Capture Colorado 01 TRD Taco - GOAE build

capturecolorado

Hooray bikes!
If you're going to be hanging a heavy bumper, tire and bike rack off the back of a tacoma you need to ad some frame plates. I'm sure you know this already but just in case you didn't, be sure to get some. They are cheap insurance and can be had from many different fab co's

Good call, that's been in the back of my mind but I hadn't been thinking about that recently.
 

Kole

Adventurer
I'm very interested to see how this bumper comes out. I like the design and it's really simple. Do you plan to tie the recovery points into your frame mounts on the rear of the bumper?

Would you mind sharing your completed measurements when you've got it built?

Thanks - K
 

climber-420

Adventurer
Wow. I hope to one day have my own garage to be able to do work like this. Any possibility you would build another to sell? I live over in Lakewood. Could always lend a hand if you needed help.
 

DaveInDenver

Middle Income Semi-Redneck
I haven't had a sway bar on my truck for 15 years, with sufficiently high spring rates and good shocks (IOW, decent suspension) I never missed them.

FWIW, I put CBI plates on our briefly owned Taco. Fit was perfect and the steel was high quality. Way better than anything I could have fabricated.

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Did make custom plates for the section at the bend, which is a notorious spot for rusting on all Toyota pickups since forever.

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capturecolorado

Hooray bikes!
Wow. I hope to one day have my own garage to be able to do work like this. Any possibility you would build another to sell? I live over in Lakewood. Could always lend a hand if you needed help.

My garage exists, but my personal collection of tooling is pretty poor right now, I'll be using my dad's garage/shop to do all the fabricating until I get my own shop worked out. One of my coworkers is interested in having me build him one as well, so I'm considering doing a sort of group buy on these for people who're interested and build a handful of them in a row while I have everything set up to do so. Just kinda need to get a list of folks together - PM me and let's talk. I'm certainly open to it.

You don't waste any time, do you? I'll have to come by the shop and check it out.

Nope :sombrero: I got the Jeep where I was happy with it when I sold it, I don't want to wait around too long before this gets where I want it. Just some armor and cargo storage stuff initially, at least. In person the truck doesn't really look like a lifted truck unless there's a stock one next to it, just looks appropriate for a nice offroad package :)

I'm very interested to see how this bumper comes out. I like the design and it's really simple. Do you plan to tie the recovery points into your frame mounts on the rear of the bumper?

Would you mind sharing your completed measurements when you've got it built?

Thanks - K

The position of the recovery points in the rendering is more of a general idea, but I'm considering tying them directly into the frame mounts, it kind of depends on how it shapes up, I may just back them up against one of my gussets on the back side and place them slightly inboard of the frame mounts to better distribute stresses across the mounts, rather than focusing recovery stressed on one mounting point. They'll be welded to the tube, which in turn will be very well attached to some 1/4" plate for the mounts, it's kind of up in the air on how exactly that detail shapes up. With the bumper for my own truck, I could go either way, since any bike rack will be attached to the tire carrier, leaving the actual receiver open to be used for a hitch d-ring bracket.

From what I've seen with a lot of recovery points on commercially available bumpers (specifically for Jeeps), many plate bumpers simply have the recovery point welded to the surface of the plate steel and not directly tied into the mounts. While mine may or may not attach to the frame mounts, they'll tie into the internal structure of the bumper via the 2x6 tube, rather than rely on plate steel. I'll figure it out haha.

I haven't had a sway bar on my truck for 15 years, with sufficiently high spring rates and good shocks (IOW, decent suspension) I never missed them.

FWIW, I put CBI plates on our briefly owned Taco. Fit was perfect and the steel was high quality. Way better than anything I could have fabricated.

Ordered some of the CBI plates while on lunch today! Thanks for the insight and pics! I drove about 90% of last year in my jeep without the swaybar attached, and it was fine for pretty much everything. I'm planning on making some disconnects, but before I do that I'll probably just remove the sway bar and drive around for a month and see how it does, body roll was reduced substantially with the lift over how it was as stock, so I'd imagine I'll be fine.

If not, a couple of male and female threaded heim joints and some wing nuts, and I'll have disconnects :)
 

DaveInDenver

Middle Income Semi-Redneck
Keep in mind that I have a torsion bar IFS. Of all the suspension types it's probably the least tippy and I have 25mm (oversized) torsion rods, OME shocks and have additional pre-load cranked in to compensate slightly for the bull bar and winch. The body wants to stay parallel to the ground, which is mainly why people hate on it for trails. Coils will be more flexible, so I don't know that it'll work as well with a Taco with long travel.
 

capturecolorado

Hooray bikes!
Ah, good point. Once I got the lift on my jeep and rode without the swaybar, I was pleasantly surprised that it had as little body roll as it did, thanks to the shocks and stiffer springs. I'll give it a shot and see how this rides without, if I don't mind I may ditch it completely, otherwise I'm pretty sure I can figure out a way to make a disconnect for the thing.

Or maybe I can find a wrecked JK Rubicon and pull the electronic sway bar disconnect out of it, then mod the everliving ******** out of it to make it work in the taco... :roost:
 

capturecolorado

Hooray bikes!
If one of my bikes sells soon, particularly for the price I'm hoping to get, a set of these might find their way onto the taco in the form of a 255/85r16. Little more highway friendly, but look like they'll still hold their own.

Thanks to Amazon for the humungous photo.

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capturecolorado

Hooray bikes!
I've been stockpiling parts for a couple of weeks now for a few projects...

Rear bumper - I have everything I need to get started on that, except enough time to go through and start doing everything. I need to trim the bed a little bit before I can fully start on the project.
- 800# latch
- pop pin
- dual-sheer tire carrier spindle
- tire carrier plate
- 2" receiver
- two Ballistic shackle mounts
- miscellaneous tabs, which I'm probably not going to end up using, but they're here.
- 2x6, 2x2, 2", 3", and 4" rectangular tube and plate steel, all 3/16" thick.

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Then today, I picked up some shiny for the front bumper that may or may not be on its way here... If UPS could pull their heads out of their asses and figure out where it is, I can get started on some stuff. Basically I decided to get a Trail-gear low profile front bumper, if I end up not liking the tube I'll just scrap the tubing and build off of the existing foundation. But I think I'll like the tube.

I decided to start working on my lighting situation. I wanted to do it right this time... With my Jeep, while it worked just fine, it was kind of a chaotic system, not as well organized as I had hoped it would be, and a challenge to add anything. Also no labels, so if I had to change a relay or fuse, it wasn't clear which was which. So in addition to shiny bright things, I've got a sheet of HDPE to use as the base for my fuse/relay panel, aaaand a bunch of other parts to replicate this to a degree. I'll pre-cut, and wrap together signal wires to go from the switches to the relays, which will all connect via terminal block, and a 6-way plug at the switch panel for easy reworking of the wiring. Each system that connects to the panel will connect with a weatherpack connector, so I can completely remove the wiring for an individual set of lights. Everything will be LED, so the current draw on the system will be pretty low overall; I'll probably never have ALL the lights on at once (1-2 10" bars on the bumper, 4 forward-facing pods, two small flood pods on either side of the rack, and aux. reverse/loading lights).

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New shiny... 4x 16w pods, and 1 50w 10" bar from local guys Olympus Offroad, they're also going to hook it up with some of their 18w bolt rock lights that should prove very useful for illuminating the bed, and obviously for rock lights. I'm not sure if the rock lights will project enough to act as alley lights, but that would be pretty rad.
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On a side note, if you're in the market for some really well-built LEDs for not the price of Rigid, these guys are worth checking out. And Daniel is a really cool dude, I might have the opportunity to do some photography for those guys coming up, and look forward to working with them some more.olympusoffroad.com
 

cdrewferd

Observer
That lighting setup is going to be sweet. I really like how you did all the lighting wiring on 1 panel that you could remove if needed. Do you have any more information on how you did that? Can't wait to see all this wired up and the rear bumper built.
 

capturecolorado

Hooray bikes!
That's not my panel, but I plan on duplicating it as best possible once all the parts show up. I'll be sure to get some more pictures of it while I'm putting it together for you. I can't wait to see all these lights thrown on. Yesterday I started thinking about a way to get the 10" bar up higher than it'll be when mounted to the grille hoop.... so I'll likely be welding in a hood scoop from a 2000ish 4runner for general aesthetic ************ looks, and I can stuff the light bar in there :)
 

austintaco

Explorer
Are you still leaning toward the redundant latch on your bumper? If I am looking at it correctly, to open the bumper, you will need to remove the cotter pin, pull the safety pin, and then do the latch? That might become a PITA after awhile. I opted for a real beefy Destaco latch and a spring loaded safety pin by the hinge. If the Destaco ever failed or was bumped off, I can lash it down for the ride home.

Your build looks great, and props to building your own bumper.
 

capturecolorado

Hooray bikes!
My biggest concern with the latch is if one were to fail on the highway, say, after wheeling or something where vibrations have been pretty constant, I wouldn't want the swingout to go flying. Your mention of the pop pin on the hinge side just gave me an idea to use one on the latch side for the redundancy. I've got a pop pin that I intend to use on the hinge side, but I haven't figured out how to accomplish that - the dual sheer bracket presents some difficulty in that area. But I could see putting another pop pin on the latch side (probably just right in the middle of the tube), so that when the arm is shut, the pin would be sunk into a slot. Or some kind of slam latch kind of thing.

I'll probably just end up doing something like a padlock latch, but not quite as large of an opening, and just use a ring pin to keep it from swinging open in case of failure. With the Jeep's swingout, it was multi-step, but once you did it a couple of times it was plenty quick, hardly any slower than just the latch - ultimately I ended up not having the cotter pin, so it was just undo latch, pull pin, swing...close, insert pin, latch.

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capturecolorado

Hooray bikes!
Got started on a few projects today. First, started the rear bumper; today was pretty much running errands and removing the stock bumper/hitch, and trimming the bed for the new bumper.

I'm no stranger to cutting sheet metal off of a vehicle, so this didn't particularly phase me. But the ridiculous amount of metal you've got to cut through on the corners is a headache.
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Also, all I had today was my camera phone, so these pictures are teh suck.
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Once everything was removed and I had clear access to the frame, I got started with some bumper mounts.
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I'm going to make a "template" mount, that way if I ever want/need to build another bumper for anyone in the future I'll have the basis on which to do so easily. I also decided I'm going to add at least one additional bolt to the mounting plates on the frame rail, potentially two. I might also get some extra material and weld a crossmember in between the frame rails on the back end. Dunno yet. Either way, the 'template' will have some 3/32" or 1/4" holes drilled in it at the locations of the bolts, and the outer dimensions needed for the mounts, that way I can line it up with the new material in the future and punch the holes through, then enlarge with the step bit to the required size.

The truck looks a little weird without an ***. A little later in the afternoon I went to another parts store and picked up some door edge guard for the cut edge; it cleaned up the look substantially.
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I may have mentioned this before, but while the wiring of aftermarket crap on my jeep worked, it didn't look good, nor was it organized in any sense of the word (ok, it was, but no where near what I would expect of myself). In ordering lights, etc., I've also ordered parts to build a proper relay and fuse panel, so everything is in one location, easily organized, serviced, and diagnosed for issues.

Getting started on the panel with a 12" square piece of 3/8" HDPE. I chose HDPE because it's non-conductive, corrosion-resistant/proof, and extremely easy to work with. But mostly because it's non-conductive. All the hardware on this is stainless steel, as well.
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All it needs now is some wires. Input will be fused 150a into the fuse panel, signal wires from the switches in the cab to the relays on the right, power from the relay to the device is on the left, with a group ground adjacent to the fuse panel. All the relays' grounds will be looped together in a row to keep things clean, and each relay is held on securely with a wing nut on a carriage bolt which is jammed into the HDPE, so there's a non-permanent way of mounting the relays so they can be replaced without the need of tools in the field.
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That's all for now. Tomorrow I'm going back to my parents garage to continue working on the bumper, and will be picking up additional material to make a second bumper for a guy on TacomaWorld.
 

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