There have been a few upgrades since the last update.
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Unfortunately, one of the sunroof drains got clogged by leaf matter and it leaked into the cabin during one of the recent torrential rainstorms. I thought I had caught or mopped it all up at the time (and cleared the drains), but the smell of mildew wafting out of the passenger footwell a couple weeks later told me that I hadn't quite gotten all of it. Cue a professional carpet mold-removal treatment and a couple of weeks of retreating (and soaking - including the floormat and carpet pad) and drying with various cleaners, fungicides and dehumidifiers.
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More than a month after the last treatment and no further signs (or smells) of mildew or mold have appeared in or under the carpet, so it appears the lengthy series of treatments succeeded. Unfortunately, the passenger floormat is probably not going to clean up properly and will have to be dumped - however, that's a lot less of a concern than before due to the next item.
I'd been looking for someone selling Weathertech or Husky front floor liners for cheap since I'd bought the truck. Since this is my daily
and parts shuttle, not to mention living in a place that gets lots of rain and therefore mud and such, I wanted to protect the interior of the truck and make cleanup from muddy boots easy. While the de-molding was going on, I happened to locate someone selling a serviceable set of Husky liners in my area for 1/5th retail price. I promptly collected them, cleaned them up and - after mold removal was complete - installed them.
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Since these require the stock floormats to be removed, the possibly bad passenger mat is a lot less of a concern.
Next I did some research into the trailer brake controller that came with the truck. It turns out that it's a cheap time delay unit that is less than ideal for a truck of this size and wheelbase. Since there's a possibility I might need to do some trailer hauling, I managed to pick up a
Tekonsha Prodigy proportional brake controller very cheap and swapped that in.
The crappy aftermarket one that came with the truck.
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While removing it, found more of the crappy Scotchlock goofball wiring that I'd found in the previous repair. Fixed that properly, of course.
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The Prodigy can be unplugged from the truck and either stored or moved to another vehicle if needed.
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Finally, I've wanted some additional gauges since I bought the truck. Coolant temp, tach, speedo and fuel level just isn't enough. Thing is, there's not a whole lot of room in the cabin to put dedicated gauges. I noticed that I had some soon to expire store credits and discounts at Advance Auto, so I decided to buy one of these:
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Despite the overenthusiastic package copy, this is actually a highly regarded unit. It's a standalone OBD2 multifunction display; it's also the only one on the market that can read the semi-proprietary Toyota transmission input temperature sensor, an important thing to monitor if towing. It can also display some ridiculous number of other parameters four at a time. The driver can cycle through all of the parameters by pressing the appropriate buttons, and it can add trip computer functions to the vehicle as well (distance to empty, instant/average fuel economy, etc.) I have it semi-temporarily mounted to the aftermarket pocket below the radio until a different mounting option can be evaluated. It's very nice to have these functions back at my disposal, as I like trip computer functions and have missed them in the last series of vehicles I've had.
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One of the next projects is to hardwire the dashcam and Valentine One into the truck so I can eliminate the hanging cables.