So this build has snowballed drastically over the years into what its turning into now, but most of the end goal has been the same. A 4g63T powered mighty max. I traded for this truck 7 years ago. I had purchased a Z28 camaro to use as an LS swap donor for my e30, after stripping the shell and listing it for sale as a roller I was having minimal bites on selling it out right. A buddy sent me a link to an 89 mighty max with a blown up engine and figured Id offer a trade for the z28 roller, to my surprise the guy was super excited to make the trade. I loaded the truck and trailer up and off we went. The owner had been building this into a mini truck for a handful of years, building a new g54b 2.6L with a new trans, slowly piecing together nice parts he could grab from the yard to make a nice straight truck. He had the engine apart a few times in the process of rebuilding it and on final assembly forgot to torque one rod cap. 30 seconds into a multi year rebuilds first fire up it windowed the block and he gave up completely on the truck. Here I was ready to scoop it up and make what I thought would be an awesome slammed drag truck I could haul my bikes around in.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

With the bed and cab full of 3 trucks worth of parts, we barely made it onto the trailer without ripping the the whole driveline out. I spent the next few weeks trying to decide what I wanted to do. I didn't really have the cash or time at that point to do a full 4g63 swap and wanted to at least be able to use the truck, knowing I had zero desire to put a carb engine back in I managed to grab a 4g64 from a 93 mighty max out of the junkyard. I had no clue if the engine would run, the oil cap was off it with no hood in the middle of our monsoon season so I fully expected the engine to be trashed from water. With no other candidates local we gambled and pulled the engine with all the accessories and harness. I spent the next week or 2 swapping the 4g64 in and converting the once carb truck into a fuel injected 4g64. To my surprise the engine fired right up and ran really well, so well I spent the next 7 years trying to kill it so I'd be forced to 4g63 swap it and failed at it. I did as minimal maitenance as possible to it, the only major service was a timing belt after the old belt chucked itself in the middle of a parts run in it. Luckily they're non interference and I had no timing covers so 30 minutes and a couple of wrenches later we had a fresh belt and driving home.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr
Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

The truck was cool low and it got a lot of attention despite being multi colored, but one day leaving our wells fargo i got high centered in the parking lot exit and I had enough of the low truck life. The next week I was ordering lift springs, tires, pulled my drop spindles, blocks and low pro wheels/tires. I have a couple of pre runner buddies and with my lifted montero I was ready to build a high speed off road truck.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

This is the point where I really realized the 4g64 wasn't going to cut it. It's never been a quick truck, but going from a 24" tire with a 3.54 gear to a 31" tire with the same rear turned the truck into an absolute slug. 5th gear was so tall it was useless at even highway speeds. The truck was more fun to drive being able to run everything in its path over, but passing anyone required a half mile head start. We did some test fitting with my montero 33's, they clear the rear but the front would require some major fender work. The end goal for the truck is 37's, we'll be long traveling the suspension and building fenders and tubs. More than likely grafting a first gen tacoma front end suspension in for ease of aftermarket support. The rear is pretty easy to get cycling properly

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

I told myself once summer was over, this was the year I was finally swapping the truck. No more slug, blown up or not the 4g64 was coming out. A buddy came over and 2 hours later the 4g64 was out. I actually posted this for sale shortly after and had a guy drive 13 hours from colorado springs to come pick it up. It's currently in his truck doing its work truck duties until he can prepare a 4g swap for his.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

I've got a couple of 6 bolt 4g64 cranks and being a truck I wanted to retain as much torque as possible so it was an easy decision to build a 2.3L. A local buddy spun a rod bearing in his 500 mile stroker and ended up selling me the short block for $100. I bought a new rod and dropped one of my cranks in it with fresh bearings and built a 10:1 2.3L

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

I didn't want to move the engine forward for the thermostat housing and I've done a 1g intake manifold RWD conversion already which was a pain so I chose to use a 7 bolt head with a 95/96 CAS, kiggly 2 tooth crank trigger, and an evo 8 intake manifold. The evo manifold faces the proper direction for RWD and just requires a few mods/welding to bolt on. The main being filling the injector ports and cutting the ear off the manifold. Nice easy RWD intake.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

7 bolt head on a 6 bolt block requires reaming the head bolt holes out to 1/2", I didn't want to take this to a machine shop for the simple procedure so I took a page from the shootout hotel parking lot build book and got my milwakuee brand mill out.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Dropped the engine in for mock up and to start fitting parts. 16g turbo on and decided not to mod an internal wastegate to work.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Used my new home tig welder to weld the intake up and build a stainless 3" o2 housing. I have a $46 amazon special tial knockoff for a gate. I took it apart and make sure the diaphram was OK and it cycled properly with boost. We'll see how long this thing lasts, I'm not too worried about the engine.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Everything was then ceramic coated in gold. Next was an intercooler, I have seen a few mighty max guys using evo 8/9 intercoolers and I had the stock core off my evo 9 so that was an easy pick. It actually bolts right to the hood latch and with a little bending the body mount tabs line right up with 2 nutserts on the core support. 2 90* couplers and a couple holes in the core made for a really easy, no welding required intercooler setup.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Wiring harness was next, I have evo 8 ecu's in all of my 4g powered cars so I chose a 2g harness and evo 8 to make this easy as well. I've done what seems like too many of these standalone 2g harnesses lately so this was an all too familiar view for me. A few hours later it was stripped down and ready to merge with the mighty max harness.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

This is the point where friends started to question if this would run and where most people seem to give up. Spaghetti mess wiring

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Getting things fitted for length and taping everything together, this was way more satisfiying to see.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Flashed a base map into the ecu and got it fired up! I'm currently using a stock truck KM132 trans and a stock g63b clutch/flywheel. I have no plans to keep the KM132 since they're weak, so I bought a cheap OE replacement clutch in hopes it would hold stock boost levels on the truck. I was wrong, the first half pull we did had the truck blowing through the clutch. In all fairness a 10:1 2.3 probably makes 2x the power a stock g63b does, but I was hoping it would hold for a little while at least. When it does hold it roasts these 31x10.50's with ease. The plan is to grab an AR5 trans adapter from bill hincher and stick that in. My buddy runs one in his 4g63 e30 and they're cheap and stout. I need to button a bunch of stuff up on the truck and reinstall all the A/C parts but it's driveable now and way more fun. I'll be doing the long travel this year hopefully and then it'll be on to wide fenders and paint to finally make this truck one full color.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

It wouldn't be a prerunner without some glass fenders and bedsides. My boss had a colorado prerunner and didn't like the fitment of his original besides, they've been in storage for like 10 years and I had mentioned to him I was looking at grabbing a ranger off marketplace to rob the glass off of for my truck. He said I could have his original bedsides so I figured i'd mock them up to see if they were worth modifying to fit. They appear to fit really well once the besides are trimmed. Obviously theres going to be a decent amount of cutting and glass work to get them on, but no one makes bedsides for a mighty max and this is much closer to a finished product than I was expecting to have. I was going to run the colorado taillights to make things easy but I think I'm going to mold these into the stock tail lights to keep the mighty max rear as intact as possible.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

These should have no issue tucking 37s, the front is going to be another story but I'll fix that when I get to it.

This poor thing got dropped off at a buddies house sometime after my last post. I had too many cars at my house and not enough room so my buddy said he'd take it and cruise it around. It ended up just sitting and I had a handful of parts ready to go into it, with a bunch of projects finishing up I was able to bring it to my work where I can wrench on it after shop hours.

First major mod was ditching the stock KM132 truck trans. These are notoriously weak so I didn't plan on keeping it, but I figured I could use it as a temporary setup to be able to use the truck. Rather than investing a lot of money on a nice clutch for a trans setup I didn't plan on keeping I opted to just put a stock truck clutch in with the truck flywheel. I assumed this would at least hold wastegate pressure for a little bit, but apparently a 10.5:1 2.3L makes enough power to overpower the stock clutch, I could barely get into boost before it would just slip. Out goes the KM, in goes the AR5. I've had this trans on the shelf for 2 years along with a southbend TZ-SS clutch kit, adapted to the 4g with a bill hincher R154 adapter and a modified input shaft it was a super simple swap.



This is out of an 04 colorado and with the stock location 4g it puts the shifter in the same location as factory. I did have to hammer the sides of the tunnel a bit to make room but it fit very well in the stock tunnel. I also cut the shifter hole in the floor a little larger so that I could remove the shifter if needed. I was able to modify the stock crossmember for an energy suspension universal t-56 style trans mount. I had the stock driveshaft modified with a 27 spline slip yoke which works great, but it was over $700 to have this modified and had I known before dropping the driveshaft off I would've just ordered a pre-built aluminum driveshaft and bought the 1310 conversion flange I run on my montero for the rear diff. This will likely get swapped out at some point anyways.





Next on the list was a steering update. The 4g steering pump was in the way of making a nice intake to the turbo and the gear box in the truck leaked pretty horribly so I killed 2 birds with one stone by swapping to a prius column. I run this in my montero and I've done a handful of installs in dsms and various other cars so this one was a breeze to get in. It was nice having power steering when the truck was disabled and we had to push it in and out of the shop by hand. This cleaned up the engine bay a lot too.



After that I ditched the evo 8 ecu and modified 2g harness I've been running for a haltech S2 like the rest of my cars. Drive by wire conversion means I get cruise control on a truck that was a very rare option factory and all the other fun motorsports functions with the haltech. I fabricated a new engine harness with TXL wire and all new connectors. Apparently I don't have an installed picture of this so I'll have to take one next time I'm at the shop.



This went way more sideways than I had hoped it would. I run a 2ga cam sensor behind the cam gear and a kiggly 2 tooth 6 bolt crank trigger on the crankshaft. With the evo ecu this worked great, I just had to flip the firing order like a 95/96 dsm would be, unfortunately with the haltech it wasn't that easy. I fought for a month trying to get trigger systems to work, discussed it with a handful of people and finally got haltech on for some remote help where they recommended just going to a 12-1 trigger since I'm already on a kiggly crank sensor. This was still a bit of a hassle to get going. Kigglys website shows the missing tooth 105* BTDC but his setup guide which was for the older elite software shows a 70*BTDC offset. I also had to flip the firing trigger 180* since my cam sensor is still inverted with the 2ga CAS but with a 285* TDC offset we were able to get the truck running properly. I have a handful of things to button up still on the truck but it's at least driveable now and I can work on dialing in the tune. I also picked up an evo 8/9 FP green with evo manifold so I can flip the turbo into a better position for a RWD configuration and I wont be as limited power wise as I would be with the 16g that's currently on it.

Holy cow. A lot of work kudos to you bud. How long been working on a year? Or ?? I have one too but a mud truck 4wd 3.0 swapped a locking diff from montero onto it last weekend and thought I was working hard apparently not

God I want one of these so bad. Not necessarily a prerunner, but definitely a turboed/63 swapped Mighty Max. I think I would keep it stock looking/stock ride height on the outside and find a way to stuff ridiculously wide tires under the rear or somehow make it 4x4.

Uuuhhhm youd have to apply your good dsm skills to fix the weak front cv axle if want huge tires. I’ve snapped them offroad twice. So I now go real easy nothing extreme. Snap even with 15 inch wheels. Need a solid diff or something

Lonestardsm said:

Uuuhhhm youd have to apply your good dsm skills to fix the weak front cv axle if want huge tires. I’ve snapped them offroad twice. So I now go real easy nothing extreme. Snap even with 15 inch wheels. Need a solid diff or something

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I don't want off road tires. I'd want straight line traction. Think of a modern coyote single cab F150 street racing build, and apply it to a 4G63/4 mighty max. Only without the ridiculous fender flares and goonery.

I do think weak front axles would 100% still need to be fixed in this instance though.

I get it but has nothing to do with an off road tire it’s how much mass is rotating at the end of that axle . It’s tapered very small at the end which bares the weight of the rim and tire. It’s a design flaw they corrected on the later year Montero’s

I tried Monterey knuckles and axles makes camber be waaaay off

Lonestardsm said:

Holy cow. A lot of work kudos to you bud. How long been working on a year? Or ?? I have one too but a mud truck 4wd 3.0 swapped a locking diff from montero onto it last weekend and thought I was working hard apparently not

Click to expand...

I've owned the truck since like 2016, I 4g64 swapped it right after buying it and drove it slammed for a few years until lifting it back in 2019ish. The 4g63 swap has only been in for maybe 2 years. If you look at my montero build thread in my profile I actually put almost 700ft/lbs through my stock gen 1 9" LSD for a few years with zero issues. I have a gen 2.5 airlocked 9.5" diff and it has taken an absolute beating with well over 700ft/lbs. The front axles are a bit of a different story and I've never done a 4wd dry pavement launch before for fear of losing my feet to the front driveshaft, but in the dirt it hasn't cared. I'm on 35x12.50s on the montero, I have the same 4.63 airlocked 9.5" rear diff waiting to go into the mighty max and I know this 2.3L wont make near the torque the turbo 6.0 in my montero does so I'm not at all worried there.

Awesome

I’m just an off roaster not really a drag race guy . I got tired of all that in dsm . Needed a new hobby

CrackedDSM said:

God I want one of these so bad. Not necessarily a prerunner, but definitely a turboed/63 swapped Mighty Max. I think I would keep it stock looking/stock ride height on the outside and find a way to stuff ridiculously wide tires under the rear or somehow make it 4x4.

Click to expand...

If this wasn't slammed when I got it I may not have ever lifted it. I was going to build a drag truck out of it and just put a big tire on the rear but the truck was absolutely slammed and after hanging it up leaving a wells fargo parking lot one day I was fed up, out here in southern AZ the desert off road scene is huge so a baja style truck makes a lot more sense. A stock height mighty max on a tire would definitely hurt a lot of feelings pretty easily though, modifying an F150 front axle in at that point wouldn't be the end of the world to do either, lots of guys swapping ford 9" rears into these so getting a matching gear ratio would be easy for an awd/4wd drag truck

Lonestardsm said:

I’m just an off roaster not really a drag race guy . I got tired of all that in dsm . Needed a new hobby

Click to expand...

I road race my other cars but yea the montero is a good wheeling truck and the mighty max will do the high speed desert stuff

Eeehh a lot of work I’ll look into it but sounds like too much work for me just to go mudding. It rains here often but not enough for me to do that much work. Probably good for Baja like you or drag race?

Lonestardsm said:

Eeehh a lot of work I’ll look into it but sounds like too much work for me just to go mudding. It rains here often but not enough for me to do that much work. Probably good for Baja like you or drag race?

Click to expand...

Sorry the f150 front diff and rear end swap were meant for cracked. If you're just mudding a montero rear diff and some fresh CV's up front should handle as big of a tire as a mighty max can fit. Way easier getting a 35-37 under a montero than the mighty max haha

Bottom mount turbo was easy, but top mount turbo is cooler. I've had an evo FP green on the shelf that was either going on my evo 9 or on the mighty max. If the evo got the green the mighty max was going to get the stock 9 16g, but being a high compression 2.3L and really enjoying the powerband in the 9 I decided the mighty max was better suited to the green.

The old b16g



The new top mount FP green



I've been wanting to go top mount on this since it was first swapped but didn't want to invest the time into it until now. My 2g needed a turbo and the 16g was a good candidate for it so I fixed both by upgrading each. I bought a used invidia evo tubular manifold that had a crack at the head flange. Perfect for me because I was going to cut the flange off and flip the manifold upside down. The turbo flange also needed rotated 180* to get the turbo facing back in the correct orientation. Ordered an o2 housing flange, built a new downpipe, and ceramic coated everything. This was a super easy swap







Definitely laggier than the 16g, but with some tuning I think I can get back most of the response. It only makes 19lbs right now but it just fries the tires at anything under 80mph

Wow. Great work and determination. Now I feel like I’m not doing enough grinding on my projects!