’71 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ-40

Todd’s Landcruiser has to be one of the nicest Landcruisers we have released to a customer to date with about 3000 hours into building it. One of the major reasons why this truck is so amazing is because the customer understood how hard it was to build a custom vehicle and not rushing the progress would only make the end product amazing. Due to the level of custom features and attention to detail we decided it was the perfect candidate for Sema 2022 and has been a personal goal of mine for over 10 years. The amount of subtle details and custom features on this FJ40 make it the most tasteful build we have ever done. While looking at this truck from a distance it looks like a stock FJ40 but when you get up close you start noticing all the hidden features from custom sound system to cold air intake. When we started this build it was never intended on being the truck it is today as explains below in the backstory of this vehicle. To learn more about this vehicle please watch our documentary YouTube video and Full time-lapse video below.

Todd’s Land Cruiser started off its life as an early build from Joe’s TLC Parts in North Carolina for a customer. You can see some of the pictures on their website in its early stage in life where they only did a 4 inch suspension lift, disc brake conversion, roll cage and various mods. The vehicle had started its life out hard due to all the different year Land Cruisers that had been put into it to make it what it was, so we stuck with that style build. Down the road, it was eventually picked up by World Wide Vintage Auto and that’s where Todd purchased the truck online without any visual inspection. Previous owners throughout the years had made modifications and heavily off roaded the truck, which only damaged the previous work done. Check out the vehicle here before restoration:

Todd had brought the vehicle to us after buying it to install a soft-top, restore a set of factory hard doors and addressing misc. mechanical issues. We ended up letting Todd know that The Land Cruiser needed more work, and his plan was to fully restore the vehicle in the spring of 2020. However, with our backlog, he decided to leave the vehicle for us to fully restore it. Once we started to restore the vehicle, we found a lot of old repairs done by previous owners that were not “up to par” with what we do at our facility, and as the build went on Todd wanted one of the nicest Land Cruiser Fj-40s around. So we ended up building the Land Cruiser from the ground up. The only pieces of the vehicle that were left to use were the front grille, hood, frame and axles. Everything else has been replaced with new components or used from our salvage yard. We kept the build kind of what it was with different year components from all various years, making it unique and one of a kind, “The best of all the cruisers”. For example, I personally like the early directional turn signals and hood trim to make it look vintage, but it also has modern disc brakes and vent windows on the hardtop.