I won't bore you with the ripping out of the aux heater other than it is a HUGE PITA, I had almost decided against it but seeing all the possible points of failure that could make a roadside "get you by repair" impossible I'm glad I did rip it out. Its definitely not easy, takes a lot of time, cussing, and patience to accomplish.The new water pump and thermostat were pretty straight forward so I won't bore you with that either. Fabbed a quick plate for the hole, tacked it in and sealed it shut on both sides.

Well this project started simple like most of my projects do and then quickly snowballed and morphed into things I couldn't have perceived no matter how much I planned ahead or how many hours I spent on Ih8mud.com!

To start I acquired the 1996 294a 80 series Land Cruiser from my daughter who had it just over 4 years. Shortly after she bought it I moved to Maryland from Florida for a job so I was unable to help her with repairs and maintenance. The last year she had it she was plagued with several problems, these included a dead battery, the pesky heater hose blowing, leaking birfs, and anti-lock brakes that sometimes caused a hard pull to the left, this was to be her final "I'm done with it" and she wanted it gone and refused to drive it any longer.

I don't blame her, with gas prices they way they were and 13MPG at best I agreed with her and told her I'd help her sell it. She used her own money to buy it even though I had originally cautioned against it and had taken care of it pretty well but it was time for her to find something more economical and in her mind dependable. Since it had the pulling issue she didn't feel right selling it, she feared that if she did and something bad happened the buyer would come back and blame her. I agreed to fly down, redo the front brakes and drive it back to MD to sell it there. Being a Florida truck that was completely rust free I thought I could get her more $ here for it and she wouldn't have to worry about it coming back to haunt her.

I ordered a complete front end brake set, rotors, pads, and calipers and had it shipped to my parents house in Sarasota and spent 2 days getting it done, thanks Dad for letting me use the garage! The manual locking hubs were installed by the PO so they could tow it behind their motor home, my daughter had been running with them unlocked and I later found this to be the sporadic problem with it pulling hard to the left when braking. Since they've been locked I have never had the issue happen again so there must be something the ABS doesn't like about free spinning front hubs.

Three tanks of gas 19 hours later I was back in Maryland, something strange happened along the way though and now instead of selling the truck I wanted to buy it for myself!  It could have been the lack of sleep, the long drive, or who knows but I fell in love with it and wanted to keep it! I found out shortly after getting back it was a locked 294a which made it a keeper for sure, that alone sealed my decision to not look back and from that moment forward my wallet was to be emptied accordingly.

After fixing some odds and ends like rear hatch lock, rear door lock, window motor for drivers door and some other odds and ends like LED kits for the interior lights and ripping out the absolutely crappy alarm system and installing a simple keyless system I decided it was time to do the stereo. What I thought would be fairly straight forward project has mushroomed into a full fledged interior tear down and rebuild.

First it didn't make sense to do the complete stereo and amps until I did the dual battery install, it did make sense to do that until I did the water pump and thermostat as it would just be more stuff to work around. It didn't make sense to do the water pump and thermostat until the aux heater was ripped out and bypassed, see where this is going? This is how things snowball out of control!

So here we are a year later, I have a working stereo so that should tell you something, but getting to this point wasn't a cake walk and I have countless hours of time invested, if I were to guess easily over 100 hours, and tons of more hours left to complete. Most of my weekends over the last 6 months have been consumed by the LC and to be sure the rest of this years weekends will be too.

First the imcomplete album can be found here
This album is missing several photos but gives you a good idea of the scope of work, I'll work on documenting further after I'm done and can round up all the pictures.

Since it had a an OK Sony head unit in it already I decided to plug ahead with speakers and save there rest after the second battery install. I found one speaker in each of the doors and later two in the dash and two more in the rear headliner. I bought some cheap 5.25" Blaupunkts from ebay for $17 for the front doors and another pair of 4" $12 Blaupunkts for the rear doors, am I a cheap Dutchman? YES definitely! I try to spend my money like I salt my food, just enough to make it taste good, too much and it tasted like doodoo. 

For the dash I put in some 3.5" Polks, again $20 per pair off ebay and some Polk tweaters for the rear for $12. For the amps I bought a pair of Sony Xplod XM-GTX1302 which are 800W 2 channel amps that can run at 2-8ohms. Since each amp would be powering four 4 ohm speakers each they run at 170A. These amps were found on Sony's outlet site and I got the pair delivered for an amazing $120 for BOTH! Am I a cheap Dutchman or what?

So the speaker install was pretty simple but since I was to have the doors apart it made sense to lay down some 11101 dynomat first. For about 2 hours and $20 a door this is well worth it, the doors thud shut and you can really tell the difference, like it's night and day. Both sets of speakers were shallow mounts, neither were deeper than 1.75" and I didn't expect much from them other than to be better than what was there.

They sounded great with the Sony but I was chomping at the bit to see what they would sound like with some juice behind them, this is where the dual battery install came in. The key to dynamat is taking your time, making a template, having a good roller and heat gun. Start pealing the backing off about an inch from the top and work your way down, there is NO WAY you can put this on in one go so don't even try!

  The dual battery install was again fairly straight forward but just took time, the right tools, and materials. Since Blue Sea products are of high quality and reasonable cost it was a no brainer. I went with the Blue Sea add a battery kit and a Safety Hub 100 for just under $150 for both kits. All connections were soldered, I don't believe in crimping anything unless for a temporary repair and so I sourced all my #2-#8 eyes and connectors at DelCity which is a great one stop shopping place for all kinds of electrical goodies. The batteries were to be fused with mega blocks and DC breakers, these along with the #2 welding cable was to be sourced of ebay. I should have taken more pictures along the way of soldering the connectors etc but I was in get it done mode and it completely slipped my mind until I was done. All house power now comes off the intelligent switch on the firewall, you move the cable that comes off the starter and connect it to the switch as well. I tapped the small wire going to the starter for the SI so it can isolate when needed, if not it will not isolate the two batteries when needed.

 

So now that this was done it was time to start mounting some amps, the placement was under each front seat and I took some bolts and tacked them in upside down and that made for a great way to secure them to the floor. Before this was to happen I wanted to lay down some mat first. Dynamat had a product but I felt it was overpriced and decided to use Thermo-tec 14620 which was $40 for a roll of 5'-x3' took two rolls to get this done. You can see once again that your best tools will be a good roller and a heat gun, a good scissors and utility knife are also a must have. Starting to peel back a bit and stick it first is a good idea, in this case I pulled about an inch down from the trans tunnel and then worked it in as I went to the door channel.

After I was done I used some liner spray to seal it all up. Not sure if I would have done this again as this stuff smelled horrible, was extremely flammable while drying, and messy. Tape off ANYWHERE you don't want this stuff to end up including bolt holes!

Now that I had let this dry a couple days and tit was time to start installing the amps and fuse block so I could finally start somewhat buttoning this up.

Passengers side is a bit tight but everything does fit and does work pretty well, not sure if I had it to do over again if I would change anything but I wasn't making any changes at this point!

Everything laid out and working but not buttoned up quite yet. I'm still waiting on a 25' composite/RCA cable to run from the new head unit back to the rear subs so I'll have all the needed wires for future improvements like a backup camera and what not.  The Clarion head unit was a really good deal from Crutchfield for $109 delivered and I found the BT adapter from ebay for $38. I'm sure a double din upgrade is coming someday but for now I'm happy with how everything sounds. The "Blaupunkts" will probably be replaced soon with some decent Polks or Infinity's as I'd like to go 6.5" in the front doors and 5.25" in the rear doors but we'll see. Since I'm such a cheap SOB I'll probably wait until I see something on the Crutchfield outlet store that I can no longer resist!

 

I've since screwed the stereo in so it wouldn't fall out, buttoned up the wires on the floor and put the carpet back in along with the drivers seat and middle passenger seat. Hopefully this weekend I'll get the front pass and drivers middle seat recovered with Sean's kit and with any luck have it done before the first snow.

The rear subs/amp/subox is an entire story in itself but here it goes. Back in November of 2011 Best Buy had a special on subs, they were on sale and if you bought on you were eligble for a free sub cabinet and free delivery for both. I did a total of 4 orders the first two I did Kicker 12" subs because they were on sale for half price @ $49, with each one I ordered a free dual 12" sub cabinet, the most expensive one @ $179 The last two orders I got some nice Alpine 10" subs on sale for $69 from $125 each and again ordered the same dual 12" cabinet. So I now had 4 subs and 4 dual cabinets. 

I put up a craigslist ad and and sold the 2 Kicker 12" subs with one of the dual 12" cabinets for $150,

I then sold each of the remaining three cabinets for $75 each, this netted me $275, backing out $140 for the Alpines I was still ahead $135 so I found a Kenwood mono amp on Crutchfield outlet for $99 and this case from Amazon for $33.81 delievered. I know it was insane, I have NO idea how they shipped this cabinet for free or how they even got it over hear from China for that but it was made for some model of supercab Ford pickup and the measurements would fit in the cruiser so I didn't delay and snatched it up.

This makes my entire rear setup free, which makes it sound all the better! For those doubters and haters I have posted screen shots of my amazon and best buy invoices!

I forgot to add that before this was done I replaced all 4 shocks with Rancho 9000's and love them!

 Subbox from Amazon

 Sony Amps from Sony Outlet

Yet to come is the Ironman 4x4 front bumper and Engo 10K winch install and the Slee skid plate.