March of Madness!!!

I'll admit, considering I had just finished the truck about a week and a half before I was to leave cross country for school, I was a little worried about how good of a job I did putting it together. I had been building racecars on my school's FSAE team for three years before this, but this truck was (mostly) a solo job done in two months, so yeah, I was a little apprehensive.

To try and convince myself (and my parents) that my truck was up to the task of driving the 3000+ miles all the way to Rhode Island from Oregon, I took the truck on a shake down trip to Newport,OR and back (roughly 200 miles round trip) with a friend just to see what broke and what didn't. In the end only a part of one of the rear fenders rattled loose and ripped off the truck. A quick trip to Lowes for a piece of sheet metal, some quick cutting, drilling, and pop pop pop riviting and the fender was like new again.

I did a quick sand down job on the truck itself and gave it a matte black paint job with some red detailing so it would conform to my preferred color scheme for any and all things I own. I was now as ready as I could be for the drive across the country

This is it, day of departure, fresh coat of spray paint on it. the plan for the first leg of the trip was to drive the truck a short 7 hour leg across Oregon to meet up with my parents (who had left the day prior) at my Aunt and Uncle's house in eastern Oregon. Logic being that if I got stuck or broke down anywhere they could conceivably tow me back home on their way back. However The Revenant did just fine, and made the trip without complaint

First leg of the trip down, the whole rest of the country ahead....

Here she is in Yellowstone, a day later, that night on the way into North Dakota the first, unusual sounds began...

Because the dually axle was designed for 2wd trucks, it's e-brake system was different than the system Toyota used on it's 4x4 trucks. Neither system was compatible with the other, because where the 2WD e-brake system uses two cables connected behind the transmission the 4x4 system uses one cable routed along the frame rails. To remedy this I purchased a transfer case mounted parking disk brake kit that is used by the off-roading community who don't want cables that might get snagged on things on their axles. Little did I know that this system now caused my transfer case to leak because it required the replacement of several transfer case bolts.

After spending about an hour in an off highway parking lot determining this, and after getting hot transmission fluid on my hands checking the fluid levels in the transmission, I consulted my truck repair manual, and refilled the transfer case with new fluid and was on my way

Now knowing this was something i would need to fix later I bought a gallon of 80W-90 gear oil and went on my way

The transfer case leak was the only issue I had during that first trip cross country. I made it to school on "move-in-day" and while getting several questioning looks from other students and more than a few parents I unloaded my pickup and moved into my dorm

The truck continued to preform well during the school year, the exhaust broke loose of it's mounting and I decided to fix it by routing it up the side as a smoke stack, because, well STACKS ARE AWESOME!!!! But it wasn't until Febuary of 2013 that The Revenant really got to show me what it was made of.

At the beginning of February of 2013 the north east got hammered with snow, Rhode Island was no exception. I was down at the FSAE shop when the snow started to fall and by the time I was heading home that night quite a bit had fallen, I was greeted to this as I walked outside

Apparently people were advised not to drive that night because of the insane snow fall, but like a good college student I promptly ignored that advice, I had four wheel drive after all.

After taking a few of my friends back up to campus from the shop I met up with another friend of mine who also had a 4x4, it didn't take long for us to decide to go hooning around campus in the snow because why not? so we did just that and drove around campus scaring the pants off other students who were walking in the middle of the road in a stupor because the power had gone out at that point. The term "deer-in-the-headlights" took on a whole new meaning that night. Seeing two trucks driving around in 8 inches of snow that weren't snow plows was apparently the last thing any of those wandering students were expecting.

Around 1a.m. we decided to call it quits

Driving around in the snow was great, but I did nearly get stuck a few times in some of the deeper drifts and that made me realize that the little bumper from the orignal 2wd truck I had on the truck at the time wasn't enough, it was time to make something absolutely bonkers, off-the-wall, madness style. After a late night sketching and revisiting my childhood dream truck and looking at "cow-catcher" guards on old locomotives, I came up with what I call the "Demon bumper 1.0"

During spring break, the demon bumper jumped from the sketch pad into reality, all 60lbs of it...

I built it around a large 4inch steel tube I found lying around that nobody was using, and cut nearly everything else out of a large 1/4 inch plate I had been using to make my swords out of (for those of you who don't know, rather than party, I made swords for fun in college)

These were some of the bits after cutting them out of the plate with the acetylene torch

At this point it was pointed out to me by a friend who was in the shop at the time that this bumper might not be entirely legal for the road...

Taking my friends advice I rounded off some of the points so that any passers by who might brush up against the bumper wouldn't start bleeding.

I ended up making a few adjustments while I was making it, mainly leaving the center section devoid of the vertical slats I was going to weld in, this should allow me to easily modify it in the future so I could possibly integrate a winch into it

Mounted

Because everything looks better once you add horns. Now my truck was finally starting to look like the mad machine I had always dreamed of driving.

Shortly after graduation the timing guides in the engine went, and I needed to replace the timing chain and timing cover because the chain had eaten away a good chunk of it. I decided that it would be a good idea to upgrade from a single row timing chain to a double row timing chain, hopefully eliminating the need to replace the timing chain ever again.

After installing the new timing chain, water pump, and oil pump (the kit I purchased came with these upgrades as well) I began my preparations to drive back home to Oregon,

This involved making a rack for my truck topper that could transport my custom bike.

The drive back home consisted of exactly zero mechanical problems

However, with the 1100lb load I had in the truck this time going home (one might notice it is a bit more loaded down than on the trip over), physics pointed out something interesting to me. While the rear axle and suspension and chassis had no problem with the load, the powertrain didn't like it so much. 100 horsepower just isn't enough to haul that kind of load up the Rockies. That is 100 hp at sea level, elevations on this trip were between 8000 and 9000 feet. Going up the mountains I had my little 22RE floored, pedal to the metal, and even then I had to be shifting from 4th to 3rd and back to 4th as I would slowly loose speed in 4th going up the passes, at around 35mph I would shift down to 3rd until i hit 45-47mph and would repeat that process until I made it up whatever incline I had to climb. The cooling system worked great, my engine never even came close to overheating in fact the engine temperature barely even went up at all even under this constant heavy loading. On the way down I would pick up as much speed as safely could, hitting about 85 in 5th to hopefully gain what I was calling a "gravity boost" (law of conservation of energy and momentum in reality, but gravity boost sounds more fun to say) up the next incline.

Driving 35 mph on a highway at full throttle is really no way to go, and it can be quite annoying to someone who likes to drive more... assertively... than most. It was on these up and down highway passes that I decided a naturally aspirated 2.4L inline four cylinder engine just wasn't enough for my mad truck.

Keeping in mind that this truck is to be the "3500 series" to the hilux's "1500 series", or a mini heavy duty truck, and that I wanted to keep everything i added to the truck within the Toyota family (because plopping in an American V8 is just stupid easy and about a million people have done that). I began to wonder what engine does Toyota or a Toyota group company make that could be swapped into The Revenant and could make reliable, ridiculous power and torque for a mini-truck....