That is immaculate. It looks like a completely new engine. What made you decide to pull it out?
Sort of a long story. Basically like all 2LTE's of the early 90's, the head cracked at one point before I owned it (in Japan). The owners kept driving it with the cracked head and were topping up the coolant with straight water. Number one problem with this is the water mixes with the diesel exhaust and creates sulfuric acid. This causes pitting in the cylinder walls. I've seen this on a number of these engines now. The second problem is the straight water leaks into the cylinder when the engine is off, and rusts the cylinder walls. Especially if the motor sits for a while, which I think mine did.
So, the Japanese owners eventually put on a new updated Toyota cylinder head, but they did a rushed and crappy job at it so the head gasket was leaking a bit in one spot. So when I got the vehicle, I pulled the head (thought it was cracked at the time, so had bought a new one), and did a really good job on the cylinder head replacement. It's then that I saw the pitting and rusting of the rear two cylinder's. This caused blow-by, and some loss of compression when the motor was cold. Was a depressing moment.
I ran it like that for five years and things did not really get worse. But it was definitely on my list to replace the short block.
This past summer I tried running 10w30 and a different brand of oil (normally I had been running rotella 15w40). I did this while towing in really extreme weather and the oil actually broke down to a water like consistency. I was relying heavily on my methanol/water injection while towing. As it turned out, my nozzle placement was really poor (too close to the intake manifold), and most of the mix was entering cylinder three, in droplet form. I had not known this before hand. Because of the large nozzle size, there was enough meth/water mix that cylinder washing occurred in #3. Cylinder washing is when fuel (water/meth in my case) washes the oil off the cylinder walls. This caused the rings to contact the cylinder wall, and my blow-by got bad very quickly. There is some pretty nasty damage on the walls of cylinder three from this. In the years of using meth/water this problem had never occurred until I ran the crappy oil. So I think it was sort of a combination that lead to the problem.
So, friend of mine had bought a rusty parts prado with a blown transmission around the time I started to figure this all out. The engine in his Prado had excellent compression and ran really clean. So I bought the short block from him. I actually took the whole engine home, and stripped it to the short block and returned all the parts I did not need back to him.
I bought all new bottom end bearings, a full new engine gasket and seal set, new water pump, t-belt kit, engine mounts, block heater etc. I pulled the motor right apart and cleaned/painted everything as I put it back together. I actually put a new turbo CHRA on at the time too. As it turned out my old turbo was fine and the crank-case pressure was actually causing the turbo to push a bit of oil out the turbine seal into the exhaust. I took the opportunity to install a pre-turbo pyrometer probe as well (had only been running post turbo until now).
So motor is basically new now. I also scored a brand new injection pump last year from Australia. Between this job and the dozens other things I've done to my motor over the years, suffice to say I know these motors pretty well now.
Moral of the story? If ANYONE out there, cracks their 2LTE/2LT cylinder head, PLEASE fix it right away. Don't drive it like that! And second thing, be DANG careful about how you setup your water/methanol injection system if you do go for one. Put the nozzle far enough back in the system that the water/meth has time to mix and evaporate properly with the air before entering the engine.
Here are a couple pictures right before the motor went back in.
