Build "Rednexus" - 2007 GX470 Build and Fabrication Thread

[Rednexus]

The Sandhills are one of the main bird hunters destinations in the US, for some species.

Great choice in trailer tire! My Ranger and Trailer are both made in Minnesota. The trailer tires in Wi. not as bad as the made in China May Pops but not high speed rated either. At 4 years I replace trailer tires no matter what condition they appear to be in. When I replaced mine last year did a lot of research and there was only one that stood out as the best. Not a fan of Goodyear either but in this case...

I found the Sand Hills to be beautiful. After traveling most of the US, I'm also of the opinion that the Great Plains (western KS/NE/SD as well as the eastern CO/WY/MT) have the most genuinely nice people out of any region in the country.

FWIW, out TrailManor was made in South Dakota....by a Hutterite colony .

 

[stupidchicken03]

I checked our tires last night since we just bought it a few months ago. Luckily the date code is May 2024

 

[Rednexus]

Back from our final camper trip of the year. The camper towed drastically smoother with the new tires - previously, it always had a bit of a vibration that was transmitted up to the Lexus, but that is now gone. We were a bit heavy on the way down with about 300# of water and firewood, so the back of the Lexus was a bit squatty even with 30 psi in the bags. I should have used the WDH on this trip due to the extra load. But, it was fine on the way back, with the water empty and wood burned. Someone at the campground apparently knew someone else who recognized my rig from this build thread as well, which was pretty cool, and made me feel Internet-famous for a few minutes .

Also, this is the best way ever to park a trailer into a cramped area . I'm not sure it would be possible to back the camper in with my GX, especially considering the mess of a driveway I have due to difficulties in getting the concrete guys to show back up.

 

[Timujin]

Congrats on a good trip.

Were the new & old trailer tires balanced?

 

[Rednexus]

Congrats on a good trip.

Were the new & old trailer tires balanced?

New were balanced, old where whatever balancing the camper manufacturer did or not do before they installed them. I don't recall seeing any balance weights on the wheels when I took them in with the old tires, so it's possible they were never balanced. The Goodyears only needed 1 small weight on one wheel, which is certainly a good sign.

 

[Timujin]

That’s awesome.

 

[rav8]

On our big camper trip this year, we drove 100+ miles of super broken pavement through the Nebraska Sand Hills (which, other than the crappy roads, were actually a pretty cool part of the Great Plains). One of our camper tires developed a significant vibration after that. Since we were close-ish to home, we decided to just deal with the vibration and limped the camper back to the Ozarks.

Yesterday I finally got around to replacing the old tires on our with a set of Goodyear Endurance trailer tires. I've never been a big Goodyear fan, BUT these are the only M-USA trailer tires out there. The tire shop inspected the old China bombs and found that the plies were starting to separate internally - and assumed we had driven them flat (which we most definitely did not). I noticed that tires were actually date coded as 3/2019, despite us buying the camper in 12/2021.

Lessons learned - 1) always check the actual date code on the tires (I assumed they were ~3.5 years old like the camper when in reality they were 6+ years old), 2) China bomb trailer tires really do suck (they had <10,000 miles on them), and 3) stop immediately at a tire shop if you get a vibration in a trailer tire. We were pretty darn lucky to not have a blowout, which could have been catastrophic with a single-axle trailer towed by a short/tall SUV, especially if on a busy interstate.

We'll see how these (and other post-trip) camper upgrades do this weekend on our final trip of the year.
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Ours (Spring 2020 build, delivered July 2020) also had 2019-dated Westlake tires. We did 20k in two years and were happy to replace them. Saw too many single axles pulled over with shredded tires during our travels to trust them for long. Did the Goodyear Endurance thing and have had great luck since.

New were balanced, old where whatever balancing the camper manufacturer did or not do before they installed them. I don't recall seeing any balance weights on the wheels when I took them in with the old tires, so it's possible they were never balanced. The Goodyears only needed 1 small weight on one wheel, which is certainly a good sign.

I did not balance mine. Wear to this point has been pretty even and haven't had noticable vibration.

Funny thing...as I dismounted the Westlakes I found several ~1" pieces of what looked like steel hose clamp. Turns out that when they were mounting the band-style TPMS sensor, they were clipping off excess during tightening, instead of measuring and cutting to have proper overlap.

I'll look to see if I still have the photo...because the handful of steel pulled out of each tire left me wondering how I made it past 5k without having a belt seperation or worse.

 

[Rednexus]

Pulled the GX in the shop today to address a few minor issues.

^Last week I noticed the engine coolant temps were funky, as they were jumping from ~160F to ~185F. About 4 years ago the ECT sensor plug gave me issues and I spliced on a new one. But, the new one didn't exactly match the ECT sensor body, so I shaved off one of the ribs on the sensor body to get it to fit. This time I ordered a new sensor plug from Ballenger Motorsports, and went ahead and replaced the sensor with a new Denso sensor I picked up for ~$50 on Rock Auto.

^Despite owing the GX for 5 years and nearly 65,000 miles, I'd never done the plugs on it. So I swapped in 8 new Denso Iridium Power plugs and a set of spark plug boots (though there were only 7 in the Denso box! Luckily AutoZone had a single NGK boot in stock locally). The old plugs were all in excellent shape, but the GX does seem a bit more peppy with the new ones.

^Since the plugs were out I went ahead and did a compression test. Pretty happy with the results. I had my son crank the motor until compression stopped rising, which seemed to be a different number of cranks per cylinder. Overall this motor with nearly 197K on it seems to have a lot of life left in it.

 

[HomersCanyonero]

Pulled the GX in the shop today to address a few minor issues.
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^Last week I noticed the engine coolant temps were funky, as they were jumping from ~160F to ~185F. About 4 years ago the ECT sensor plug gave me issues and I spliced on a new one. But, the new one didn't exactly match the ECT sensor body, so I shaved off one of the ribs on the sensor body to get it to fit. This time I ordered a new sensor plug from Ballenger Motorsports, and went ahead and replaced the sensor with a new Denso sensor I picked up for ~$50 on Rock Auto.
View attachment 4018935
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^Despite owing the GX for 5 years and nearly 65,000 miles, I'd never done the plugs on it. So I swapped in 8 new Denso Iridium Power plugs and a set of spark plug boots (though there were only 7 in the Denso box! Luckily AutoZone had a single NGK boot in stock locally). The old plugs were all in excellent shape, but the GX does seem a bit more peppy with the new ones.
View attachment 4018934
^Since the plugs were out I went ahead and did a compression test. Pretty happy with the results. I had my son crank the motor until compression stopped rising, which seemed to be a different number of cranks per cylinder. Overall this motor with nearly 197K on it seems to have a lot of life left in it.

How did the ignition coils look? Any cracks?

 

[Rednexus]

How did the ignition coils look? Any cracks?

They looked great! One boot was a bit oxidized but that was it. New boots were pretty easy to install as well.

 

[HomersCanyonero]

I saw 8 new Denso ignition coils from partsouq at $303 total shipped to my house

Thinking about ordering and installing…saving a handful of original ones as trail spares

 

[Rednexus]

I've heard folks will buy 1 or 2 spares and keep them in the rig. I might do that at some point, just in case.

 

[Rednexus]

There was a bit of discussion on the @r2m build thread regarding voltage boosters and batteries. I decided to check my Odyssey AGM and noticed that it was, indeed under-charged! A full night on the NOCO Genius got it back up to snuff, but I didn't want to trash the expensive battery, so I bought a Voltage Booster Pro Texas Slim booster. I previously had a diode-based booster that gave me a full extra volt....which fried a bunch of my cheaper LEDs and probably my old PX6 as well. The Texas Slim has a "low" setting that is adding 0.4-0.5 volts over the ECU-commanded voltage (i.e., about 14.2 volts driving around and 14.7 after starting). I'm hoping this will preserve the battery while avoiding killing more LEDs.

Otherwise....the GX is close to "done" for the near future other than little maintenance/repair tasks. Over the holidays I'll rebuild the rear shocks (they finally started to give out at about 54K miles) and take care of some minor interior tasks. The next mods will be better skids (which I might pick up on Black Friday), then bumpers and a winch sometime in 2026. I also have a ProSpeed rack sitting around that I'll throw on sometime next year.

 

[rav8]

Cool. What is your current mileage? Curious about the GX470's.

 

[Rednexus]

Cool. What is your current mileage? Curious about the GX470's.

Something like ~198,000. If you get one, it's quite easy to fall in love with the 2UZ-FE .

 

[Rednexus]

Happy to report that my Odyssey is sitting just fine at 12.7 volts now. Since NOCO-charging it on Friday evening it's had the compression test (which must have consumed lots of battery), was driven maybe an hour w/o the Texas Slim, and <1 hour with the Texas Slim. We'll see how it fares over the winter. But, it's much better than the 12.4V it had been sitting at, even after lots of highway driving.

FWIW, it looks like Odyssey batteries have a 100% SOC at 12.9 volts (most generic AGM charts put 100% SOC at 12.7 volts, which is ~80% for an Odyssey), and their manual confirms the battery needs 14.2-14.5 volts, which the GX is now running at. That explains while my camper battery is often sitting at 13.0V when it's charged. I'm hoping this extra voltage will also help our camper fridge run better when it's running DC on long tow days.

 

[Rednexus]

One more minor update. The entire time I've owned the GX it's always had higher long term fuel trims (LTFTs) on Bank 2 than Bank 1. It was like 1-2% higher, but it's slowly crept up to 3-4% higher, which was concerning (and part of the reason I did a compression test - to rule out a internal engine problem). Now the LTFTs are almost always exactly the same!

I'm thinking this was a boot issue rather than a plug issue, as the plugs looked nearly-new when I bought the GX ~65K ago (and looked OK when I replaced them last weekend), but there is a good chance the boots were the originals. It's also idling super-smooth, to the point where it's hard to notice it's running at idle, and it's definitely zippier as well. Overall, it's pretty impressive just how well this rig runs with almost 200K on it.

(note that my LTFTs are most always +5 to +15%, which I attribute to having a CAI on the rig, although the headers might also affect it).

 

[HomersCanyonero]

Happy to report that my Odyssey is sitting just fine at 12.7 volts now. Since NOCO-charging it on Friday evening it's had the compression test (which must have consumed lots of battery), was driven maybe an hour w/o the Texas Slim, and <1 hour with the Texas Slim. We'll see how it fares over the winter. But, it's much better than the 12.4V it had been sitting at, even after lots of highway driving.

FWIW, it looks like Odyssey batteries have a 100% SOC at 12.9 volts (most generic AGM charts put 100% SOC at 12.7 volts, which is ~80% for an Odyssey), and their manual confirms the battery needs 14.2-14.5 volts, which the GX is now running at. That explains while my camper battery is often sitting at 13.0V when it's charged. I'm hoping this extra voltage will also help our camper fridge run better when it's running DC on long tow days.
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You measured your battery charge level at the posts using a multimeter?

I’ve been running a voltage booster a little over 6 months from a defunct company called ARCLightLed that I set at 0.5V boost for my Kirkland AGM battery H7 (94R).

I haven’t gone back and checked the charge level on my battery at the posts, but the cigarette lighter volt meter says 14.7V on startup and settles back to like 14V (+/- 0.2V) after driving.

So, just curious how you checked the voltage. My GX470 is a weekend warrior and it can sit for a week before I take it for a ride around town in between outings.

 

[HomersCanyonero]

One more minor update. The entire time I've owned the GX it's always had higher long term fuel trims (LTFTs) on Bank 2 than Bank 1. It was like 1-2% higher, but it's slowly crept up to 3-4% higher, which was concerning (and part of the reason I did a compression test - to rule out a internal engine problem). Now the LTFTs are almost always exactly the same!

I'm thinking this was a boot issue rather than a plug issue, as the plugs looked nearly-new when I bought the GX ~65K ago (and looked OK when I replaced them last weekend), but there is a good chance the boots were the originals. It's also idling super-smooth, to the point where it's hard to notice it's running at idle, and it's definitely zippier as well. Overall, it's pretty impressive just how well this rig runs with almost 200K on it.
View attachment 4022329
(note that my LTFTs are most always +5 to +15%, which I attribute to having a CAI on the rig, although the headers might also affect it).

One question on the ignition coils. I’m assuming that the rubber boots sell separately?

Just thinking it’s one more preventive maintenance part to get.

I was gonna get new Denso ignition coils, but seems like the boots could be an issue as well.

 

[Rednexus]

One question on the ignition coils. I’m assuming that the rubber boots sell separately?

Just thinking it’s one more preventive maintenance part to get.

I was gonna get new Denso ignition coils, but seems like the boots could be an issue as well.

Yes, the very end of the coil is a silicone boot that pops right off. It also has a small spring inside of it; both of which get replaced. The spring goes into a recess at the bottom of the coil. I used an old plug to push the springs in until they clicked. A link to the Denso boots (VVTI so double-check they'll also work on yours) is below:

More Information for DENSO 6718184

If you are going to re-boot, I'd also replace the plugs. I'm very happy with the Iridium Power plugs, which don't last quite as long as the other iridium plugs but supposedly have better MPG and horsepower. A link to the VVTI plugs I used is also below.

More Information for DENSO 5304

Another thing you could also do is have your fuel injectors cleaned and flow-matched. I put a set of Dirty Deeds 12-holes in mine, but since you GX is not a daily, it's probably cheaper to have your OEM 4-holes refurbished. You may also have a local shop that will do it. Much like plugs and boots, it's not reasonable to expect a set of injectors that are 20+ years old to work like they are new.