Wits' End

09/03/2020

Uh oh, trouble showed up 😳
vader and Chiclé the street meat

09/02/2020

I’m not proud of this but it was necessary for the time being.

This turbo truck lived in South Carolina for 22 years before I bought it drove it to the West Coast. Now I say this because rust is a crazy real issue for non-west coast trucks but I got lucky.

One of the things that eventually needs to be take care of is the roof rack residual rust. The truck is mostly perfect except for the rust on the OEM lame ass roof rack. So f’ing annoying. Everyone has to to deal with this at some level. Three of the legs were fine but passenger front shoes signs of rust under the paint. Boo. I’ll have to deal with that later.

For now I just need to deal with the existing holes where the factory rivnuts are in the roof. Each needs to be dealt with before the rain starts. I took the easy way out for the time being. I just used EXTRA wide button head screws with UV stable rubber washers. The ID of the washers need to go around the outside of the rivnuts because they sit proud of the roof. The flanged stainless bolts need to squeeze the rubber washer to create a positive seal to prevent water intrusion. It’s not super sexy but it absolutely solves the issue until I can take care of the rust at another time in the very distant future 😜

09/02/2020

Quick tip:
When trying to figure out placement of accessories on doors, hoods, and hatches, it’s best to find out how much room you have to work with.

Well, the easiest and cheapest way to *know* is to put some into a ziplock bag and then close the door or hood or hatch to get a complete view of the room you have to work with. In this case we just needed to verify that some hatch lights would fit in the hatch space that we planned for. Turns out we had plenty of room.

09/01/2020

Turns out FaceBook doesn’t like Cancer posts 🤬

09/01/2020

Second round of chemo is in the books. Nurses implanted a little device on her arm that injects her in exactly 24hrs. It’s a shot that gives her immune system a turbo boost.

Day started out strong but ended with affects of chemo really hitting her hard. She’s hurting for sure. It’s hard to just sit here and watch her figure out her medication regimen for the night. It’s a lot. We have trash bag and towels at the ready. Tomorrow is a new day.

08/31/2020

Wits' End - End of August Product Mentions and Goings On -

Wits' End- End of August Product Mentions and Goings On

08/30/2020

Another one to add to the list of crap that four people might find useful. Redid all my battery cables and cleaned up all the loom. But I made the starter cable longer to keep it looser and decided to use the little useless tab on the charcoal canister as a clamp for the battery cable.

You know that useless piece of metal hanging off the bracket on the charcoal canister? I wanted it to be slightly less useless. Does the job perfectly. @ Medford, Oregon

08/29/2020

Had a request from a customer to do an install for the WeBoost cell phone booster system. Since I’d never installed one before I figured I’d make the mistakes on my turbo truck first before I screw it up on a customer’s. Glad the turbo was the test mule. Spent way too much time trying to figure out a very clean install. Mounting it in the was the best route.

The inboard antennae was routed to the front of the drawers and the outboard one was mounted to the back of the roof rack.

Special thanks to for getting three systems out to me so quickly. @ Medford, Oregon

08/29/2020

And so it begins...

We knew it was going to happen but just wasn’t sure when. Well it’s been nearly three weeks since Jessi’s first chemo treatment and her hair is now starting to fall out. From this point on it will likely accelerate until she decides to say f**k it and just have me shave her head. I’m a pro at that. Years of experience.

The hair doesn’t just pull out from the roots in clumps. The hair that comes out has already fallen out but just lays with her hair that hasn’t fallen out yet. I wouldn’t call it “clumps” as others refer to it. Clumps sounds like it’s unkempt hair. You just run a brush thru and with every stroke a wad of hair needs to be removed from the brush.

I thought for sure she would be more emotional about it but she’s taken it in stride. Realizing that once her chemo is done around Thanksgiving time that it’ll just grown back.

But the reality of what her hair is doing I don’t think has fully set it. Today her hair is beautiful and feels soft. Tomorrow will be here in a flash.

We met with the oncologist yesterday to prep for chemo on Monday. All of her blood work came back normal which is awesome. We went thru all the other scenarios we have to look forward to. Right now Jessi needs to stay active and eat. Eat a lot. She’s nearly 6ft tall but only 117lb. 🤯

08/27/2020

So you have ARB air lockers installed in your Land Cruiser. Yay! But now you have these three ugly Carling-type switches that stick out of your dash like big, out of place, plastic pimples in your otherwise pristine dash. Well, as it turns out you can actually eliminate two of those eye sore switches and use an OEM "lust worthy" locker dial instead and use it the way Toyota intended.

This basic wiring kit includes what is needed to convert your switches to OEM dial and keeps it as plug and play as possible. You do have some cutting and crimping to do to finalize it.

I of course include all part numbers in case you don’t my shenanigans and just want to do it yourself 🙄

Instructions:
• At the ARB locker solenoids:
The pinouts of the two wires going to each of the locker solenoids needs to be swapped. The terminals have a small metal tab that can be pressed aside using a terminal pin tool and the terminals can be pulled out the back of the connector. Both black wires needs to go at the top/wide-end of the connector "T's" and the yellow and dark green wires need to go to the bottoms of the connector "T's" respectively.

• At the compressor:
The small black wire going to the small two wire (black and purple) connector that feeds into the compressor needs to be cut as far away from the compressor and as close to the wiring harness as possible. The end going into the harness needs to be capped off to protect it from shorting out. This is done by placing the supplied piece of heat-shrink over the cut wire. Half of the heat-shrink should hang over then heat the heat-shrink and pinch the end of the open heat-shrink to get the adhesive to adhere to itself. The black wire going to the compressor then needs to be crimped into the supplied black ground wire and connected to a ground source.

• At the ARB switches:
The ARB compressor's "isolation" switch is now the only switch that will be used. The red wire with yellow stripe needs to be connected from an ignition 12v+ source directly to pin-2 on the compressor switch. The solid red wire needs to be connected to the black and red wires at the four wire (dark green, black, red, and yellow) connector and then connected to pin-3 on the compressor switch. The blue wire with a white stripe needs to be connected from a dash illumination source directly to pin-6 on the compressor switch. Pins-7 and -8 on the compressor switch need to be connected to a ground source.

• At the supplied harness:
Connect the red wire with the crimp connector of the supplied harness to the yellow wire going to the ARB harness as pictured. Connect the blue wire with the crimp connector of the supplied harness to the dark green wire going to the ARB harness as pictured. Connect the black wire with the ring terminal to a ground source (drivers kick panel most likely).

• Behind the instrument cluster:
Remove the instrument cluster from the dash. Insert the two light bulbs into the front and rear diff lock indicator light holes in the back of the instrument cluster. You can locate these by holding the combination meter to a light source to see which are the ones for the lockers. In the wire connector that is farthest to the passenger side behind the instrument cluster, remove the two plastic inserts to gain access to the terminals. Remove the terminal with the white wire at position 10 and replace it with the pin on the red wire of the supplied harness. Remove the terminal with the green wire with a red stripe at position 9 and replace it with the pin on the blue wire from the supplied harness. Protect the two terminals you removed from the connector before reinstalling the instrument cluster by wrapping with electrical tape separately.

Notes:
The black wire in the ARB harness is a ground wire, it's being cut near the compressor to retain that part as a ground and the rest of it is being switched over to positive 12 volts so that the factory diff lock switch can provide switched ground to the solenoids and switched ground to the indicator lights on the dash. This follows the negative grounding found throughout Toyota vehicles.

If your p***s is so small that you insist upon being able to lock the front diff without locking the rear diff, simply put a single pole single throw switch of your choosing inline from pin 1 of the locker switch before the wire T's off to go to the rear diff indicator light on the dash and the rear diff solenoid. With the switch in the off position the rear locker circuit will not function but the front locker circuit will.

08/27/2020

Ever heard of galvanic corrosion? Well after seeing what kind of damage it can do inside of our engines, I decided I really needed to do something about it.

Here is the start of what will be a solution for all 80 series owners and right after, 100 owners. Corrosion is a huge issue especially if you have an aluminum radiator.

One way to remedy it is to use a sacrificial anode. In this case zinc because it’s a less noble metal. With the coolant flowing (the electrolyte) ions will always try to pull electrons from weaker dissimilar metals. In our case, aluminum. Well introducing zinc makes the ions favor corroding the zinc instead of aluminum.

Right now this piece is ready but I still need to ground it for those with plastic tanks. Almost there.

Feedback welcome. @ Medford, Oregon

P.S. it’s designed for a 10mm wrench in the head.

08/27/2020

On the methanol kit, I've got everything worked out but its not quite production ready because its not as bolt-on as I'd like it to be yet. Here is a simple mounting bracket solution for the boost switch. Its a simple hobb's switch. Its adjustable but I'll be setting them all here before they go out. Switch is normally off and once boost hits 2psi it connects to ground which turns on the pump. Let off the gas pedal and the throttle plate closes so no boost so the switch disconnects ground. Its crazy simple.

The issue was just about the mounting of the switch. A simple mount was made and it secures the switch to the unused bracket off the MAF. Works perfectly. I'll be making up a batch of these to go with the eventually kit. @ Medford, Oregon