Take care of your truck and it’ll take care of you.
I recently wrote a 125K mile long term update on the 4Runner. I hardly consider that long in the tooth for a modern Toyota 4×4, but that doesn’t mean that some maintenance items aren’t going to come up from time to time.
That time crept up on me quite quickly a couple of weeks ago when, immediately after a great day in GWNF the truck started feeling…wandery. I knew immediately that something wasn’t quite right, but it wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t get home or get around town.
When I connected with our good friend Hugo (who also happens to know his way around a Toyota front end), we confirmed a couple of things right off the bat:
- The inner tie rods on both the driver and passenger side were worn
- The front-passenger wheel bearing was bad
Now we’re obviously not talking catastrophic failure on either; my guess is these parts had already been work/weakened prior, and about ~100 off-road miles sent them clearly into the replacement interval.
For reference, the tie rods had about 35K miles on them, which isn’t much, but they’ve seen plenty of offroad miles and tie rods are known to be a failure point (but better to wear out a $170 tie rod than a $1000 steering rack!). The wheel bearing died a noble death after 130K miles of service, most of it carrying the extra load of oversize tires, offset wheels, and wheel spacers, all of which are not good for those bearings.
So now, time for parts shopping. To get what I needed, I went 2 directions:
- For the inner tie rods, I went to TRDParts4U, which is part of Toyota of Dallas, and used their OEM parts search. $429.13 later, I had complete OEM Toyota inner and out tie rod assemblies on the way. I chose to go ahead and do both inners and outers since the all have to come apart anyways, and the outers are only $40/ea.
- For the wheel bearing, the easiest route to go is to buy a pre-assembled wheel/hub assembly that uses the factory koto wheel bearing, versus paying labor for someone to take your hub/knuckle apart and press in a new bearing. For $204 I scored a new pre-assembled hub assembly on Ebay.
Hugo was kind enough to help with the install, and while it was under the knife, we also decided to replace the original iridium spark plugs, which are recommended to be replaced at 120K.
The end result is a truck that feels significantly more planted and with steering that while never as sharp as a sports car, now at least responds faster than a snails pace to steering inputs! Per usual, the truck aligned perfectly within specs thanks to the Total Chaos Control Arms up front.
I’m definitely looking forward to breaking it all in properly at the DirtRoadTrip Campout this weekend! See you there.
