Interior panels are a breeze to remove.

Tips:

The plastic tabs that go into the alligator clips that hold the headliner and front pillar trim on are probably brittle. Take your time pulling those trim pieces off.

keep a pair of needle-nose pliers handy to extract the alligator clips from the slots in the sheet metal.

Measure out the slots in the sheet metal and order new clips online (the largest that will fit). The smaller ones have a tendency to rattle a bit. I was able to get a box of 100 from a local body shop.

Other than that, it took maybe 15 mins to completely strip the interior.

The original A/C vents were sloppy and rattled.
Picked up a dash with tight vents, perfect door rubber seal, & gauge cluster.

$50

Smoking deal.

I love ALL Toyota trucks. The 88 is mega cool.

Feel free to ask away, I’d love to answer any questions!

I have! To be honest, I keep going back to this one yard that has a BEAUTIFUL T100 that was scrapped just because of the rear axle. Not much left anymore, but I’m hoping to snatch the frame off of it before it goes to the crusher.

It might be a really SMALL market, but I’m sure there are plenty of people going insane over their sloppy air vents.

These little pieces are inserts that are what provide tension on the vents up and down swivel.

they are almost ALL, on any truck I have taken apart, cracked, broken, missing, or completely worn out.

I managed to get a full set by scalping two full dashboards.

Inserting them, and then dropping epoxy resin in the gap. Hopefully this will do the trick for another couple decades.

I noticed that on both dashes, the windshield defroster vent assembly is not actually sealed to the dash pad, allowing large amounts of air to be able to escape the vents before even making it to the windshield.

So I’m just using some extra Copper RTV I had laying around to run an ugly (but effective) finger bead of sealant to provide an airtight seal. This should be a major improvement of airflow over stock.

Last piece of sound deadening went in.

I think it will be an even tie of keeping sound in / keeping sound out / keeping beer cold / keeping women hot / and hushing the screams in crowded parking lots.

Once again, RockAuto had an unbeatable deal on a front end refresh.

More to come!

Fastest way to get it done is to take the whole assembly out in one piece.

This also allows you to get some measurements from center to center on the ends so when you put it back together it’s not TOTALLY way out of alignment.

This should allow you to get down the road safely enough to get an alignment on it when it’s back together.

These MOOG tie rod ends are way better than stock, plus they’re greasable.

I measured out the stock ends.

Driver side = 337mm
Pass side = 320mm

The different between the two ends being 17mm.

My thought process is to split the difference. (Add 8mm to the pass side and take away 8mm from the driver side)

A 8mm shift of the tie bar won’t even matter in the damper or stabilizer travel.

If it throws off the “center” on the steering wheel, I’ll just move the pitman arm a couple teeth to recenter everything at zero.

Then I can make the fine adjustments to the tie rods when I actually do the alignment.

But overall, I’m thinking the tie rods should be in the neighborhood of 328mm on each side from center to center.

Time to put in some work on the interior while the tie rod is at the powdercoater.

It took me a year to get this fabric. Already the most expensive part on the build, lol.

Fingers crossed that I still know how to run a sewing machine.

If it turns out like I envision it, the interior is going to be “next level”. Lol...

Took a break from sewing the headliner.
Got the linkage assembled this AM.

Ready to go back in.

Seriously: project is fantastic to date.👍

If this isn’t an angle, I don’t know what is...