Tacoma Rear Shock Relocation — Scrapping the First Attempt and Trying Again

December 17, 2018.

I’m generally pretty good at building things with my hands, but in relocating the rear shocks on my first gen Toyota Tacoma, I’d royally screwed up. If you haven’t read about that, I’d recommend checking out the previous post in this series — Rear Shock Relocation — Fabrication and Failure, where after I’d permanently welded a bunch of stuff to my truck, I’d discovered that I couldn’t go over bumps taller than about 2-inches. Not good for adventuring out on dirt roads.

But, failure is a great learning tool, and I’d spent some time figuring out why what I’d done hadn’t worked, and what the right way was to accomplish my goals… so it was time to give it another shot.

Note: If you just want to understand the right way to do this and don’t care about the story, the post you want to read is this one:

How-To: Toyota Tacoma Rear Shock Relocation — Determining Leaf Spring Cycle and Mount Positioning

Of course, having welded on the original shock mounts I’d purchased from RuffStuff.com, the only way they were coming off was by cutting and grinding, so my first step was to order a couple new sets of mounts. I got the same ones I’d purchased previously — RuffStuff SBRKT-175 (upper) and R1988–8 (lower) shock mounts.

New parts acquired, it was time to figure out how to get the bed off the truck again — always a tedious process for me since I don’t have a good place to store it, and since it requires a few strapping folks to lift free of the frame. Luckily, my 4Runner buddy Joe — who’d run the WABDR with us earlier in the summer — wanted some help installing a new roof rack and said I was welcome to use his “trellis hoist” to pull the bed off at the same time if I wanted.

Of course, I wanted.

So I headed over and maneuvered the truck under the trellis in his backyard. Joe uses this hoist to lift his RTT on/off his 4Runner so we hoped it had enough oomph for the Tacoma bed — I protected the cab and rear bumper with some moving blankets just in case it started to swing around.

As we started lifting the bed, it was clear that the rear half was much heavier than the front. Removing the tailgate balanced it out almost perfectly and with the help of some pulleys and guidance up and over the fuel filler neck, the bed was soon suspended several feet above the frame.

With rain in the forecast, it’d make a nice roof, assuming the rope held through work.

To see if it did (of course it did!), and to see how the whole project ended up, check out the full story in Scrapping the First Attempt and Trying Again — at adventuretaco.com.

Originally published at adventuretaco.com.