Hey all,

I've been around here for a while but took a bit of a break. I used to have a 74 Hilux but ended up selling that to @hambler and took some time experiencing all sorts of cars from a new GTI to a turbo Subaru Legacy wagon to a foxbody mustang and several more. After trying out plenty of other options though none filled the void that my old little pickup left, and so faced with the decision of getting either a first generation RX7 or another Hilux, I bought this:




A 1977 Toyota Pickup Long Bed deluxe 4-speed. Bought sight unseen from California and shipped to New Jersey. Thanks again to @jetas for the tip on finding this. I bought it in need of some work as it had been more or less sitting since the 90s, and made running by a guy who bought it just to get running and sell. It came with tons of maintenance records and receipts which I could comb through.

This was a month ago as of writing this, and in the last month I've done some of that maintenance, with much more to do before the true modification can begin.

 

When I got the truck it ran great until it warmed up where it absolutely refused to idle. I figured the carb needed a bit of a tuneup and a check of vacuum lines and then I found this:



I can't say I've ever seen a secondary so stuck closed it became water tight, so I had a feeling there may something more seriously wrong with the carb. Oh no... I guess I HAVE to buy a Weber now. And what's a Weber swap without a full emissions delete. Anything in NJ pre-1996 is no longer subject to any inspection so no problems there. So one slightly expensive LCE order later:





And while I'm doing all this I needed to sort out the rest of the truck mechanically.

 

As for the rest of the truck, it seemed to be in great shape. California is so much nicer to old stuff than Jersey it's frankly not fair. Plugs, wires, cap, rotor, valve adjustment, the standard tune up later and the truck was running well (this was still with the old carb. Slightly out of order to play catch up to present day.) Plugs looked okay



Which belied a slight problem. Compression isn't terrible, but could be better. 125-130-132-95. D'oh. Cylinder 4 plug looking fine and the smooth running made me come to the conclusion this was a later problem.

 

The trans was shifting poorly, absolutely no feel whatsoever. Looked like bad bushings. Well if I buy rubber bushings again that'll take forever to get here and why do they need to be rubber anyway? I have Solidworks and a 3d printer so...


Suddenly I could tell when I was in gear or not, modern luxuries. After that it was time to tackle the interior and check how rust free this "rust free California truck" really was.

 

"Not" was the answer I unfortunately came to, but only just barely. After tearing up the flooring this greeted me:

which while certainly not ideal is also almost a joke in NJ, especially for something from the 70s. Regardless it'll need a patch, and I wanted to see what was under the factory sound deadening.



Fortunately underneath that was pretty clean. So I'll have to weld in a patch but that can be ugly as it'll be on the floor which I'll be covering with Dynamat and carpet. Phew. Most of that band also cleaned up well and was just surface. This whole time I was cursing to myself for living on the salty coast.

I can't explain why, but removing the factory sound deadening was EXTREMELY satisfying:



And with rust in mind it was time to figure out where some water came in during rain. The culprit (until proven wrong in the next big rain storm, was door seals. Another satisfying thing to replace:

 

After mechanical interior fixes was electrical work. Basically no lights were working, from reverse lights, to dash lights/warning lights, and the front right turn signal/parking light combo. Pulling from my experience on the 74, it was time to diagnose some electrical faults, starting with the gauge cluster:



After using a power probe to find the faulty areas and repairing them, all the lights and gauges were functional. at least on a test bench. In the truck I still needed to fix severed wiring to the combo light in the front. the reverse light switch appears to be broken as the lights and wiring is all checking out good. I don't plan to keep this transmission as I want the 5 speed so I'm not worried about that. I also have an interesting issue that I could use some help with. My fuel pump works, but my fuel gauge doesn't work. I dropped the tank to take a look at things, and when the tank was dropped the fuel pump stopped working (I assume it lost ground as it must ground through the frame). But strangely, with the tank dropped my fuel GAUGE started to work. Once I put it all back it reverted back to fuel pump working and no gauge. No idea there, anyone have some perspective?

 

Nice truck , & work.
Should whale in the areas wire wheel off any & all rust & seal with Por-15!

 

I almost forgot the very first thing I did to this truck. Same as my last one, it's removing that hideous rear bumper:



After all this fixing it was time to drive the damn thing, so a couple of test drives with the Weber and fixes yielded some results that made it feel worth it:



And then the 25+ year old tires did 25+ year old tire things:



Fortunately it did that on the way to the shop where I mounted and balanced new tires, so we're all good.

The last thing I did was install a "radio". $18 on Amazon is a little board that is a Bluetooth receiver and 50W two channel amp. Works well for the time being, as a full sound update will be once I have interior in:



And that bring us to current day. One month to the day after getting the truck off the trailer from California I could finally bring the truck to work with me, which was a very proud moment. Lots more work to do yet, but a good first month in my opinion, especially considering my usual pace of projects (it took me 3 years to get my 74 running after the first motor was Dead on Arrival)

 

That's the plan actually! I need to look into how well POR-15 will stick to clean metal, but I figured I would wire wheel and sand the whole pan and just give a couple coats of the stuff before I put the sound deadener/foam/carpet in following the floor patch it needs.

 

Not just the pan, I see rust on the door top where you already installed new door seals !

And Por-15 is made to go over rust to stop it & to go over bare metal !

 

Great work so far! This truck is going places!! Where did you find that amp board?! Neat deal you can mount anywhere. And literally has only the functions I need, BT and volume control!!

 

Exactly why I got it! This is the unit I got:

https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Am...232&sprefix=12v+blutetooth+amp,aps,62&sr=8-17

But there's others that have EQ control and even additional channels for subs and such, so seems like a sweet deal. Plus the price is hard to beat

 

Be best to pair that to some stock car speakers because they will be the most efficient. They don't spec the rms watts. I would expect it to be around 10 or less. You're typical aftermarket headunit is 50 watts max and just over 15 watts rms at 4ohms. If you don't pair it with efficient speakers you'll probably experience breaking up anything above a few watts. The speakers sensitivity will tell you how loud it is at 1 watt from 1 meter away. I can't remember the formula but you quickly use up your watts increasing the dB. Your basic car with a no thrills system out of the junkyard might have the speakers you need.

 

I'm sure the unit could be tested beforehand to know exactly if the advertised specs are even real. I found one BT 2.1 ch.. a knob for lows, highs and an on/off/volume I think it's a deal @$20 there are better ones on the higher end ! But I can see myself integrating this into my dash for sure.

 

One note it looks like that specific unit expects to see between 15 and 26V so you'd need to bump up the voltage from your wiring as even running you wouldn't see more than 14.7V so you'd undervolt the amp.

 

Well after spending several hours working on the truck this past Friday I have a bit of an update on the latest.

First things first, tires. I had already had a blowout during a test drive and was on my spare, and the newest tire on the truck had a date code from January 1997 so they had to go. I couldn't find a set of Starion wheels by me so I got some cheap tires to throw on stockers. Why didn't I wait until the right wheels came up? Because the tires were bad enough that this happened on the way to the shop where I mounted them:



After that I couldn't help but notice that the front wheels were slightly warmer than comfortable after a drive and that if I shook them there was a slight amount of play in them. Assuming the wheel bearings needed to be re-packed I got to work:


Sure enough, wow this grease was in terrible shape:

One of the nice things of bringing the Hilux to the shop is that my truck gets to meet my truck. The red truck is a 1987 Land Cruiser that I'm in the midst of fixing. This is New Jersey so the rust is brutal and I'm in the process of replacing the roof:


Being from California this truck is what I would call rust free. That said there was one patch that needed to be made in the passenger side floor. After fabbing up a plate I used body panel bonder to secure it in place and fully seal the floor:


With that done I'll now be able to focus my attention to upgrades in the interior rather than fixes and maintenance. This is going to include sound deadener/foam and carpet on top of the rust converter and paint that will soon be applied.

The last update I'm very excited about. @Toyotashack is sending me his W50 transmission that I'll be able to throw in and have the beauty of an overdrive on this truck:



More to come. The updates are likely going to be slow because I don't want to sink all my time and money into this truck and have a few trips coming up where some extra cash would be nice to have, but I'm still very excited to get more done on this truck.

 

Great touch on the wheel bearings. Safety should always be at the forefront of any build. Last thing any of us want to do is go 3wheelin down the freeway!! Ahah

 

Nice truck! Excellent write-ups and you have a clear strong drive about your little truck too! Looks mighty fine if I do say so myself Rust sure is a kicker, my first-first car's rear axle was entirely eaten through by the time I got it, and so is my current "first" Saturn unfortunately; shame they didn't sell to well because I'll have to look on the Opel market in Europe to find anything for this car, but it's still wonderful aside that.
Anyways, keep it up!!

 

Thank you Erwin! My main goal is to get this to a healthy baseline before I go and try to make it more what my end vision for the truck is.

83, what type of Saturn do you have? Does it happen to have a V6? My current thought for the truck is to use a Saab B234R or B204R engine and they use the same bolt pattern as an Opel Omega R28 box I believe. I’ve been looking into the European market extensively to see the inter-compatibility of that 54 degree V6 and apparently Saturn used it as well, and the Cadillac Catera I believe? May be picking your brain one day haha

 

My Saturn is a 2002 L200 2.2L EcoTec with a 4T40E 4spd Auto, the L300 trim had a top-of-the-line 3.3L V6 in them. The Catera, whew you're the first guy I know anywhere to even bring that thing up! Can't say much for the Catera but knowing GM it's probably similar aside the fact The L-Series is FWD and the Catera was RWD I believe; not too sure if there's any engine differences there since I only know so much about cars as a concept as a whole let alone anything Euro-specific. I will say, the automatic transmissions on them allow you to pick all 4 gears independently which is neat if you're using it for towing or wanting to pretend you have a manual!

If you would like more info than what I can spare, you can check out "SaturnFans.com" which is everything Saturn-related on a forum like here, and some guys on there can answer them better than what I can since they've been around as long as Saturn has been as a whole, may they drive high in the sky.

Sorry if this is a lot of text, not many people online aside from the congregations of forums talk about Saturn, rarely outside of them too.