The Sequoia has been sitting in a sad state for a quite a while now. My mom had adopted it as her daily and all was well until the rear air suspension started sagging, and then the brakes started making a noise, and then to top it off when I jacked up the front to check the brakes the front shock pissed all over the floor. With no brakes, and no suspension it went into hibernation for a while. Time to see if we can get this tree standing tall again.
There wasn’t a ton of info out there on lifts for the Sequoia, but I eventually settled on a plan. I went with a mix of new OEM and aftermarket parts. I’m a little more open to aftermarket parts on the Sequoia since it’s technically ” An American Car” my trust in the OEM parts just isn’t the same as what it is for the true Japanese built Toyotas that I have.
The leaking front shock was ditched in favor of Bilstein 5100’s set to the middle notch and topped with new KYB strut mounts. While I was in there new OEM upper and lower ball joints made there way in along with new outer tie rods. To assemble the front struts, I cheated and took the parts over to my friends at Cordel Foreign Motors and let them do the hard work. Maybe one day I’ll invest in a good spring compressor of my own. Or maybe I’ll just buy coilovers from here out.
The rear I picked up a matching set of Bilstein 5100’s from Toytec and new pair of air bags from Suncore. We never quite got the bags in though. While I was starting the removal I found that level sensor had become frozen and disconnected. This should explain the bag issues, and if not I’ll hang on to the Suncore pair just in case.
For the brakes I went with Akebono Ceramic pads and Goodridge braided lines. The front brakes turned out to be in great shape, so I left them as is with the exception of the brake lines. Unfortunately the lines didn’t fit well and had one side of each line clocked about 90deg off. The rear was the real problem. Someone had removed the wear indicators, so we didn’t know there was a problem until it was too late. To add to the problems the nice folks at O’Rielly’s manged to cut the brake rotors down to nothing. (Maybe a brake lathe should be in my future as well!) New rear rotors are on the way but unfortunately these will have to do for the trip the alignment shop. The rear brake lines were closer, but still not an exact fit. If I were doing to choose brake lines again today, I would spend a few dollars more and buy the OEM.
To round things out we replaced the yellowed stock headlights with some black housing units from Headlights Depot. They were cheap and arrived super quick. I won’t say they are OEM quality in their finish, but lets be honest, plastic headlights just aren’t long for this world anyway. It’s shame that they are a wear item at this point, but if you don’t want your vehicle to look like shit and want to see where you’re going, then you don’t have a lot of other options.
As it sits right now, with the rear in “High” mode it is about level with the front Bilstein on the middle setting. I’ll get final measurements once the camber is corrected.
And yes I couldn’t spend that much time under it and not ditch those stupid running boards. Now the back of my leg won’t end up dirty every time I get out!
