Ways to Build a Toyota Tacoma
When your project starts with a blank slate, you can take it in any direction
My dad bought this 2001 Toyota Tacoma Xtracab brand-new off the lot back in 2000. He commuted about 100 miles to work every day from Plainville to New Bedford, Massachusetts, so he selected an economical 2.7L four-cylinder with an automatic and 4x4 to handle the long New England winters. Then he proceeded to rack up more than 321,000 miles under the rotted framerails before he passed away in 2015.
Rather than haul "Grampy's Truck" (as my kids call it) off to the junkyard, my oldest boy and I flew out to New England to bring it back to California. I first dragged it down to Auto Rust Technicians in Cranston, Rhode Island, to have the rotted frame patched well enough to make it across country. Then we drove it on a cross-country adventure from Massachusetts to San Diego, which I covered in a story for Four Wheeler magazine, titled The Epic XC.
Once we got it back to California, I weighed it, smogged it, and got the California plates and title assigned to it. Although the truck had some really excellent Michelin tires on it, I couldn't take the rusty steel factory wheels any longer and wanted a bit more traction for mild dirt roads, so I upgraded to some General Grabber AT2 tires and KMC XD128 Machete wheels here. The factory exhaust, which had been hanging by a thread, finally fell off, so I replaced it with a Gibson after-cat exhaust system for another Four Wheeler story, which you can see here. Eventually, after two years of trouble-free use, I ran into a bureaucratic hiccup during the truck's first biannual smog check that required me to install two California Air Resource Board-stamped catalytic converters from MagnaFlow, which I highlighted in a story you can read here. And finally, after driving for several years with only three functioning shocks, the front factory struts finally puked their seals, leaving the Tacoma with only one cheap parts store shock on the passenger-side rear that I installed in a Walmart parking lot in Indiana. I installed new Eibach Pro Truck struts and shocks that finally kept the tires in contact with the road surface in a story you can see here.
But now Charlie, my oldest of four kids, is driving, and my second-oldest, Caelin, has his eyes on the Tacoma as his ride when he gets his license in a couple years. To most it doesn't make any sense at all to build a truck using a 340,000-mile Tacoma drivetrain. Heck, it doesn't even make much sense to build a truck with a 340,000-mile Tacoma body. But sentimentality is a strong phenomenon, and nobody in my family really wants to give up on this old truck because of its connection with my dad, so we're plodding forward to keep it going for as long as we can. With the factory frame integrity still a worry, I procured a solid frame from a first-gen Tacoma with the help of my buddy Harry Wagner. Harry dragged the frame from Tahoe to Victorville, California, for me. I met him there, and we loaded it onto my trailer. So now the plan is to prep this frame to accept the "Grampy's Truck" body and running gear. At least, that was the original plan. But now that I've seen Dave Chappelle's newly finished MazGrande in action, I'm not so sure how Caelin and I are gonna build this sucker. Here are a few options we're considering.
