The Dirt King lower arms come with spherical bearing antisway bar links. Although a lot of off-road people remove the sway bars because they want more articulation, we believe in running them. Our truck is too big for technical trail running and we prefer fast dirt road and desert driving to trail crawling anyway. The swaybars help handling in this sort of driving and make a huge difference on the pavement. Desert race trucks and short course trucks run sway bars and so do we.
We everything installed, we aligned the suspension to have 1.5 degrees negative camber, 3 degrees positive caster, and zero toe. The stock truck only has about one degree of caster so 3 is a big improvement.
Here is everything looking cool before we put the skid plate back on. Lots of strength and decent travel are now available.
Up top, everything looks pretty sanitary.
Our suspension is strong and functional. Not mall crawler bro dozer.
We did some extensive testing on and off-road. One of the things is all of the new large-diameter spherical bearings were very tight and made the steering feel like it was binding at first. This took a few hundred street and off-road miles to break-in. Once they broke in everything was awesome. Even though our truck has extensive suspension mods it looks pretty much stock at first glance just the way we like it!
5 comments
Such an awesome shop truck. If I still lived in california I would love to have you work on my regular cab Taco work truck. Currently sitting pretty with a Ute flat bed, bilstein trd pro spec dampers, OME leaf pack, & lightweight scs wheels, and corbeau GTS2 seats to avoid scoliosis. Suspension is good enough but still leaves a bit to be desired
I used to sell those trucks. I was always surprised how much people would pay for a used Taco, when they could get a Tundra. They were paying more for the old Tacos than the new ones. I never understood that, at all. Especially, considering the E-diff and traction modes.
The tacoma was more practical and easier on the wallet for many folks. First gen tacomas have a cult following and not everyone is on the wagon with the pricier new tacomas. What’s not impressive is the gas mileage on the newer tacomas and tundras lol.
That’s interesting. I never knew why people loved the old Tacos. I guess technology isn’t everything for some people. Truly disappointing about the fuel economy, though.
The one thing that is impressive is the auto loans they have these days, which are basically mini-mortgages. I know it’s a bit of a scam, though. It gets you to buy something that you really can’t afford.
I went with a Tacoma because of the size. Full-size trucks are too damn big. A Tacoma is pretty much the smallest thing you can get nowadays. If someone offered a compact truck I would have gone that way but they’re all deader than the dinosaurs.