The tacoma leaf spring debacle

Toyota does not sell the leaf spring spacers ("silencers" as they call them) as a separate part, despite the fact that it is a wear item. Kanata Toyota also allowed a worn suspension component, among other things, to pass a safety on a vehicle. Anyways, it's damn near impossible to get the leaf spring silencer in Canada unless you give money to Jeffrey "my rocket looks like a penis" Bezos and after much protest, I gave in.

However, I also printed the part because it took me 10 minutes to design it. The left (driver's side) will be getting the PETG slider, greased with a spray-on dry silicone grease, the right (passenger's side) will be getting the Amazon part. The OEM part was actually rubber and not UHMW as most aftermarket parts are, so we'll see what the amazon part is.

The left has had about 80km put on it, and appears to be holding up just fine, The upper of the two springs originally had two spacers placed side by side, however it is impossible to open the springs up enough without completely pulling the suspension to get the second one in, so we'll be living with one of them. The actual replacement part comes in tonight so I will be able to test side by side and see how they wear over time.

tl;dr bezos and toyota can suck a dick, I have a 3d printer. Solid PETG though ABS or ASA might have a lower coefficient of friction.

The amazon parts are in. Quality is... What you'd expect from a massive conglomerate hell bent on nothing but profits.

Material: feels almost gf-reinforced nylon which is hilarious, but whatever. It's not the rubber that the original parts are for sure.

Also lubed with dry silicone, the contest begins!

[Ayydan]

I really can't imagine the loading will be too hard on this part, so it'll be interesting to see

Alright - we're about a month in. There's creaking from the PETG side, and no creaking from the aftermarket side. It seems like the PETG is actually too hard, because I can still see the lines in the print a month later - I was hoping they'd hold the silicone lube, but it doesn't seem that they did.

I managed to squeeze another block in the secondary leaf, and sprayed some more silicone lube back in there, which seems to have made the creak go away. We'll see if it's a materials issue vs the ability to hold a lubricant, however now I'm tempted to try these in TPU as well.

Well, I forgot to update this thread.

Good news: leaf spring creak isn't an issue anymore.
Bad news:

[Ayydan]

Ha I just saw this update and was wondering what it would be, glad you're alive <3