I finished this last night. I ordered the full replacement kit from
Land Cruiser Products (
@LandCruiserPhil) on Thursday and it got to New Mexico on Monday - that's three days faster than Amazon Prime. Once you see the tubing it becomes obvious what to do. This is what it looked like before the delete (the PO replaced the hoses with these pretty nice green ones, so these aren't stock)
The longgreen tube on the bottom is the coolant return, and that intermediate piece is a T that draws from the rear heater. The top curved green tubing is the coolant feed. At the bottom of the feed curve it connects into a metal piece with a channel to the rear heater and the main coolant channel. The main channels run through the firewall and the rear heater channels both run down along the firewall. Getting the hose assemblies out is a pain as some of the clamps are hard to reach (and in my case a couple of corroded and broken ones to pry out.) Not complicated, just fiddly.
This is what it looks like after the delete kit install:
You can see the open tubes for the rear heater underneath the return hose and inside the curve of the fitted hose. This is the stuff I took out:
The T fitting on the left is from the return channel and the metal tube with two exits on the right is from the main coolant feed. I cut out the last couple of feet of the metal tubing underneath the truck leading up to the rear heater as they were corroded and also in the way of a heat shielding project I am working on. If anyone wanted to reinstall the heater in my truck they'd just have to run some new lines.
As for the hole under the passenger seat where the tubing came up: I sealed top and bottom with high temp aluminum tape and put DEI heat shield underneath. I took a metal plate for an octagonal single gang outlet ($3 from Lowes or Home Depot), put some more heat shield on the bottom and used a couple of sheet metal screws to secure it over the hole. A few days ago I measured the temperature of the floor next to the hole at 247°F after 15 miles on the highway. Today it was 144°F after a long drive.