FJs and Mods

[NCFJ]

I have been reading a lot of posts lately about the FJ not living up to it’s off road advertising and I just had to address the issue. This is MY OPINION and is not carved in stone anywhere.

Toyota built the FJ as an off road capable vehicle that can also get you back and forth to work in relative comfort. It did not build a bullet proof off road machine that can handle being pounded on rocks or jumping it. There are scores of testaments to the FJ’s prowess off road in bone stock configuration but the fact remains that if you plan to go to places like Tellico or Moab you are going to need to beef some things up.

The most common additions to the FJ in the form of improving off road performance are lifts and tires. But just adding a lift and bigger tires is not enough. Once you add a lift you change the angle of your front axle shafts. There has been much talk that the angle does not change much, but the fact is that the angle does change. Adding bigger tires adds more rotational weight. Both of these factors add extra stress to the front axles and CVs, there is no getting around it. In order to compensate for the extra stress put on the front axles by these factors, heavy duty axles and CVs are in order. To date I am not aware of any available on the market, although I’ve heard some may well be in the works. By whom I can’t tell you.

Another area of debate is the lower control arms for the rear and their front mounting location. If you are running trails with rocks you must overcome these items will sooner or later encounter damage. In the case of the lower control arm itself, several cases of failure have been reported here. If this part breaks on the trail and you don’t have a replacement you are in deep trouble. I have seen photos of this part broken in half and they are simply not up to the task of taking on rocks and supporting the weight of the machine. Fortunately there are several companies making heavy duty versions of both these parts.

Serious armor is also an area any off roader that likes to play in the rocks should have on their short list of Mods. The stock skid plate on the front end and the gas tank skid plate are simply not up to the challenge of hard trails. Once again there are several after market versions of skid plates available that will make your rig much safer from damage than it is in stock form.

The bumpers on our FJs are also items of concern. Personally I refer to them as Tupperware. Mine have been ripped in a couple of places already. One concern I do have in this area is with the front bumper. There are a couple of very thin walled box tubes stacked on each other that make up the structure behind the Tupperware. My thought is that these are part of the crumple zone designed into the FJ for our protection. So what happens when we remove these and add solid steel bumpers to the front end? Is a hard impact in the front end going to lead to frame damage? I am not qualified to answer this question but logic leads me to believe it may.

So what does all this mean? It means that although the FJ is a very capable off road vehicle in stock form, it does require upgrades to be the trail beast many of us want it to be. This is also true of almost every “off road” vehicle on the market. You may be asking yourself why Toyota did not just put all this stuff on the FJ from the factory, the answer is most likely marketability. Bigger tires, better bumpers, a lift, etc all add to higher cost and lower MPG which would take many prospective buyers out of the market for an FJ. At $30,000 the FJ is a pretty good deal, add $10,000 to that and you’d see far fewer of them, and lets face it, some FJs will never see so much as a fire road and do not require that much gear. So if a vehicle that does not require mods to do what you want it to do is your goal, I might suggest a Unimog

[Corey]

Whenever someone asks me if the FJ is a good crawler/wheeler out of the box in bone stock form, I refer them to this video.

YouTube - FJ Cruiser Miss FJ wheels Hells Gate on Hells Revenge

But what you say is true.
If you are going to play rough, you do need to do some extra upgrades.

[KD7NAC_07FJ]

It Doesn't need any mods at all. Like the clip Corey posted of MissFJ in her bone stock of the lot FJ doing Moab the FJ is a seriously capable off-road vehicle.

I personally took mine up a mountain road the day after I got it. The kicker was there was 2-3 feet of Cascade Concrete (wet heavy Northwest snow) on the road I though for sure I was stuck at least half a dozen times but the FJ just pulled right through like it wasn't there.

I think the mod craze is because it is such a capable platform the niche type of person it draws is the kind that has the "Tim Taylor" sickness to some degree. We want to make our FJs ours and it is more of a celebration of what it is and can be not that it is lacking and needs fixing.

[Toledo FJ]

KD7NAC_07FJ previously said:

It Doesn't need any mods at all. Like the clip Corey posted of MissFJ in her bone stock of the lot FJ doing Moab the FJ is a seriously capable off-road vehicle.

I personally took mine up a mountain road the day after I got it. The kicker was there was 2-3 feet of Cascade Concrete (wet heavy Northwest snow) on the road I though for sure I was stuck at least half a dozen times but the FJ just pulled right through like it wasn't there.

I think the mod craze is because it is such a capable platform the niche type of person it draws is the kind that has the "Tim Taylor" sickness to some degree. We want to make our FJs ours and it is more of a celebration of what it is and can be not that it is lacking and needs fixing.

Very well said!

[ATXFJ]

I agree with NCFJ.
The aproach angle sucks.
The bumpers suck.
The rear lower control arms suck.

I didn't see anything in that video that would damage anything under the FJ. I did see some good driving and great spotting though.

FWIW: With the OME lift CV angles shouldn't be much of a problem. They retain the factory stroke. The top spacers like RC allow more droop and increased angles.

[CowboyCEO]

Corey previously said:

Whenever someone asks me if the FJ is a good crawler/wheeler out of the box in bone stock form, I refer them to this video.

But what you say is true.
If you are going to play rough, you do need to do some extra upgrades.

Corey, that video 's

Is that a "Horizontal band-Dopler radar" on top of your Cruiser????

ing

[TexasCabledawg]

This topic brings up a fine line that I am riding with my FJ. Mine is a daily driver (we also take it on long road trips). It is stock, including stock skid. After taking it on a fairly difficult trail, I knocked the rear bumper out of place once (damaged the bumper pad a little but on the underside) which snapped back in place, and chewed up the skid pretty well. This got me thinking about mods such as a lift and tires, but how it would affect it as a daily driver. We don't go wheeling very often, but would the benefit of the added offroad capability outweigh the benefit of a stock rig that is a great daily driver? What are the new tires and lift (among other possible mods) going to do to my MPG vs avoiding damage and associated costs with the occasional trail run?

The rig performed really well stock, but I would like to have had a little more clearance.

[athenaceleste]

We knew for the type of driving we do with ours that we will be breaking things and replacing with better products. We took our stock vehicle alot of places did alot of things.. I've seen other stock vehicles do alot of things also. Our FJ is not our daily driver (yes we want to drive it all the time, but have held back) it's got to the point that we trailer her to moab... she's our toy!

[Swingshiftworker]

TexasCabledawg previously said:

This got me thinking about mods such as a lift and tires, but how it would affect it as a daily driver. We don't go wheeling very often, but would the benefit of the added offroad capability outweigh the benefit of a stock rig that is a great daily driver? What are the new tires and lift (among other possible mods) going to do to my MPG vs avoiding damage and associated costs with the occasional trail run?

The rig performed really well stock, but I would like to have had a little more clearance.

It's apples and oranges.

If you lift and put big tires on your rig (and do all of the other suspension stuff you should do to accomodate the lift & tires) it will NOT be the same car. Your mileage will go down, it will (or should) ride stiffer) and it won't be able to get into your (or other) garages. I decided early on not to lift my FJ for these reasons. My "solution" was to buy another 4x4 (my 99 Wrangler TJ) which has already been lifted 5 inches, sports 35" mud/rock tires, and has all of the other necessary mods to allow it to go anywhere the FJ can't (and there aren't many places that the FJ can't go).

I use my FJ as a daily driver too, so my mods were mostly "comfort" and "convenience" related. Sunroof, auxillary fuel tank & fog lights are in this category. I also have a couple of off-road mods, including the Lucrum winch mount, Warn M8000 winch and Optima dual battery system. My FJ already came w/OEM sliders, skid, TRD wheels & BFG AT tires and a TRD exhaust. So, it's ready to go off road at a moment's notice, but it won't be able to do much rock climbing.

So, if you like to go on the kinds of trails that knock your bumper off and dent your skid plate, you'll have to decide what's more important to you. Comfortable and affordable daily driving or less comfortable and less affordable off-road capability. Only you can make that decision, based on the amount of money you have (lift/tire/suspension mods are EXPENSIVE) and how much you think you'll actually make use of these mods.

Good luck!

[Fjamming]

KD7NAC_07FJ previously said:

I think the mod craze is because it is such a capable platform the niche type of person it draws is the kind that has the "Tim Taylor" sickness to some degree. We want to make our FJs ours and it is more of a celebration of what it is and can be not that it is lacking and needs fixing.

A lot of people suffered from too much too early mods. Wasting money on mods that aren't needed or worse, mods that require other mods just so they can make it work. They go about it with no plan in mind. Often times, driver education is much more needed then mods.