The samurai build

man that looks great, hope to see it on the trails soon

Great Job

I was slacking on the pictures.. heres where I am as of last night. Actualy the Bung for the high steer kit is incorrect and they sent me the wrong one. So I will be makign a call today.



T-case in snatch, to the right is the Toyota to Sami intermediate shaft balanced by A1. the toyota side has a standard 1310 Ujoint with a new yoke.

Radiator Mock up with Power steering box

what I came home too last night. LROR high steer kit

looks good when do you think you will be done

mdcj7 wrote:

looks good when do you think you will be done

I am really trying for it to be trail ready come Aug 6th. Tht is the day for Gonzookin which is an all suzuki run at RC. I won't be done-done for a couple months I would guess but at least ill be able to hit the trails! Really scrambling now to finish up some stuff. Actually just to a break to check my phone. I'm putting the high steer kit on now. The main things to finish is the steering which includes drilling and sleeving the frame for the box. Cutting and welding up a new steering rod.putting radiator and electric fan in. Fabing up transfercase mounts/brackets, then welding up some square driveshafts.. have all the parts. Just a lot of work lol

Have you ever felt like quiting even though you know you are so close? Well that was today. Murphys law. Need to put a 3rd row pulley on, but only way to do that is to make sure the crank doesnt spin. so i thought, good time to start on the driveshafts. well when measuring for the rear it seems that the angle is just so steep I need to run a cv style shaft and not just the regular square driveshaft like Id planed. so I took the toyota shaft and measured. looks like its about 6in too long. but this is all a guess because I really am not fully understanding how a cv shaft works without a spline. allthough when I measured for the driveshaft, even at full flex stuff etc, it never went over 3/4 of an in difference in length. so im guessing I wouldnt have needed very much spline anyway. I then moved onto the front. after I cut the tubes to length. I checked to see if they slid well. only when in about 4 inchs and they seemed to do fine. welded each of my ends up. go to put them together and they go in about 2 inch and then stuck. I even sanded the outside of the inner shaft just so i Knew it was smooth... the outer shaft inner wall on the other hand I just blew out with an air hose... So now i have two shafts stuck together that is about 5 ft tall. So I then gave up on the shafts and hoped I would have better luck with the steering box since I found my larger $18 bit I bought just for the leaf spring hangers.... I then proceeded to snap the tip of the bit off and bent the bit. moved onto the sleeves. got 3 out of the 4 sleeves to line up well. This is where I stopped. all of that took about 5 hours.. In the end I really dont feel like I got anything accomplished.

We shall see about the zuk run...

even a bad day fishing is better than a day at the good ole job.

Well, It looks like I wont be making my deadline like I wanted too. But I am still going up with a friend of mine who has a little tin top sami. I actually found him this sami about 9 months ago and he has yet to been offroad with it. Hes ridin with me a couple times when mine used to be his size but this should be a little challenge for him.. Look forward to being his spotter. (this is what I keep telling myself lol) I am hoping the sami will be done by Big dogs main jambo in September. My other club (HRC) is planning on trying to make this run down there. Not sure if Gore is really a good place to debut a rig but I guess we will see. Is anyone else planning on going up to RC before the main jambo? or even going to the main jambo?

On Aug 14 two of use are running the Save the TA TA run and on the 15 we have three of use running trails.

Yea Topless for TaTa's Chantelle is putting on. Yea I still probably wont be ready in time for that.. But it is a good run. She used to be Secretary for HRC last year when the 1st one was. Good run for a great cause.

Nothing too exciting. Got my front driveshaft in. Had to change out the toyota U-joint. I also decided to use the flange that originally bolted to the T-case and not to the axle for a couple of reasons. the main one was that the Ujoint was basically rust welded in the flange that was at the axle. It was also a little beat up. I took a picture but of course left my phone at home so I cant upload it. I like the driveshaft angle and the driveshaft even though its a tad long, It looks pretty well tucked up underneath. When I make my flat belly skid I should be able to get a good amount of it protected. I also got the radiator put in. No lines are hooked up yet since I still need to pull the front clip out a little and work on the steering. good weekend to say the least.

Got the power steering box bolted up and the steering shaft made. So now I can sit in the rig and turn the steering wheel and watch the pitman arm move lol For the Drag link I am speaking with LROR right now and going to get them to custom make me a drag link. My original plan was to just cut the drag link that came in the kit and put in a weld-in bung. Well I was told the bung should slip right in... it doesnt considering the drag link really wasnt made to do that.. So I would have to drill the drag link to the correct size.. which just so happens to be close to an inch.. I dont have this large of bit.. I also found that the FJ80 tie rod really doesnt have a good fit on the Isuzu box. So my current plan is (and im going to discuss this over with chris from LROR) is to have a drag link made with the FJ80 TRE on the steering arm end and a Heim joint on the steering box side. I think this will be my strongest setup. Picked up some exhaust stuff last night so that will probably be tonights project.

if you put a heim joint on the pitman arm make sure you use a last chance washer on it. This will keep you from loosing steering completely if the heim falls apart. Its just a large washer on the bottom of the bolt

Will do, thanks for the suggestion!

Custom Drag link on order. and the original being sent back. Getting credit for it so thats pretty cool. The new custom drag link is only about $25 more than the original one i ordered. so not to shabby! Hooked up the rear of the cooling system to the heater. decided instead of making it just a closed circuit inside the engine compartment, a little heat and defrost might be nice. Going to hook up a switch for the fan on the heater core. I also finished welding up a new down pipe for the exhuast. The stock down pipe on the toyota tried to turn righ into the firewall of the zuk. Got all my pieces for my exhaust so that might be one of the next things on the list. I really need to put the power steering pump on and look into getting lines made to connect the box and pump.

Rob and I did some work on the sami last night. Got the exhaust run. Originally we were just going to do the basic exhaust and let it exit out the rear but I really didnt like where the muffler would have had to have gone for it to do so. well I told rob originally I would love for the exhaust to exit in front of the rear tire that way i dont have to mess with tucking it up in the rear and making sure its out of the way of everything etc etc... well we couldnt exit it infront of the drivers side tire because there was no where to put the muffler. Rob came up with an idea to go across the width of the vehicle and to tuck it up under the floor. It now exits in front of the passeneger rear tire. not that this helps offroading or anything but the way we have it, I will need to cut a hole in the sheet metal side have a tip come out.. I think it will look pretty neat. After that we cut the metal for the rear floor. Also cut my thumb pretty good on the sheet metal. I did it when I was being impatient and trying to move the whole sheet bymyself. when we put the floor on we decided we needed to add a little bit more strength to the floor so we welded in some U angle steel we had lying around in the shop. I wanted to paint the bottom of the floor to get it over with because I knew I would be lazy later on, so while we were waiting for the floor to dry Rob got on a painting frenzy and just started spraying my rig...so I joined in and we re-primered and then painted black the rear of the cage, and body framing. It was a good night. Tonights agenda will be screwing the floor down. I also brought the gas tank so I will put a fitting in that, run the lines and hopefully fire it up and see how that new exhaust sounds!

Havent updated in awhile. I got the power steering pump on and the drag link installed. Came to a little problem I feared would happen but had to wait until it all was actually together. It seems that the isuzu steering box im using, the pitman arm is a tad short. full turn I really only have 3/4 of my turning radius. Ive been on the isuzu boards and searched all over google with no luck in finding an extended pitman arm that is either made or would work on the box. There isnt that much support for isuzu offroad. So my next option is to use the shorter steering arms LROR sells to work with the sami and trak/kick steering box's... In all honesty It didnt really occur to me about pitman arm length till I started reading on some of the isuzu boards about the box. From what ive read this is a strong little box, it just has a short pitman arm. So my plan is to call up Sean at LROR and see if he will swap me the yota steering arms for the yota/zuki arms. He already did it on the drag link and gave me credit so more then likely he will do i for these. Really good guys over there. great service.. all though im talking to a mostly jeep crew, if any of you were to get into zuki or yota stuff, he is almost the one stop shop for prices and service. Next the plan is to try to track down the pully i need for the power steering setup. the crazy rays up here only has V6 yota's. Im getting real close and im getting pretty happy about it!

if you extend your drag link will that get you what you want for a truning radius. That is how I adjusted mine. if your pitman arm is center that you extend it unitl you hit your stop it should travel the same distance going the other way.

I'm afraid I'm not following. I centered my steering box and centered the wheels, then I just put the drag link in at that length. Is there another way to do it? I called Dan at LROR today and he said it wouldn't be a problem to swap the steerin arms. This should fix the problem.

the more I think about it you are right mine may have pull full travel but didnot push far enough.