2001 Toyota Tacoma Prerunner - Project Venture Toy

All-Pro provided a Toyota IFS steering box that was freshly rebuilt and tapped with hydro assist ports in the form of two AN fittings. In the next project installment, we'll be adding a PSC hydraulic assist ram to the axle and plumbing it to the steering box.

Here you can see the steering box temporarily clamped in place to the outside of the driver side framerail. We pushed the D60 axle forward a bit more than normal for the kit design for better pumpkin clearance so our steering box had to move further forward as well. We did a little more sheetmetal trimming near the front clip body mount to clear the forward snout on the steering box.

With our steering box location finalized, we added the weld-on strengthening plates from the kit. One plate goes on each side of the framerail and then three DOM tubing sleeves are welded in to provide further support to keep the framerail from collapsing or distorting from steering box stress. With the steering box mounted, we also fabricated a small bolt-on support from the frame rail to the inner fender to add some support under the battery tray after we cut out some of the fender sheetmetal.

All-Pro provides a pitman arm for the Toyota box. However, our steering box location to accommodate the D60 configuration needed another modification for clearance. For this, we made use of a Sky Manufacturing flat billet machined pitman arm (top). We needed the pitman to be a bit longer to fully steer our D60 axle with the Toyota box, so we had Skip's Buggy & Fab Shop cannibalize the splined portion of the Sky pitman and create a new pitman -inch longer (bottom) to suit our application.

We replaced the factory steering shaft firewall plate with the new one from All-Pro and routed the new Borgeson steering shaft from the upper steering column down to the steering box. We found one issue with the splined Borgeson joint mating to the upper column near the steering wheel. Toyota didn't completely cut the splines all the way around the shaft. We used a small cut-off wheel on a Dremel tool to cut the extra two splines we needed on the shaft.

The steering shaft was mated to the splined input of the steering box without issue using a Borgeson needle bearing joint.

Budbuilt machined custom length tie rod and draglink tubes for us from 1.25x0.25-inch wall DOM tubing. They typically build the beefier rods for Toyota solid axles but were able to provide us with the pieces for our D60 setup.

At the axle steering arm points we used FK brand 4130 chromoly rod ends with Teflon liners. These should provide plenty of linkage strength and the liners will keep the action smooth and provide good wear resistance for this dirty application. Budbuilt tapped some of the tubing for the 7/8-inch rod ends and one draglink end was tapped to accommodate the 7/8-inch shank of a 1-ton tie rod end.

We mounted the draglink over the tie rod using the FK rod ends and bolted them to the drilled steering arms in a double shear configuration. The draglink also utilizes high misalignment spacers to handle the steering rod angle during suspension droop.