2012 Taco slow build - The Escape Pod.

Finlay

Triarius
I got a new Taco last October. Happy day!

So Shiny!!

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First thing I did was remove the back seat. It did not suit the doggies.
I built some shelves to level the floor out and then put a blanket on it.

I'll figure out what to do with the hidey hole later, but for now it sits empty.

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I did a few other mods - disable the A/C on defrost and the annoying chime when the key is in the ignition.

Next on the list - build a bed rack to house the RTT.
 

Danimal

Adventurer
Nice truck, and I love the blue. I think I remember the photo of your truck in the driveway from a few months ago on TacomaWorld?

Looking forward to seeing the bed rack, as I think this seems like a good solution for my family in a few years.

Dan
 

Finlay

Triarius
So, I bought a RTT from Cascadia Vehicle Tents

Now, I need to build a way to mount it over the bed.

I found a few sources of inspiration :
This was nice, but quite heavy.
This one is quite nice, too

So, I called my dad, and was all like - hey! Do you still have the welder and a garage. And wanna feed me steak for a week while we build a rack ?

He was cool with it.

Short digression here - he and I talked a bit about what to build it out of. I suggested steel, but he raised the point that it was going to be heavy at the OD I was wanting, and my weight budget - about 900 lbs loaded - was a consideration.

He suggested we use EMT. He had used it for lots of projects - deer stands and ice shanties and such, so it seemed reasonable. It's a subject of some debate, so let me lay some points out :

Pros :
inexpensive
easy to get
easy to work with
it can be welded and ground, provided you take some precautions with ventilation
corrosion resistant
lightweight

Cons:
Not as strong as steel tube.
if it's galvanized, it can be a real pain to weld on
hard to bed without the right die

I ran some numbers on 1.25" EMT with a ME friend of mine. Given the load on it - ~125lbs of RTT, the design we laid out should hold up fine.

Now, we got a jack style tube bender to use, but the die we had didn't work, even though it was supposed to - it was just a little too narrow and would crease it. So we had to use the old fashioned method :

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It worked well enough, but its hard to get consistent bends doing it by hand. We did OK, though. Lost a whole 10' section to practice, though.

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So, after that, we set up a jig and cut and notched the crossmembers
I want to add some others, but I'm not sure yet where and how, so I'll do that in the future.

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Now, to make the rails. I got a 20' 3 inch bar of 1/4" thick plate steel for 30 bucks from a scrap yard. The Tacoma bed rail has a taper to it, though, so I need to cut the bars to match.

The cut looks like ****, but thats why god invented grinders.

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Now, to weld it. We had to travel to a Denny's house, because Denny just got a new heavy duty line feed arc welder and he wants to try it out. Also, Dad'd little linefeed just doesn't have the juice we need to get good penetration on the steel plate.

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Now, I need to attach it to the bed rails. A couple washers cut down to fit and a bolt welded on

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Now, to cut some brackets from some angle iron we had laying around

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And weld them on

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Finlay

Triarius
Primer and rattlecan the hell out of it

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And put it on :

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It took a few weeks for the weather to cooperate and warm up enough to dry fit the RTT, but we did this past weekend

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I need to build a fairing. This thing is gonna rock. I'm so pleased with it.
 

Finlay

Triarius
Nice truck, and I love the blue. I think I remember the photo of your truck in the driveway from a few months ago on TacomaWorld?

Looking forward to seeing the bed rack, as I think this seems like a good solution for my family in a few years.

Dan

Yeah, I posted some pics over there. I thought I'd put the build thread here, though, if I were really smart, I'd just set up website and point to that. I might still do that.

The rack turned out pretty well. I spent about 120 bucks on materials, and about 3 days of labor. I did have to split a bunch of wood for my dad, though. :)

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Owyhee H

Adventurer
Nice looking truck. I like the rack a lot.:) White water raft frames are often made out of the same material and it can be very strong but fairly easy to work with, I think you will be fine for strength.

Do you have a link for how to disable the a/c with defrost? That is really anoying to me, why cant I control my A/C manually? Defrost is my preferred vent location but it sucks the gas running the A/C pump all the time.

Nice dog too, Ive got GSP's but the vizsla is a great companion.
 

Finlay

Triarius
Thanks all!

The A/C disable is here But note that if you have an 09+ tacoma, you need to do this.

It's pretty strightforward and takes about 10 minutes.

I know why they did it - and it's because people totally misunderstand how to manage the HVAC controls - but I sometimes wonder if maybe that should be part of the driving test because it's so friggen basic, I just don't get how they can't know. [/rant]


Anyway, the Viszla is my dog - in the "if you have to chain it to the porch, it aint your dog" sort of way. He's a great dog, an awesome hiking companion and a total character. To much of a wuss for brush hunting though, he much prefers to stick to trails and ditches.

My wife has a GSP - I'll get some pics up later - and that one is a rocket. He's kind of a doofus, but a very good and driven hunter - we won't have to worry about him in the coming zombie apocalypse. My wife is a member of NAVHDA, and has put a ton of work into both of them, although the GSP is a much better hunter and much more her dog.


Next on the list of things to do to the truck is build a fairing. I'm sort of at a loss as to how to accommodate the sharkfin antenna. Almost no matter what I do, it's going to be obscured by the fairing and to a lesser extent, the tent. I think I'm going to have to relocate it to the front of the cab. Yeesh.
 

Finlay

Triarius
I got a scangauge a few months ago as an anniversary present from my wife. She included the blendmount mirror mount, but I just didn't like the fit with the huge taco 2012 mirror stem. It was way too fiddly.

So, I was farting around, weighing my options and I spied an old, broken tape measure I had forgotten to throw away. The clip on it was perfect.

This picture is as clear as I can make it - 17 years of IT experience, a degree in electrical and computer engineering and this damned canon might as well be silkscreened in greek.

But, the idea is that I used the clip from the tape measure over the lip of the roof liner. I found a short machine screw in my bucket of screws that fit perfectly. The scangauge is stable as hell, an in a great position over the top of the mirror.

Simple, easy, cheap. I love it when a plan comes together.

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Finlay

Triarius
CB antennae install

This was a real challenge.

Since I am getting a HAM radio at some point, I wanted to reserve the space over the cab for that antenna. Plus, real estate up there is going to be constrained with the fairing and other nonsense. So, my CB would have to go out over the bed. But the tent occupies most of that, so...

I decided to use a dual stick CB antenna mounted to my custom bed rack just behind the cab, but ahead of the RTT. It's not a lot of room, and certainly not ideal - but it should allow for OK performance from the CB while not interfering with my other crap.

It took me quite a while to formulate a mounting strategy for my rack. At first I tried to cut some custom brackets from some 20ga steel I had laying around, but... I'm lazy and hacksaw is slow. Besides, it just looked ghetto. I found some 3/4 in EMT in the shed, so I took a couple feet of that and tried bending some funny curves, but... that didn't go so well, either.

Finally - and I don't know why I didn't think of this first - I just cut a stretch of the EMT, crimped the top end, drilled through and bolted it on. Simple. Easy. Fits like it was meant to go there. I can be so incredibly stupid sometimes, it's a wonder I don't wear my pants on my head.

The antennae perform OK - it took a bunch of tuning - SWR is 2.1 at 1 and 40 and 1.1 at 19; and it's pretty directional front to back. But, it works pretty well and really, I'm looking to get better performance out of my HAM set up. This is primarily for trail use and for screwing around on the highway.

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ETAV8R

Founder of D.E.R.P.
Great build.

Another scanguage option with the blendmount is to just screw it into the headliner. That is what I did.

For the back seat I suggest you keep an eye on Tacomaworld, Toyota Nation, and craigslist for people selling their backseats from 08 and below. I got one from a guy on Tacomaworld and haven't looked back.
 

SLOwag

Adventurer
I like your idea on crafting the rack. I'm planning something a little shorter and was wondering if you're going to mount the rack on top of the plastic rail cover? Any plans to place some kind of material to isolate the rubbing between the two materials? Thanks
 

Finlay

Triarius
I like your idea on crafting the rack. I'm planning something a little shorter and was wondering if you're going to mount the rack on top of the plastic rail cover? Any plans to place some kind of material to isolate the rubbing between the two materials? Thanks

Thanks! The rack mounts right on top of the plastic bed rail. I put a couple strips of topper weatherstripping on the bottom of the rack rails. If you look closely at my pictures, it's that white seam between the rack and the bedrail top. I wasn't so sure it was going to work that great, but it's holding up pretty well so far.
 

Finlay

Triarius
Got the windows tinted today. 50% on the front. Stock on the back. The tint looks uniform from the inside, but the fronts are definitely lighter from the outside. I'm pretty happy with it.

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