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There are also all electric AC systems out now. No idea how well those work, no experience. That and a Mojave Heater should solve the HVAC needs I'd think.
 
There are also all electric AC systems out now. No idea how well those work, no experience. That and a Mojave Heater should solve the HVAC needs I'd think.
I don't know if the electric AC would solve anything unless it comes with the heater core, since I'd assume you'd still need the condenser and lines, and the pump somewhat ironically is the one component I do have and should bolt up fine.
 
Just because you can, does not mean that you should:
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More pics here: Log into Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/773270148933318/
OTOH:
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Log into Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/676407448830727
 
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Hilux has been making some odd noise lately. It's like a light tapping only under low throttle and seems to be coming from the top end of the engine. I first replaced the serpentine belt since it was squealing occasionally, and was crossing my fingers it was the tensioner bouncing but that didn't make any difference. I changed the oil, popped the valve covers, and cleaned out the VVTI inlet screen.

The oil looked fine, a bit of gold shimmer in the bottom of the container after draining it, and some shimmer and a couple small pieces in the filter. This is the 2nd or 3rd oil change on the engine, so I'm not particularly worried.

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The VVTI filter had some s*** in it, but not enough to stop the VVTI working.

The top end looked fine. I pulled the spark plugs and they all look great.

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I checked the valve clearance, all but two were within spec. Intake #8 and #11 were loose, with #8 at .012" and #11 at .014" with spec being .010" at the loosest. My current guess is those two valves are the tapping noise I'm hearing. It's really hard to reproduce it with the truck parked, but I can pretty reliably get it to happen when cruising through the neighborhood. 1st or 2nd gear around 2400rpm it'll make a little tapping noise. At idle it's fine, full throttle it's fine, anywhere else it's fine. It seems to get quieter as the engine gets warmer too, which I think would help point to the valve lash where it'd get tighter as everything expands. When it's fully up to temp you can barely hear it.

There's a couple other causes I've read about. The VVTI gear can get slop and cause a somewhat similar noise, though that usually seems caused by the VVTI having zero advance when the sound is made and is solved by advancing the camshaft in the tune slightly, but at the rpm range I hear it the VVTI is well advanced so that seems kind of unlikely. I don't think it's rod knock or anything on the bottom since it only occurs during a very specific rpm zone, and doesn't happen at idle or high throttle. The truck could be at 20psi of oil pressure at idle and it's quiet, or it could be cold at 2400rpm with 130psi of oil pressure and the sound still happens. And I don't think it's knock from detonation, it has never (audibly) done that and the plugs and fueling look fine and haven't changed and been through a couple tanks of gas.

It could also just be a bolt loose somewhere and as the engine heats up the gap shrinks and that part can't vibrate as much. I'm going to put a wrench on everything I can reach and see if that stops it. But it sounds like it's coming from the head, and people have reported similar sounds due to valve lash being off. I thought it seemed extreme that the valves being off .002" and .004" could cause noise since that's such a small gap, but it's also over double the gap that the low end of the spec is.



I just wanted to catalog what I'd found for future reference. Otherwise the truck has been running great! I got some new rear tires (old ones had the flat spots from the spin out) and my goodness what a difference that made in how smooth it drives. She can do 80mph and not feel like a suicide box! I even got it over 100mph just to prove it can! I've been eyeing a S364SXR turbo for it, but that will be awhile before it goes on and I'd like to get it on the dyno with the current turbo before then too.
 
That's what they make wraps for. I'm betting yours is better sorted.
I was hoping there'd be more info and pictures. Curious what transmission he's using, rear axle/suspension setup, fuel setup. Stuffing the engine in was relatively simple compared to all the ancillary parts!
 
The noise kept bothering me and I couldn't figure out where it was, so on a whim I pulled the cams to fix the valve lash on the couple spots out of wack. That revealed the journals were pretty chewed up.

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The cams seemed fine, but there seemed to have been an oil starvation issue which was odd, or some s*** had gone through the engine. With not a lot of options, I took some scotch brite and smoothed out the surfaces which didn't take much effort and made them look a lot better.

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That was last week. Put it back together, no change. Talked to my neighbor, and we found that unplugging #6 made the noise go away, so whatever the noise was from was caused by #6 firing. Friday morning I decided to pull the head and see if there was anything that would help me not have to pull the whole engine.

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There was nothing seemingly wrong with the head. The cylinders (all of them) had these weird wear marks about halfway up and on both intake/exhaust sides. It's all smooth but the cross hatching is worn away, and this is with maybe 3000 miles on the engine. My other block with 200k on it doesn't look like this.

Today I pulled the engine.

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Easier to just pull the trans out and then will make aligning with the clutch easier when I reinstall it.

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No big chunks in the oil pan which is good

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Pull #6, the rod bearings are a little marked up but not terrible.

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The skirt has matching wear marks as expected, but is pretty smooth actually.

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Crank feels fine

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Let's check the mains.

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Well that's not good!

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Those are all ridges you can feel and get a nail on the #7 main. It turns out all but the #4 (center) main is totally wiped. Here is #4

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Pull the other pistons. The #6 was the ONLY one that was in good shape.

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Here's how most of the rod bearings look, they aren't in "bad" shape as in they're nice and smooth, but all the top layer is gone.

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And #6 for comparison, the cylinder that was causing the noise looks great by comparison?

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And then all the mains:

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The mains are in bad shape, feel nasty and gritty and have crazy wear marks.

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Back to #6 because it was causing noise. But the wrist pin, bushing, and piston journals are all tight feeling and look great.

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And that ends the day.

I'm pretty stumped what's happening. There seems to be three or four issues at play:

1. Cam journals seemed to lack oil
2. Cylinders lacking lubrication on the walls?
3. Rod bearings wiped
4. Main bearings wiped

I'm going out on a limb but maybe the noise from #6 was really the crank flexing from the #7 main bearing being so beat up (it seems the worst of them all) since the #6 assembly seems the best out of everything.

As for the real issue, there seems to be an oil feed problem. What is weird about that is it not rearing its head until thousands of miles in, and I have low oil pressure safeties which will turn the engine off if the pressure drops below a value that's dependent on rpm. This engine has had low oil pressure since the start, but it was within stock spec, it was just much lower than the original stock engine. But once it gets above idle the oil pressure is like 40+ psi and up past 60psi at high rpm, and at idle it's around 18-20psi (but stock engine was 35-40psi for comparison).

What I'm going to do next is get some plastigauge and check the bearing clearances. After talking to my neighbor the theory is that the mains are too loose or tight, that blows them out, then the rods aren't getting enough oil and get blown out, and there isn't enough oil spraying out of the crank/rods to properly lubricate the cylinders. That doesn't explain the cams that seemed starved for oil... but the thought is that it's a brand new high flow oil pump, and the ecu thinks there's high oil pressure, but is there something happening down stream of the oil pressure sensor that is making the engine not get properly lubricated?

It's all very confusing and the more I tear into it the more questions and messed up stuff I find, and so far there's no smoking gun besides something happening with the oiling system.
 
While you've got apart rod out all of the oil passages? Physically verify that none of the passages are partially blocked or compromised, or that any plugs aren't leaking.
 
Does the oil pan have any baffles? Windage tray? Is there sufficient clearance between the pan and pickup? If you had no alarms for low oil pressure, I guess none of that's a problem. Just curious.

What oil do you run? Any chance it gets airated?

Good that you caught it before massive failure.
 
While you've got apart rod out all of the oil passages? Physically verify that none of the passages are partially blocked or compromised, or that any plugs aren't leaking.
That's what I was thinking too. My dad sent me some instructions he found where people remove the oil galley pressed in balls and then tap the galley for threaded plugs so the galley can be fully inspected and cleaned, I will definitely do that too. I'm really hoping when I pull the crank there are some obvious signs of contamination at the main feed ports.
Does the oil pan have any baffles? Windage tray? Is there sufficient clearance between the pan and pickup? If you had no alarms for low oil pressure, I guess none of that's a problem. Just curious.

What oil do you run? Any chance it gets airated?

Good that you caught it before massive failure.
It's not baffled but it does have a windage tray. The pan has an upper section and then the actual sump hangs off that in the front and is where the dip stick goes. Lately I've been running Rotella-T6 15w-40, early on the engine seemed to make low oil pressure compared to the stock engine (but not outside the realm of "normal") so I bumped to the 15w-40 from 10w-30, and that isn't uncommon either for 2JZs from what I've read. I guess it could've gotten aerated, I don't know how one would conclusively know that though, it would seem like if it was aerated enough to cause issue the sensor would register that maybe?

The only thing outside the realm of normal that has occurred recently was setting up launch control and we did a bunch of pulls on the highway, but I have a hard time believing that did anything (and I don't remember when the noise specifically started so the two could be totally unrelated). But if doing 0-60 pulls dialing in launch control was causing issues, that's no different really than hard acceleration so I don't think the oil would've been sloshing around enough to make a difference.
 
With the sump at the front of the engine those hard launches may have been sloshing the oil and momentarily uncovering the pick-up. Once in a while may not be a problem, but a bunch in a row may have been.
This is a common issue in drag racing with front sump engines. If you can devise a baffle that acts like a diode, oil can flow into, but not out of the the rear of the sump (w/o resorting to hinged gate(s) because those always complicate things) I'd do it.

I built a KA24 pan to fit a 510 that used two over-lapping sets of 90° baffles arranged in a pair of diamonds to trap oil around the pick-up. The gaps at the tips let oil in under G loading, but they were short enough that normal flat-level oil level flowed over the tops of the baffles. It was crude, simple, and enough for the occasional hard corner that car would see.
 
If your sensors are working as designed, it sure would seem to eliminate an oil delivery problem yet it "looks" like a delivery problem. Could it be insufficient oil type for the current use/load? Or is more bearing clearance needed with more flow like the old school racers used? I think they did it for less rotating drag though??

Your truck is Baddass, I hope you get it figured out.
 
Not sure, seems like that should be short enough. Does it turn it off until reset, or only turn it off until pressure comes back?

Doing the math, 250 ms is 29 revolutions at 7000 rpm. If I did the math right. hum.
7000rpm/60sec = ~117 rev/second, 117*.25 = ~29 revs per 250 ms.
That might be too long.
 
Not sure, seems like that should be short enough. Does it turn it off until reset, or only turn it off until pressure comes back?

Doing the math, 250 ms is 29 revolutions at 7000 rpm. If I did the math right. hum.
7000rpm/60sec = ~117 rev/second, 117*.25 = ~29 revs per 250 ms.
That might be too long.
Turns off with a 3s buffer until it's allowed to be restarted. It'd still be spinning but would at least notify you that something happened and stop being under load. At idle the limit is set to low teens, and then pretty linear up to 5000rpm where the failsafe is set to 45psi.
 
Pulled the oil galley plugs, took the oil pump and filter housing apart, and no smoking guns of anything obvious happening. I ended up dropping the crank, block, and pistons off at the machine shop. They'll regrind the crank, the block they are suspicious needs to be line honed since it was not originally and they said with the ARP main studs the block could warp enough to squish the crank which could explain the wear on the mains, and then starvation of the rods and potentially material being generated to mess with the cams. The pistons they said looks like normal wear from s*** getting flung off of the rods and crank, and they'll measure and inspect the pistons and if they need some love they'll touch them up and recoat the skirts. They also found what APPEARS to be a crack in the crank at the center main bearing:

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They're going to check if it is actually cracked or not. The crank being cracked and the mains being squished from the studs are the two suspects they're chasing down. If the crank is cracked I have my original crank I can use but it also needs to be reground. Hopefully find out more tomorrow.
 
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