2001 Toyota Tacoma Prerunner - Project Venture Toy - Tech

We also used a Powertank inflator when airing up our tires. This unit has a quick connect nipple to hook to our regular hose and then has a clip-on air chuck. In between is a nice 2.5-inch liquid filled gauge and air control valve. The valve allows you to fill, bleed, or check pressure. The pigtail air hose also allows you additional safety to keep your hands away from the beadlock rings when filling.

We wanted to be able to effortlessly steer our 37s on the trail or in the rocks, so we chose to add a hydro assist setup to our truck. Performance Steering Components (PSC) offers all the components we needed to replace our stock pump, increase fluid capacity and cooling, and add an assist ram to boost the power of our steering.

We'll be running a PT-10 CO2 Powertank on this truck for on-board air duties. We got their latest system with the XP300 PRO series regulator. We seated the tire beads with the Powertank without issue. We compared the new fast flow setup to our 110V home compressor to see how each inflated a 37-inch tire from 15 to 30 psi. The Powertank did it in about 45 seconds compared to a 75-second time for our 2HP compressor.

We replaced our stock power steering pump (right) with a PSC high flow TC type pump (left) on our 3.4L engine using the stock hardware. The new pump uses a billet aluminum underdrive pulley that will help keep the steering pump pressure up at lower engine speeds. We also swapped to a shorter pump belt to accommodate the smaller pulley.

We tucked the PSC remote aluminum reservoir between the air filter housing and the front sheetmetal cowl using the supplied clamp mount. This allows us an easy access point to the filler cap and also positions the canister above the pump body.

We opted for a 1.5x8-inch hydro assist cylinder. PSC offers several larger bore cylinders but we felt the smaller diameter would keep our steering responsive for road use without overpowering the movement and losing all road feel at the steering wheel. The 8-inch length was chosen to match the linear travel of our D60 tie rod.

We used the spherical rod ends provided with the PSC cylinder and welded the mount tabs to our tie rod to capture the cylinder rod end, and fabricated a larger mount to secure the cylinder body to our axle tubing. The addition of the PSC assist kit will take a lot of strain off our steering box, linkage components, and the framerail where the steering box is mounted.

The final piece of the steering puzzle was the addition of a Derale billet cooler. PSC prefers using these where possible as they are durable, heat efficient, and can mount in relatively small spaces. We were able to tuck ours in front of the radiator and then plumbed everything together with the supplied fittings and hoses.

We gathered up parts to complete our brake conversion. We fabricated an adapter plate from half-inch aluminum stock to allow us to mate the two-bolt Chevy master cylinder flange to the four-bolt dual Toyota booster. We required several plumbing adapters and some hard line to route fluid from the master down to lines running to the front and rear brakes. We added 2-pound residual valves for our discs and an adjustable proportioning valve to the rear circuit to reduce the line pressure going to those calipers.