I'm working on my friends 01 taco and he's got some real issues up front.
No four wheel drive. He says it all started after his front wheels left the ground and he came down hard on his front skid plate on a curb.
I took the actuator out and held it in my hand with the wiring harness plugged in. Told him to shift back and forth between 2h and 4h. Fork moves as it should.
This leaves only one place for the problem. In the axle right?
All the splines look good on the shift collar and on both the drive gears that it slides over. There is no excessive gap between the shift fork and collar. Toyota dealer says the max should be .035. (I couldn't even get a .020 feeler in there, so thats fine.)
Is it at all possible to have an impact so hard that it knocks the collar out of the fork? Cuz that's the only thing I can see that could have happened.