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That speaker panel looks awesome! Seeing your attention to detail, that shit must have driven you insane unfinished for almost two years.
It definitely did. I liked the look for the most part since I put the JL grille over the sub to cover the dust cap, but it always bothered me that it looked unfinished.
Not much to update, have barely driven in the last month or so. I ended up having to throw my battery tender on the truck since it's basically in storage.
I also have a full tank for the last month and a half so I threw in some Stabil to preserve the gas and help keep everything fresh.
Other than that, just vacuumed out all the dog hair today. Definitely updates coming soon though
Been working on a few small mods on the truck, I just finished this one up yesterday. So I have the center console safe, and I want to keep a pistol in there, however I've never been able to really see the combination lock at night or have good visibility to it in the dark or when I go to concerts, etc. So a member on my 4Runner forum posted this solution and I knew that I had to do it. I didn't even have to remove the safe, just pop off the rear panel on the console.
Then remove the 6 screws for the arm rest hinge
Screws removed
And here's my center console armrest before
Quick tear down
And here's a before of where I'll be mounting the lights
Finding center and marking my holes, I had to stagger them back a bit in order to clear the rear of the panel
And here's 1 LED bolt light test fit
And the other side
And here they are mounted and installed. I used Oznium 11 mm LED bolts with cool white LED's
And testing on the battery to make sure they work
The cool part about this mod is the use of a mercury switch, so it only turns on the light after raising 45 deg or higher, I also mounted it at about 15 deg so that normal driving won't trigger the switch. I decided to wire the switch into the ground.
I only wanted to send down 1 set of wires so I wired the 2 LED's in parallel
And here's my final test of the wiring with the switch as the ground, everything works!
For power I only want this light to be able to come on when the truck is running or the key is in the on position, so I tapped off of one of the 12 volt outlets in the back of the center console. I'm not a big fan of wire taps, but for this application and the fact that I didn't want to cut the stock wires, it was perfect.
And here's the final product, all wired up and ready to go into the truck.
Here you can see that the light isn't on, this is right before the switch triggers at 45 deg
And here is the light on, with the switch triggering
And the finished product. Looks like it belongs there and it's almost OEM in appearance.
I'm very happy with this mod, and only cost about 20 bucks. Pretty cool, and now I can actually use my console safe at night!
Love the detailed post and pics...
simple mods but so functional. Love it.
Thanks Gents. I've been mostly focusing on working on house projects during quarantine, but it's nice to get in the garage and work on the truck now and then. This was a small project and only took a few hours over 2 afternoons
Last edited by 97BlackAckCL; 05-15-2020 at 03:26 PM.
Just finished up another small little wiring project that's been bothering me for some time. The underhood lights were wired to a pressure sensor that was depressed when the hood was closed. I had bought this kit back in 2015 or so and installed it shortly after I bought this 4Runner, but it's definitely a bit dated. Here's the rusty, yes (gasp) rusty switch... It only works some of the time, and if you twist it ever slightly it would turn off and on, so the switch was failing, looked shitty, and would randomly turn on in the middle of the night if I had the battery tender on my car, so it had to go.
It also had an old school inline fuse from like 2001, this thing is massive and always was in plain view next to my $300 fancy battery
So I cut both of those, and removed the old switch and fuse system, and pulled the wires back toward the rear of the engine under the sPod
Then I fished them up through and trimmed about 3 feet of excess wire off and made some ends for the sPod
And here they are all installed, now I can control the lights from my HD touchpad at any time and not have to worry about the ghetto rusty switch turning on whenever it felt like it.
And here I'm testing out that the lights work with the sPod switch, sorry for the obnoxious LED overhead, just wanted to see that they worked.
And now my engine bay is a little cleaner, with less random wires running to the battery. Success!
Small headlight update... the new highbeam projectors that I bought that were just released didn't fit in the 9005 bulb housing as advertised.... so I had to get a Dremel and widen the holes, I don't really have a good before since it was very messy grinding the plastic, but they sat forward about an inch from where they were supposed to. And here's the finished product sitting flush in the back of the housing. You can see some chrome showing through on the top edge, and the paint took a beating during the modification, but it had to happen
I had to repaint the chrome eyebrows anyway since I wasn't happy with how the paint was laying, so I scuffed up all 4 pieces and painted them after I finally got a warm non-humid day. (I waited 3 months for 1 nice day to paint... sigh)
Once the paint cures, I should have some good headlight updates... finally
Last edited by 97BlackAckCL; 05-18-2020 at 08:39 AM.
Small little mod, been waiting over a year for this to come back in stock. It's a Meso extended interior fuse box cover, designed to work with the additional height of fuse taps. Pretty nice quality for a 3D printed part.
Here's a before of the 2 fuse taps that I'm using, the lower one goes out to my amber raptor lights in the front grille, the other goes to the backup battery for my dash cam.
Sadly none of the precut holes in the cover lined up with my fuse taps, so I had to cut my own slots on both sides with a dremel, you can see the slot I cut on the right side of this pic. After cutting slots on both sides the cover snapped right on. When I first had the original fuse tap for the grille lights I used to kick it out when I put the parking brake on from time to time, but since I ziptied it up higher I haven't had that problem, however it's nice to have piece of mind that the fuses are covered and not exposed right next to my left leg lol.
I purchased the part already printed, however fitting it to my truck and cutting my own slots took about a half hour and was a bit frustrating, but if it aint custom it aint BlackAck
I purchased the part already printed, however fitting it to my truck and cutting my own slots took about a half hour and was a bit frustrating, but if it aint custom it aint BlackAck
Impressive. Frankly, it would've taken me at least 3X more time if it were me.
Outsider looking in - the amount of wiring / electrical work you've done is pretty impressive. Well done!
What's next?
Thanks Tyler, next I will be redoing my bumper LED bar and adding my custom retrofitted LED projector headlights with several additional goodies installed
Did you ever consider wiring in those fuses to the blank/open spots rather than using the add-a-fuse? I didn't realize there were so many open slots.
Or is there not enough slack to pull up the fuse box and access the back side?
One is in a blank spot, one is using the add-a-fuse, and I have it tapped off the heated seat fuse since it's got plenty of juice. There's no easy way to access the back of the fuse box, it's pretty tight in there (that's what she said)
I'm not a fan of the fuse taps, but they've worked out well in these 2 applications. I still might tap the Raptor lights off the running lights at some point, but that's using the blank spot so it's not a big priority. This cover was a cheap and easy solution to cover them up so they're more out of harm's way. Honestly I have the wires ziptied up so far that they're not in danger of my kicking them out easy anyway
with your level of customization and wiring...I'd like to see you do a cobra replica build like Bear...I'd love to see your iteration with how tech relevant it would be.
04-22-2020, 05:30 PM
Lol I wish
