a couple of weeks ago I got down to brass tacks and the cut the perfectly good top off of my perfectly good Land Cruiser.

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I did a 3/4 cut first, leaving the rear of the sunroof opening and the "support" behind it intact. My intention was to use the "support" as a base to hang some stuff off of later in my build. But the "support" behind the sunroof is actually quite flimsy and it was immediately apparent that it would be easier, cleaner, and more robust to just bolt my own support in later. So I ended up going with a mostly 'full' cut but leaving the sunroof opening as the front of the cut. I think this will be advantageous as far as what I want to do with the interior later but it was a BITCH as far getting the glue shoved in there with the top on...

At this point a couple of fitment issues with the top became clear, the main one being that the rear of the top was just not pulling in well: It was high centered in the middle for some reason.

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I talked to Eric in depth about it and after a lot of back & forth we decided that my 80 is special in some way (of course it is) and that the top needed a bit of tolerance-ing to fit correctly. It was actually a bit more scary to take the angle grinder to an $8000 top than it was to cut the roof off. Lol. I did it very slowly & methodically, with at least 4-5x grind & then back on the truck to check. Luckily my come-a-long hoist set-up allowed me to do this on my own and actually worked pretty well.

My great luck continued on in the gluing process where 4 of my 12 tubes of Sikaflex burst at the sides while getting pumped in and created a Godawful mess where I had to shove the adhesive in with a spatula. This time delay and a 90F/low humidity day meant that the glue skinned over WAY faster than my test runs and I missed my window to properly smooth out the finish. So it looks like a 9yr old finger-painted the Sika on. One of the many things now on my to do list to clean up later.

But at least the top was on.
 
In the meantime, while the glue on the roof was setting, I laid down several layers of Second Skin Spectrum sound deadener. About 3mm total in several coats. I went with this over stick-on butyl mats due to moisture concerns. While I'd like to think that I wont drown my 80 and fill it with water, 3yrs of living out of my truck have shown me over and over again that moisture finds a way. Leaks, accidents, hell just sleeping in a vehicle night after night in the winter creates huge amounts of moisture from breath. So I have to wait & see what I think of the Spectrum as a sound deadener, but I have at the very least sealed the floor completely end to end.

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With the top on and the sound deadener painted on & cured I could finally get to some of the fun stuff. Starting with the @Delta VS front bumper. Dave has a been really great to work with (as always) and immediately steps up when I have any questions or issues. Great guys over there.

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I was mildly concerned about how the bumper would fit over the PDI set up. Probably mostly because the PDI has had more fitment issues than anything else on the truck to this point. But it fit perfectly.

Personally, I think the Delta front WITHOUT the hoop, as a stand alone bumper, is the sexiest bumper available currently. But I went with the big hoop mainly because I've hit too many damned deer and intercooler/new AC coil/new radiator needed protecting. But I think it ended up looking great in person.
 
The next step was incredibly important to me: The dash grab bar. I grew up in my dad's 1960 Jeep FC150 standing in the passenger footwell and holding on to the grab bar with my nose pressed to the glass of the completely vertical windshield. How my nose is still this pretty, I have no idea. Beyond nostalgia, my main reason for wanting one in the 80 is so I have place to dry my socks. So I ordered a correct 80 series brown grab handle from Russia when one popped up on eBay. Yeah yeah yeah, I know better but rare-parts bug bit me. Well, he sent me a dash bar out of 70-series (1000% not what was pictured on eBay). After much arguing the Russian told me chew nails and eBay completely sided with seller as they do. And I was out $100. If anyone needs a nice 70-series grab bar please message me!!!!!

I ended up ordering a Grey handle from Cruiser Parts and a can of SEM Monterey and just went that route. A good plastic prep spray first and it came out ok.

But then a new terror: Taking a razor knife to a PERFECT 80 dash pad. I had to have a couple drinks first to get the courage up. Cutting the roof off was easy compared to this.

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Access was very easy due to the fact that all of my dash guts are still in an unlabelled box that I can't find.


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In reality the cuts would be hard to screw up because the outer part of the handle is so much larger than the holes. Still and weird experience. The Monterey is not *perfect* but I think it's as close as you could get. In some light it's 100% perfect. In other light it's slightly darker. But no one who wasn't a completely insane person would be abel to tell it was different. Except maybe me. And I'm probably just bitter about the Russian.
 
More interior fun and I had been dying to get to this since the all the parts came a month ago:

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@Delta VS Locking Center Console and Manual Transmission Shift Console. Gobs of money, but absolutely light years ahead of the stock stuff. I made a few minor modifications for my set up including a few riv-nuts & bolts instead of the factory phillips screws but I love it.

Don't make fun of my just-out-of-the-pool-shrinkage transfer case lever. My hybrid auto/manual/RHD/LHD lever came out a bit short. If it's annoying on the road I'll to weld up something longer. Or buy @LandCruiserPhil 's extended lever.

One suggestion for Dave @Delta VS : I'm sure the tooling etc would make it not-so feasible, but SOOO many of us are deleting the rear heater and that extra space in the hidden cubby would be nice. Just a thought. Also: Legit photos of the manual console with a real camera are on the way to you as soon as the weather lets me get it out of the garage for better lighting.
 
So here she is. A half-finished, bastard monstrosity that just hit the pavement for the first time ever. Scary as hell driving something with this much time & money invested and ABSOLUTELY ZERO SYSTEMS ROAD TESTED. Lol. She did great though. Other than the 5 leaky injectors. And the leaking sub-tank pump. And the limited gas pedal travel for some reason. And about 200 other things.

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Inspection & alignment in a couple of days. Then my Delta Radius arms will finish up the suspension. I hope. God I hope.

Then I just have to build a house inside....
 
CaptBeardilocks said:
The next step was incredibly important to me: The dash grab bar. I grew up in my dad's 1960 Jeep FC150 standing in the passenger footwell and holding on to the grab bar with my nose pressed to the glass of the completely vertical windshield. How my nose is still this pretty, I have no idea. Beyond nostalgia, my main reason for wanting one in the 80 is so I have place to dry my socks. So I ordered a correct 80 series brown grab handle from Russia when one popped up on eBay. Yeah yeah yeah, I know better but rare-parts bug bit me. Well, he sent me a dash bar out of 70-series (1000% not what was pictured on eBay). After much arguing the Russian told me chew nails and eBay completely sided with seller as they do. And I was out $100. If anyone needs a nice 70-series grab bar please message me!!!!!

I ended up ordering a Grey handle from Cruiser Parts and a can of SEM Monterey and just went that route. A good plastic prep spray first and it came out ok.

But then a new terror: Taking a razor knife to a PERFECT 80 dash pad. I had to have a couple drinks first to get the courage up. Cutting the roof off was easy compared to this.

View attachment 2709667

Access was very easy due to the fact that all of my dash guts are still in an unlabelled box that I can't find.


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In reality the cuts would be hard to screw up because the outer part of the handle is so much larger than the holes. Still and weird experience. The Monterey is not *perfect* but I think it's as close as you could get. In some light it's 100% perfect. In other light it's slightly darker. But no one who wasn't a completely insane person would be abel to tell it was different. Except maybe me. And I'm probably just bitter about the Russian.
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Where did you source the handle?
 
The first problem I noticed while testing the truck was that 4 out of 6 injectors were leaking at the return line and several were leaking air around the body, made obvious by the leaked fuel.

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After talking to @NLXTACY and a few others and several people have noticed a slight difference in aftermarket injector seats/o-rings. I had installed the parts that came with my rebuilt injectors. That turned out to be very true.

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The o-rings were obviously smaller than the OEM ones and the copper seats were interestingly fatter, by around ~0.6mm according to my caliper that had a dead battery.

@mudgudgeon reminded me they injector height is critical for spray pattern in the 1HDT. I wasn’t expecting to see a performance difference from the small height difference but…

After all injectors were re-seated & sealed, I was happy to have zero leaks for starters. But I was really surprised at how much better the truck runs now. Completely surprised me. Much smoother, less knock/shake at just-off-idle RPM. I wouldn’t have really said there was something “wrong” with it before but it wasn’t exactly RIGHT either. It sounds much better now.

So the PSA for tonight is: use OEM seats & seals. The aftermarket or otherwise supplied pieces don’t cut it.
 
CaptBeardilocks said:
The first problem I noticed while testing the truck was that 4 out of 6 injectors were leaking at the return line and several were leaking air around the body, made obvious by the leaked fuel.

View attachment 2714097

After talking to @NLXTACY and a few others and several people have noticed a slight difference in aftermarket injector seats/o-rings. I had installed the parts that came with my rebuilt injectors. That turned out to be very true.

View attachment 2714098

View attachment 2714099

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The o-rings were obviously smaller than the OEM ones and the copper seats were interestingly fatter, by around ~0.6mm according to my caliper that had a dead battery.

@mudgudgeon reminded me they injector height is critical for spray pattern in the 1HDT. I wasn’t expecting to see a performance difference from the small height difference but…

After all injectors were re-seated & sealed, I was happy to have zero leaks for starters. But I was really surprised at how much better the truck runs now. Completely surprised me. Much smoother, less knock/shake at just-off-idle RPM. I wouldn’t have really said there was something “wrong” with it before but it wasn’t exactly RIGHT either. It sounds much better now.

So the PSA for tonight is: use OEM seats & seals. The aftermarket or otherwise supplied pieces don’t cut it.
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Nice! And wow, what a visual difference on the parts.
 
SNLC said:
Have you set timing yet?

Cheers
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Yes. Timing was set to GTurbo spec and per FSM when the turbo & pump were installed. I’m hoping I got it pretty close as it’s my first Toyota diesel (I’m used to old Mercedes).

It was definitely a subtle difference after the injector seat replacement, not night & day. But I’m pretty sensitive at this stage in the build where every sound and vibration has me on high alert like I have PTSD.

Overall it’s running pretty damn good right now. I’d love to have a 1HDT guru drive it and see what they think. But im pretty sure im several thousand miles from most of them. Lol

I’m wide open for long distance tuning advice if a guru like @SNLC or @NLXTACY has any!
 
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