Well after a year of moving it from my garage, to my storage unit, to my garage, to my storage unit, and finally back to my garage, Yota87Truck and I finally got around to throwing the locking axle under my truck. When I bought the axle last year I did some measuring and thought that I had bought the same axle I had under my truck already, that someone had modified to accept the elocker 3rd member from a newer 4runner or Tacoma... but what we found when we looked a little bit closer (and by that I mean Yota87Truck took one look at it and saw it immediately) was that it was actually an IFS gen truck axle modified to fit the e locker. The axle case was beefier, the axle itself was wider, and that the mounts for the e brake cables and brake lines are still (for the most part) the same as my stock axle. Pleasant surprise! This meant that I no longer had to use the wheel spacers on the back axle to fit the newer Toyota rims I have on the truck. It also meant that the getting the ubolts to seat at the bottom of the leaf springs required a 5 pound sledge and repeated convincing. We got it in the end though...





While I was under the truck last week I ran the numbers and ordered the proper shims to get my axle to the right angle with the new dual case setup and it seems to have eliminated a lot of my vibration issues. I still need to do it with the front setup, but for now I'm happy to have the rear fixed. The other part of the new axle that was fun was extending the parking brake cable for the new axle width. We were able to replace the length of cable rope on the passengers side with a slightly longer piece, using a Swaging tool and the proper fittings. This really gave it the "factory" feel and retained the functionality of the parking brake, and avoided the circus of grafting in a longer piece of cable rope in with crimps like the last time I did this swap. The new bigger drums in the rear also helped my stopping A LOT! I know the rear brakes don't do much, but my old rears must not have been doing anything because I feel like I halved my braking distance. We also found what appeared to be water in the brake line, which could have also explained the weird braking issues I had.





We're planning on running to Moab tomorrow for some light testing of the new setup. I am also going to be wiring up the e locker in the next couple of weeks. For now I will manually engage the locker, but it should get me by until I can get my setup figured out.