Sorry for the late reply, wasn't getting notifications on this post. The project was on a pretty long hiatus for a few reasons, our shop got very busy and I got a chance to race the Baja 1000 last November so both of those took up pretty much all the available free time. This one is a personal project so it slides down the priority list at times, but the race is over (and this season is in doubt for obvious reasons) and we're getting caught up in the shop so I've gotten back to working on it in the last month.
To catch up on some details - while I wasn't working on it much I was still thinking about the build and how to finish it. After doing a fair bit of research on the 2UZ swap and all the computer hassles I decided to throw in the towel on that effort. I think it will be a lot of trouble to execute and frankly the engines just aren't that powerful. Instead I've decided to build a turbocharged 1FZ for it. The truck will basically be a full 80-series drivetrain plus turbo with the chopped 60-series body sitting on it. Over the past few months I've been collecting the necessary parts for that and then in a bit of luck a full truck came up for sale near me just a few weeks ago. It's rough on the outside but has a home built turbo 1FZ where the engine has been gone through and is a great foundation. I quickly struck a deal with the owner and brought this beauty back to the shop.
She's a little rough around the edges but runs pretty well and will suit my purposes as a donor. The boost gauge is showing 6 psi around here (8000' altitude) and for a stock geared truck on 37's it moves along pretty well once the boost comes in. I've been driving it some and playing with the boost controller but am getting ready to tear into it. I used to design and develop turbo systems at BorgWarner when I was living the corporate engineer life so I'm going to be working with a couple old colleagues to redo the turbo match and hopefully improve the performance and responsiveness a bit. The turbo on there now is a Garrett copy from China and I'm not real impressed with the match so I think there's definitely room for improvement. I picked up a new 6Boost exhaust manifold off IH8MUD the other day so there will also be some plumbing and mounting to rework once I get that installed with a new turbo.
In the last month I've also been working on the body. I'll get a couple posts together to show the progress there. My main goal right now is to get it to a state where it's semi-finished such that I can set it down on the 80 chassis and see how things are looking from an overall layout and proportion standpoint. I'm not sure this factory appearing angled back cab wall is going to be easy to make look good and I'm still a little unsure what wheelbase will work out best so I'm ready to do some test fitting to see what it looks like in real life.
