OK boys and girls I’m here to talk about my completed and tested modifications!
First off I need to tell you a bit about the mechanic, Rodney Bullington (Bull for short). When I started searching for someone to work with to actually make these modifications I started to get concerned. I really needed some help due to a number of issues, time and the fact that allot of the things I wanted done were above my skill level. I needed someone to do this work, someone that had the knowledge, the time, charged a fair price, and most importantly the reputation for doing good work. So after digging around and asking folks Rodney’s name started to come up, the deeper I dug the more his name came up and then when I spoke to the owner of 4WD Toyota owners magazine it sealed the deal in my mind. So now that the work is complete and the Claw hammer run is behind me I can not stress enough how happy I am to have worked with Rodney on this project. I don’t care what it is, help changing a headlight or a total whatever swap out, change out, rebuild, this is the guy, OUR guy here in Washington. Besides he’s a fanatic Toyota Cruiser owner and owns several models himself. On top of all that he now has had some fairly serious experience with the new FJ.
So I’ll start with the gears. Went from stock 3.73 to 4.56 gears which I was a little uncertain about as I had thought 4.10’s might be a better match to bring my rig running 33 or 35” tires more in-line with the factory set up. I can report that with the help of disconnecting the battery overnight to clear the learned behavior of the FJ’s CPU it quickly adapted to the change of the gears and the 35” meat. Wow what a difference! The thing is nowhere near as sluggish as it seemed to be with the stock gears and 33” tires. In fact when I’d drive up a grade on the highway it was always downshifting and lacked pep, now it just keeps on going and seems to downshift 20% of what it used to. Definitely more torque is going to the ground and while the gas mileage has gone down a bit it’s not enough to where I’d consider it anything close to a bad thing. The other advantage is getting away from the early FJ bad news gears, granted I’ve already broken my early stock gears but I do feel better knowing I’m even further removed from the stock gears, I never knew if the Toyota replacements were new stock or old stock! Now I know my gears are good!
ARB front air locker. When changing gears on a new FJ one of the expenses is how labor intensive it is to get into the front “clam shell” differential. Add that to the fact that I would have had to by a new carrier to accommodate the new gears the ARB front air locker wasn’t a hard decision at all. When you consider the ARB has the carrier included you can basically save that cost difference and since the mechanic already has the “clam shell” open you might as well be economical and treat yourself to the ARB front locker. While I’ve been one to actually state that combining something that has the word “locker” with something that is IFS (independent) seems like a bad idea it’s not as scary as I had originally thought. Granted you use your head when you use the locker and a stupid move can cost you a CV axle it’s ability to get the FJ over obstacles is simply amazing. The couple of rigs on the claw hammer trail using the rear locker and ATRAC had to work their rigs like dogs to get over things I just went over without much effort. Yes it makes that much difference! But I’ll not be too overly biased and should state the terrain of the trial makes a big difference as well. Going to Moab? You don’t really need to ever use anything but ATRAC. Going to a rocky trail like Claw Hammer? ATRAC stinks. Want to be ready for anything? Get a front locker. I also installed the new ARBwasn't high output air compressor under the hood, complete with an attachment for airing up my tires. I located the air compressor and front locker switch in the switch cluster below the radio. I also installed a daytime running light cutoff switch and ADD switch.
Inchworm “Lefty” transfer case. Well the numbers would indicate my new low gear crawl ratio to be about 80:1 but I’ve learned that you can just about double that number do to the torque converter on an automatic transmission so in reality I’m closer to 160:1. All I can tell you is holy crap what a difference this thing makes. I’m about 50 times smoother on the trail and taking obstacles on top of the fact that I’m putting an amazing amount of smooth torque to the ground. It’s almost like cheating to be honest. A couple of things to note about the install and life with a lefty. Our stock TC is of course full of electronics that communicate with the CPU and 4WD CPU. One of the things the stock TC does is to tell the brain that you have shifted into 4WD which is also telling the ADD to engage as well (think of the ADD as the electronic version of not having to get out and lock your front hubs). Now as the stock TC and front diff are synchronized things work well and you just shift on the fly into 4WD when ever you want. With the lefty you have to either come to a complete stop to shift into 4WD or add and ADD switch, you still have to be at a stop to turn on the ADD switch (pretend like you just stopped and got out of the rig and locked the hubs) but once the switch is “on” you can shift in and out of 4WD on the fly so I really can not see this as any type of drawback whatsoever. In fact it also turns off all the big brother traction control crap so I can actually have a little fun in the sand of snow! My lefty came with one contact switch point of connection which is what we connect the 4 LOW sensor switch to, so now when I shift into 4WD the ECU and 4WD ECU thinks I’m actually in 4 LOW which has the advantage of allowing me, if I chose to engage the buttons, to run ATRAC or the rear e-locker without having to be in 4 LOW just 4WD. Not something that I would plane to use with any frequency but some folks think this is a great thing to have the ability to do, the blue form has hacks to do this to the stock set up. Also as an added bonus this Lefty TC actually increases ground clearance by several inches over the stock TC. I know one person that actually rose up their crossmember because they could with the lefty and gained a bucket load of clearance.
So overall it was quite an experience installing the modifications. Their where a few setbacks working with the vendors and if you plan on doing modifications similar to mine feel free to ask me questions. Those of you that know me know I’ll tell you like it is but at the same time I don’t think a shipping issue or communication issue we had with the vendors needs to be brought out here. As I’m still having issues posting pictures I’ve included a link to my Pbase site
http://www.pbase.com/ropedrag/gears_and_things for a few photos, I’ll add interior switch photos and the ARB air compressor photos in the future.cross member
