I finally want to update the 3rz head saga. I've finally pulled off the 3rz head to inspect the cylinder walls, I wanted to do this to see if there was any damage or signs of low oil pressure that would've caused issues. The cylinder walls still look like the day I bought it and even the rust marks are still there from the block rusting during storage at Toyota's warehouse.
This cylinder has was purchased from APRAUTO on eBay, aka. Toyota Truck Engines on the internet, and their email is toyotacarparts.com (all of this is a red flag to me now), it was a brand new cylinder head with no core charge, interestingly enough, I got a return label for my old core when I received the new one. I was also very unimpressed with the quality. There was what I think is a lot of flashing left in the ports, scratching on the cylinder head surface and the exhaust camshaft doesn't come tensioned per the FSM. The spark plug guide tubes came in a generic zip lock bag like what you buy at Walmart, and the icing on the cake for me, is that the camshaft buckets are shimless. Meaning you have to get a whole new bucket if the valve clearance isn't right and a few of mine were on the tighter side. My solution was to just install new buckets when I did my first valve adjustment at 20k miles.
I ported and polish the head due to the left over cast that was present, I should've also cleaned up the inside of the head to avoid all that extra cast too. I started the truck and broke the camshaft in, I used Sta-Lube over all surfaces prior to assembly as well. I've used this in the past with no issues on a BBF that I have driven from north to south with and when I rebuilt my old 22re. I ran Maxima 10w-30 break in oil and verified I had oil pressure by a mechanical gauge during engine break in to avoid this issue.
When the head broke I was sitting at idle in my garage trying to get my tach to start working, the front of the intake camshaft sheared off at about the middle, where the oil port is drilled. There were no warning signs, the engine just stopped. Now when I contacted the company they asked for photos of the camshaft, bearing caps, and oil pump cover and gears. At first I only send the camshaft and cap photos and talked on the phone with them, they told me that the Toyota FSM is incorrect on how to install the oil pump and that they used to have a 50% failure rate on their engine due to it being installed wrong and that they don't ship their fully rebuilt engines with the oil pump anymore due to it. I did have wear on the oil pump cover, it was a fresh one from Toyota but none of the wear can be felt with a finger nail, however my timing cover is the old one from the 3rz that spun a rod bearing, I had stripped it and cleaned it prior to using is, even pulling the bypass out. The Camshafts seem to have odd wear to me, some of the bearings and wonderful and some are worn pretty good for maybe 2 hours of run time.
Maybe I screwed up, Maybe the camshaft broke. I'll photo dump everything and let people decide for themselves. One frustration I had with them was all the different names and that once I sent the photos of the oil pump there was no follow up, no "It's your fault", just radio silence.
Links:
Condition of 3rz head when received (post 125) and post 132 contains pictures of the shimless buckets
Builds - 1984 Pickup Rebuild - https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/1984-pickup-rebuild.1310275/page-7
Pictures of the broken camshaft and oil pump cover (Post #257)
Builds - 1984 Pickup Rebuild - https://forum.ih8mud.com/threads/1984-pickup-rebuild.1310275/page-13
