Fail! I Built A Tacoma Rollcage For Ultimate Adventure that Won't Pass Tech Inspection.

In the last episode of this series we added a custom 9-inch rear axle from Fusion 4x4. Today we need to finish the bump stops. I'm going to relocate our limit straps, just fine-tune everything, get everything painted, get everything installed, get these brakes bled, and then we even have to build a roll cage. The first thing on the agenda today is I want to get this axle placed exactly where it's going to be when it's driving down the road because I want to order a driveshaft. It's Sunday, last week's video just went live like a couple hours ago, and tomorrow's Monday, so I need to send this out first thing in the morning, this driveshaft, have it modified by Adam's Driveshaft, and then it should all marry up to the new yoke and the new dimensions and everything that we have. Before I can send them that measurement, I need to make sure this axle is absolutely perfect. So the way that I do this is I've got a line laser here, and as you can see, it's casting line on my hand. Well, I lined it up with a rivet that's on a chunk of crossmember on this side of the chassis, and then there's the same rivet that's mirrored on the other side, and so I cast this line right across the high point of the rivet on both sides. Now we can use that as a common measuring point to make sure that the axle isn't going to be like making this crab walk down the highway. 12 and three-eighths, really close to 12 and three-eighths. Let's see what the other side is. We are at 12 and just over 12 and a quarter, so let's turn this a little bit. We want to be pulling that axle in. There's 12 and three-eighths. I've already centered the axle, and that's pretty easy. If you've ever, if you've watched my channel for over the last couple years, you've seen me do this on multiple vehicles. This to me is just the easiest way to do it with the tools that I have here in the shop, and I've found it to work really well. So anyway, we've already centered the axle with the center of the chassis by taking and getting a full width measurement of the axle. I use paint, and I mark all my axles with a center line, so anytime I do any mods in the future, it makes really easy. So I've got a little white mark that's the center of the axle, and then I just measure and mark the center of the chassis, cast a line across it, boom. Now we can center the axle with the chassis of the truck, and we've already done that. So this thing's really close to where it needs to be. The next thing that I need to do is I need to dial in our pinion angle, and that's a little bit more complicated. What we're gonna have to do is we're gonna have to pull the rear driveshaft off. We're gonna have to separate the rear driveshaft because it's a two-piece driveshaft, and then reinstall the front section. Then we can pull some angles off of that section, and then we can mirror that with the rear axle. We're gonna reuse this little front section, the stock section of driveshaft. This is a two-piece driveshaft. Some people go to a one-piece. Personally, because of rock crawling reasons, I don't want to go to a one-piece because imagine this just giant liability down there. So I'm gonna keep the two-piece. I'm gonna send this stock section out to Adams Driveshaft. They want to put a heavier-duty, bigger carrier bearing on it, and then I measured a five-degree angle out of the yoke out of the back of the driveshaft. So I matched that with the rear axle, and then Adams is gonna make a custom driveshaft to marry from the Toyota section here to the Fusion 4x4 section here, and I believe this is a 1350 joint. So I don't know if this is how people normally order custom parts, but I've always found it easier to draw everything on a whiteboard, snap a picture, and then I can email whoever it is that I'm talking to on the phone and make sure that we're all speaking the same language. So now I need to get back over there. We need to get our bump stops all set so I can pull everything back apart. We can finally paint. I wasn't sure exactly how I was going to mount this bump stop. I really like the way the hydro bumps mount. I like the bump stop canister style. I feel like it gives you some flexibility and depth and things like that, but I really don't like hydro bumps. Whenever it contacts the strike pad, it just... that noise reverberates through the cab and it drives me crazy. I hate that tapping whenever I'm on a trail and I'm not, you know, racing through the desert. I'm just trying to flex out on some rocks and stuff. So for that reason, I have fallen in love with these soft rubber Timbrin bump stops, and I plan on reusing those in some way. A while back, a friend of mine, David, sent me a set of bump cans that he wasn't going to use, and they look pretty sweet. I think that I can adapt those to the truck and then adapt the Timbrin bump into the can, and then whenever I go to sell this truck one day, if the next owner decides that they want to do hydro bumps, it'll be real easy for them. All they have to do is measure the right size and bolt them in. Now that we have brakes, we have bump stops, we have limit straps, we can work on finishing out the rear axle and then move on to building a temporary roll cage for this truck. So for the axle, we've got an air line that went to the old air B-locker that's going to now go to the new air B-locker. We've got, I put D and P because it's driver and passenger side wheel speed sensors, and those are going to go out here. And then I'm going to bend new metal brake line. I know that I could have modified this in a way that it would have worked, but it would have been real sloppy. So I decided to start from scratch. This is three 16ths line. This looks thicker, but it's just got like a coating on some of it. And then it's got the metric, the same size metric nut on the outside. I know that a lot of people probably bend all their brake line with this. I use a combination of a bending tool and just like a big socket. Sometimes I'll put two sockets in the vice or, you know, there's, there's a bunch of different ways that you can bend it. There's no wrong way as long as you don't kink it. So we're going to play around. We're going to see what works best, flare our ends and hook everything up. I actually have pretty good luck bending brake line with just a really big socket. I think this is an inch and a half socket and it's a good radius to follow without kinking anything. And if you've got decent quality brake line, usually you can bend back a little bit if you have to, and kind of twist it and tweak it in order to make all of your bends look good and fit the project correctly. And this project actually didn't use the bender at all. I literally just made every bend either by hand, or I just rolled it around this inch and a half socket. And I think the results turned out pretty good. This is kind of temporarily permanent. I need to trim down where the connection is between the soft line and the hard line and get some longer soft lines made. But for now, this is just going to be how it has to be. I need to get this thing on the road so that I can get it on the trail and do ultimate adventure. I have a feeling that when I show up, this won't be the only rig that's somewhat cobbled together. To be completely honest, I'm not worried about brakes and I'm not worried about all this other stuff that we're doing to the truck. I'm worried about the roll cage. I've talked with Christian Hazel a few times on the phone. He said that they're going to be flexible with me because they understand this is a brand new truck. I can't just destroy the interior building a cage. I ran a couple of ideas by him. We're going to cobble something together today. I'm going to send some pictures out and hopefully we can get pre-approval before we take this all the way to the start of ultimate adventure and do our tech inspection. Here's the situation. I've got my friend Ed here, Edward Shin on YouTube. He's over here because it's tradition if you're going to be on ultimate adventure to go all the way to the wire with the stuff that you have to get done on your truck. I leave for Europe tomorrow morning. It's noon. In order for me to go on ultimate adventure, I have to have a cage in this truck. I'm really lucky that Ed just went full time on YouTube. His schedule allowed him to come up and give me a hand today. What I need to do with the rest of my time today is build a cage. I also have... Actually, let's go over this real quick. I've got a set of skids from CBI that I need to install and I have a set of sliders from CBI that I need to install. I don't know when that's going to happen, but it has to happen before UA. Him and I are going to tackle the roll cage and then I'm going to leave for Europe tomorrow. Then when I get back, I guess I'm going to toss those on right before I drive this on the trailer and then it's going to be a nail biter. Let's get it. Let's get it. It's really important to me to keep the interior of this truck as factory as possible. I think that it feels and looks just fine factory and one day I'm going to sell this thing. I want to be able to get the most value whenever I sell this as possible. We're going to pull the whole rear interior out. We're going to basically use the existing seat bolts and whatnot to anchor down some big plates and then we're going to weld our cage to the big plates. We're going to keep this cage super simple because in my opinion, it's completely unnecessary with the rollover protection of modern vehicles. But in any case, we're totally going to make sure that we can meet or exceed the basic requirements in order to pass tech inspection. The three biggest challenges that we have ahead of us is one, we need to keep this cage somewhat far away from our side curtain airbags. I don't know how big those get whenever they fully expand, but I do know that if we get these too close to those side curtain airbags and we do roll over and those go off, I don't want those to explode in our ears. That'll make it more dangerous. We need to keep this cage behind the two front seats and I want to make it as tall as I can, but still be able to fit it in and out of the rear doors. I'm also going to make it to where we can separate this cage in a couple of different spots with some tube couplings that I got from Barnes 4WD and that should give us the flexibility to be able to weld everything outside of the truck so we don't damage the interior with any sort of spatter or anything and then we can bolt it back in once everything cools. When I bend using this machine, and this is a JD squared machine, I want to zero this thing out and make sure that we're starting from an accurate zero point. I shake the tube until right there it starts to firm up. Right there. Now I set my dial at zero. It's already on zero because I've done this before and so now I know that we have an accurate zero point so I can replicate the right degree of bend over and over. This is going to be a little complicated. If we just did two 90s it'd be really easy, but we're going to do a 65 and a 22 and a half, right? Whatever I wrote down to equal whatever is going to equal a 90 and if we're like a couple degrees off here or there it's going to make the whole thing look wonky. So this first bend we're going to bend to, I wrote them down on here, so in order we do 27.5 in order to make 20. Oh this is a 25. That makes sense. Not a 22 and a half. So yeah this is going to be, we're going to bend it to 27 and a half because there's going to be a little bit of like bend back whenever we release it on the machine. So right now we're going to go to 27 and a half. 27. This next part is really important. So the way that I do this is I use a small angle finder to try to square everything up as absolute zeroed in as possible because it's really easy to make a bend to where it's slightly twisted. I mean you won't even hardly be able to see it with the naked eye. Then when you put it on something flat it just rocks all over the place and so in order to keep that from happening what I have found works the best for me is instead of like trying to keep this part level because we're doing multiple bends. We've already got one bend here. What I do is I actually measure what the angle is on the die and so we're at two degree twist on the die and so I factor that two degree twist in with this piece here. So you want to come over here Ed. We're at 1.4 and I try to get it within half a degree. There's 2.1. I mean that's pretty hard to complain. That's really really close and that way again if we were to level this out with the ground. If we just wanted to zero that out it's going to put a little twist in it because it's actually being bent off the die. It's not being bent off the ground. This machine isn't completely level you know because it's just on wheels and so this is how I've been able to keep a certain degree of twist out of my pieces and when you're doing four bends like this it's really easy to make it wonky. This is a very important piece to the puzzle. This is going to allow us to unbolt the rear section of the cage from the front section because right now the hoop is already difficult to get in and out of there and this is completely temporary and so by using these we're going to be able to bolt in the rear stanchions essentially. Pretty sure that's what you call those. The rear stanchions and then whenever we go to remove the cage we can unbolt this section pull it out and it'll be three pieces that come out instead of just one. What do you think folks? Are we going to pass tech inspection? It's actually stout. It's in there man. This thing doesn't want to go anywhere. We'll see. I think we this should check off all the boxes for the bare minimum requirements for rollover protection and again I really trust the truck. These modern trucks are with side curtain airbags and everything are already designed well for rollovers so I'm not worried about safety but I am worried about driving all the way to the beginning of Ultimate Adventure getting turned away. Fingers crossed. It was a mad rush getting this done and it's still not done done. I need to install a driveshaft, install those CVI skids, the CVI sliders, but man I could not have done this without you. Dude, Nate, it's been a pleasure my friend. Seriously, having someone to help film makes this a way easier job so maybe I need to look into hiring a photographer at some point. Yeah or just keep calling my homie Ed to come give me a hand. So the next video on the Tacoma will be on Ultimate Adventure and I want it we're going to frame this video like it's done. I want this thing to be complete. I want it to be the end of the work that we do to it other than maintenance and fixing broken parts and stuff but I think that we finally have what would be considered a complete truck that you could go and do anything with. Camp, rock crawl, all of it and I mean it's the coolest looking thing I've ever built. Love Toyota or hate Toyota? The thing looks good. So thank you so much for watching. I'm a little delirious. I gotta go catch a plane and we'll see on the next one.