Progress on my dad’s 97 Tacoma project
Hey everyone, wanted to share the progress on a '97 Tacoma I picked up a few months back. It’s a retirement gift for my dad, and the goal is for us to use it as a project truck to work on together. Neither of us have much experience with serious wrenching. We’ve pretty much only done basic oil changes before this, so it’s been a massive learning curve, but we wanted a place to document the work we've put into it so far.
We started by tackling a lot of the baseline mechanical and suspension stuff to get the truck caught up. We swapped out all the belts, installed new OEM upper and lower ball joints, and put in new tie rod ends and sway bar link kits. Right now, we’re actually in the middle of changing out the shocks and putting a lowering kit on it. For the interior, we also went ahead and threw in a completely new sound system (wiring took us a minute especially with trying to find a diagram so we knew what colors to connect to for what).
The biggest change was the body and paint. It had some dent and rust issues that needed saving, so we had a local body shop handle the dent repair, rust remediation, and a full color change from the original white.
I know it’s still a work in progress. And yeah, I know I'm missing the bumper trim filler piece under the headlight right now. We're getting that installed the next time my dad and I hang out to work on it. Next up on the list is installing some new headlights and painting the grill and bumper satin black to contrast the new paint.
We’re loving the progress on it and didn’t realize that things that we anticipate would only be 1 hour of work could easily turn to 5 hours when we’re figuring it out. But it’s definitely been a fun thing to undertake.
It’s not a flawless build, but it's been a great excuse to catch up and learn how to actually work on a truck with my dad. Let me know what you guys think.