It's been over a month since I've been back on the road and I've put about 1400 miles on the rig. So far, so good!
This weekend I took it on its first off-road trip, to Monanche Meadows in the Southern Sierras. My only disappointment is with the stock FJ62 radiator. I don't think it's adequate. Temps got up to 222 deg climbing the steep grade on the eastern side of the Sierras, and it was only about 80 deg outside. So I'm going to upgrade the radiator. I could see myself in an overheating situation with summer heat in so cal deserts.
Otherwise, I'm pleased. On the highway, it's got more than enough power to maintain highway speed even up a grade with my rooftop tent and roof rack bucking a headwind. Under those circumstances, I couldn't always maintain speed while in 4th gear overdrive. When you hit it 80% throttle the tranny will downshift, but I still haven't ever taken the motor past about 4000 rpm, so there's still plenty of power in reserve. So yeah, if I had a 5.3 or 6.0, there would be times when I could maintain speed without downshifting, but the bottom line is that the 4.8 is more than adequate for my needs. I was able to easily pass slower vehicles on the two lane highways, so that was pretty cool.
Off road was pretty awesome also. I only used low range one time. There was plenty of torque in first gear to crawl up some pretty steep stuff in 4H. I would have never gone up some of those sections with the old 3FE in high range.
So all in all, I'm pretty happy. Now I still have to get through the smog certification.
An update on that, I sent the PCM back to Pacific Fabrication yesterday. The O2 and Evap monitors still won't start so they want to check if it was not properly configured. I'm still struggling with whether to hook up the Park/Neutral Switch selector. I may do it just to throw a bone to the Ref as a gesture of good faith so maybe he'll let me slide on the exhaust manifold problem. I'm taking my time, I've got until Noveber 2017 to get it to pass smog, so no rush other than it would be nice to get this behind me.