Rufus The Doofus

I did get the custom turbo system installed and running in the 1980 Toyota Land Cruiser HJ45 Troop Carrier. I’m pretty impressed with the power gains. Unfortunately I went the cheap route and used an aftermarket head gasket. I’ve already blown it. I’m searching now for a better option. Hopefully the OEM Toyota gasket is still available.
[Read more →]

Tags:   hj451 Comment

I’m not the New Year’s resolution type of person. I’m more of laundry list of projects kind of guy. I’ve got three old diesel Toyota Land Cruisers now and lots of things to fix or attend to on them.
[Read more →]

Tags:   bj42 · hj45 · hj47No Comments.

Things have been moving much slower than I had hoped on my 1980 HJ45 Troopy turbo project. There’s a good chance I might be up and running in a week or so. I’ve been working on piecing together an exhaust out of 304 stainless. Here’s a few photos.

I’m building the exhaust in three main sections. These photos are of the downpipe from the turbo back to the muffler area. The muffler will be the middle section and then I’ll build a custom tailpipe as well as the third section. It’s all 2.5″ stainless. I want to build it once and not have to worry about rust.

I took my time with routing the pipe to give the most ground clearance possible. I may take the truck off road someday and don’t want to worry about breaking the exhaust.

Tags: No Comments.

Things are progressing slowly on my 1980 HJ45 Troopy turbo project. I’ve been busy the last month with plenty of distractions. Real-world obligations like volunteer projects, day trading, travel for a family reunion and a number of other less interesting things.

I’ve snapped some photos of my progress along the way. Here they are.

[Read more →]

Tags: No Comments.

I’ve been kinda busy with a work project for the past couple of weeks and haven’t had much time to work on the Cruisers. I was able to spend a few hours today installing the pistons and rings in the old Toyota H diesel engine. I had to order the pistons from Australia since these engines were never use in production vehicles in the U.S.

[Read more →]

Tags: No Comments.

It’s time to start working on the Toyota H Diesel engine in my 1980 HJ45 Troopy. I ordered a set of pistons from Roodog’s 4WD Spares in Australia and they arrived yesterday. Those guys are great. I highly recommend them for any old Cruiser parts you might need. The exchange rate typically completely offsets the cost of shipping from the other side of the world.

[Read more →]

Tags: No Comments.

I’m finally getting around to working on the Toyota HJ45 Troopy that I bought last year. I’ve been fighting intermittent low compression numbers on one cylinder for about 1500 miles since I got it on the road. It’s become a big problem so I decided to pull the head and pistons to inspect the problem.

[Read more →]

Tags: No Comments.

I’ve been lazy for about almost a year and haven’t updated this site much. I use Wordpress to run this site and I simply got tired of updating it constantly. We now have a client site that’s going to be using Wordpress so I figured now is a good time to finally upgrade and get back into the blogging scheme of things.

[Read more →]

Tags: 2 Comments

I haven’t had the inclination or energy to update this site in a while. I’ve been busy. So busy, in fact, that I haven’t had a chance to finish many of the projects started when my father was here in July.

My mother-in-law passed away in late September. Things just haven’t been the same since.

[Read more →]

Tags: No Comments.

I haven’t been updating much lately. I’ve been pretty busy. But today was a day for fun. We took a 250 mile ride on the motorcycle with a couple of friends. The map above is the loop we did.

[Read more →]

Tags: 2 Comments