Yikes. The upside is that we learn the most about the system this way. The tougher the problem, the more you learn and understand it. I'm looking forward to seeing it run.
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- Thread starter
- #62
Lots of progress! Last couple days have been a focus on finishing the exhaust since I got the 3.5" V Band I needed, and then more tuning.
This guy was ****ing stoked
And here's a random photo of the turbo oil drain:
With the V-Band and some more pizza cuts I went about mocking up the rear section of the exhaust which was quite the animal.
Just getting the V-Band on was a trick and required some angles on both parts of the exhaust. It is SO tight here.
And I learned that the easiest way to assemble/disassemble is to disconnect the V-band on the turbo, and then pull the crossmember that the exhaust goes OVER, and THEN it's not too painful to get the V-band clamp on (of which I modified to make it easier also).
All of this work so I could have a high clearance exhaust (the transmission hangs lower by quite a bit) and then have a cool bedside dump into a teardrop shape!
With it all tacked up, and a pain to remove, it was time to weld it up.
The front part of the exhaust generally welded a lot better, not sure why. Though to be fair I did absolutely zero cleaning of the metal, but I did back purge it. Not the prettiest welds, but they'll hold. I welded on it for 3+ hours straight, and that was zero prep of the surfaces, not even wiping them down. There was a LOT of seams, and with it being so big I only stopped at one part to let it cool down for a few minutes since generally I could bounce between the two ends and weld one part while another cooled. The exhaust tip turned out pretty sick.
And back up she goes, tight is the name of the game!
I have the exhaust hugging, if not outright touching, the engine and transmission the whole way to try and give some room for the body and the cooling line and wiring. I then went in after and wrapped everything in aluminum foil as a temporary stop gap until I get some proper header wrap.
The bedside I cut with the plasma. I have two overlay plates that will clamp the bedside and hide the gross cut on the body, but I haven't put those on yet since I wanted to get it actually driving now that the exhaust was finished.
The exhaust tip sticks out a bit, I will hit it with the grinder so it ends up flush with the bed side.
I might move the battery someday, we'll see how hot it gets back there. I originally put it there to offset my weight. Once I header wrap the whole exhaust I'm not too worried, and there's a lot of airflow with the open bed. You can see I have two rubber exhaust hangers, one next to the driveshaft and then another near the tip. I might have a little arm come out to brace the exhaust overlay plate on the bedside too, we'll see how much it moves around and gets caught on the exhaust.
And this is back from the first drive!
Yesterday night and this morning I tried to get it to run correctly. Originally the engine was surging, was in this constant loop of revving up then down on repeat. I got that fixed at idle by closing the throttle body all the way, which I originally had opened a hair since it's a little sticky at full close--but that fixed the idle for the most part. But revving it up it would go back into the surging. I watched videos, read posts, and I couldn't find anything related to the problem I was having. Watching tuning videos just showed what I already knew. I sprayed starter fluid all over, I ****ed with the MAP vacuum line, this morning I even pulled the intercooler off to make sure the throttle blade wasn't doing some weird resonance and the turbo wasn't causing it.
I decided to check the timing with the timing light again, and for some reason it was off by 6-7 degrees mechanically from what the ECM was commanding. I thought that was weird, but I had changed the primary trigger tooth setting from falling to rising, so maybe that had affected it since it was reading a different part of the tooth presumably? And that reminded me that you could change that same setting in for the secondary (cam) trigger! I swapped the secondary trigger tooth from falling to rising and voila the truck runs perfectly! I had also noticed the camshaft timing was reading weird pulsing values that coincided with the surging, even when I would turn VVTI off, and with the trigger changed that fixed that also! So for whatever reason, my 2JZ runs the 2JZ basemap settings for some things and is 180deg different on other things! Which is crazy, literally two menu items that swapping them in the tune fixed everything, and if I had done that first would've saved me probably 15 hours of troubleshooting in the past week!
With the updated cam trigger settings, I was able to open the throttle body up again so it wouldn't be sticky and it idled great! It would rev up fine, everything was working so I took it for a drive. First around the neighborhood, then got gas, made some more tweaks to the tune, and then drove into town a bit, more tweaking, and drove home.
There was some weird things though, the turbo seemed to make this high pitched squeal at certain rpm. The turbine wheel had a ****ed up blade, so I figured it was just that making noise. But on the return from town I got into boost for the second time and heard it spool up and then a high pitched suction sound, and a puff of smoke! I wasn't sure if the engine had exploded, a boot had popped off from boost, or what, but the truck was still running fine and had oil pressure so I continued home. When I got home though, the compressor wheel wasn't spinning at all. I just took it apart, and the compressor wheel can free spin on the shaft and actually the turbine wheel spins fine too.
I think part of the turbine wheel came off, and jammed the turbine, and the compressor momentum loosened it (it's only held on with a nut). The turbine wheel is well chewed up, and seems to have bent the shaft since there's quite a bit of run out.
I pulled the shaft, which also ended up breaking the end pulling the nut off (so it wasn't getting tightened back down anyway). I'm hoping my neighbor has a spare shaft/turbine wheel lying around since the rest of the turbocharger seems fine. We already knew this turbo was going to need some refreshing, I just didn't think it'd need it THAT fast.
But otherwise lots of success! The truck and ECM are finally running correctly. I need someone to take me for a drive so I can adjust the tune and get some steady state load on it. I made 6.2psi on the second pull when it blew, and when the turbo comes on it's insane feeling. There is so much power, I thought I was going to have the rear tires break free at 60mph. One of my friend's was saying that if I had an electronic wastegate it would help it spool up faster since it would only bypass air when peak boost was hit, instead of the mechanical wastegate that is throttle dependent, so I might go to one of those sooner than I was thinking. I only got into boost twice, but it really needed some rpms to get going. The second time when it made 6psi it was at 6400rpm:
And the first time it was near 7000rpm, so it really needs to get up there to get the turbo going. But in some ways that's nice, the truck feels totally normal driving around until you go WOT and give it a second for the turbo to spool up. I just wished it was a bit more linear power delivery, but I only have one drive a lot of tuning to do still so we'll see if I can dial it in and get used to it. Can always run a different turbo setup too.
Hopefully next update is all about tuning and getting it dialed in driving. Turbo might be ****ed, but the Hilux is back in action!
This guy was ****ing stoked
And here's a random photo of the turbo oil drain:
With the V-Band and some more pizza cuts I went about mocking up the rear section of the exhaust which was quite the animal.
Just getting the V-Band on was a trick and required some angles on both parts of the exhaust. It is SO tight here.
And I learned that the easiest way to assemble/disassemble is to disconnect the V-band on the turbo, and then pull the crossmember that the exhaust goes OVER, and THEN it's not too painful to get the V-band clamp on (of which I modified to make it easier also).
All of this work so I could have a high clearance exhaust (the transmission hangs lower by quite a bit) and then have a cool bedside dump into a teardrop shape!
With it all tacked up, and a pain to remove, it was time to weld it up.
The front part of the exhaust generally welded a lot better, not sure why. Though to be fair I did absolutely zero cleaning of the metal, but I did back purge it. Not the prettiest welds, but they'll hold. I welded on it for 3+ hours straight, and that was zero prep of the surfaces, not even wiping them down. There was a LOT of seams, and with it being so big I only stopped at one part to let it cool down for a few minutes since generally I could bounce between the two ends and weld one part while another cooled. The exhaust tip turned out pretty sick.
And back up she goes, tight is the name of the game!
I have the exhaust hugging, if not outright touching, the engine and transmission the whole way to try and give some room for the body and the cooling line and wiring. I then went in after and wrapped everything in aluminum foil as a temporary stop gap until I get some proper header wrap.
The bedside I cut with the plasma. I have two overlay plates that will clamp the bedside and hide the gross cut on the body, but I haven't put those on yet since I wanted to get it actually driving now that the exhaust was finished.
The exhaust tip sticks out a bit, I will hit it with the grinder so it ends up flush with the bed side.
I might move the battery someday, we'll see how hot it gets back there. I originally put it there to offset my weight. Once I header wrap the whole exhaust I'm not too worried, and there's a lot of airflow with the open bed. You can see I have two rubber exhaust hangers, one next to the driveshaft and then another near the tip. I might have a little arm come out to brace the exhaust overlay plate on the bedside too, we'll see how much it moves around and gets caught on the exhaust.
And this is back from the first drive!
Yesterday night and this morning I tried to get it to run correctly. Originally the engine was surging, was in this constant loop of revving up then down on repeat. I got that fixed at idle by closing the throttle body all the way, which I originally had opened a hair since it's a little sticky at full close--but that fixed the idle for the most part. But revving it up it would go back into the surging. I watched videos, read posts, and I couldn't find anything related to the problem I was having. Watching tuning videos just showed what I already knew. I sprayed starter fluid all over, I ****ed with the MAP vacuum line, this morning I even pulled the intercooler off to make sure the throttle blade wasn't doing some weird resonance and the turbo wasn't causing it.
I decided to check the timing with the timing light again, and for some reason it was off by 6-7 degrees mechanically from what the ECM was commanding. I thought that was weird, but I had changed the primary trigger tooth setting from falling to rising, so maybe that had affected it since it was reading a different part of the tooth presumably? And that reminded me that you could change that same setting in for the secondary (cam) trigger! I swapped the secondary trigger tooth from falling to rising and voila the truck runs perfectly! I had also noticed the camshaft timing was reading weird pulsing values that coincided with the surging, even when I would turn VVTI off, and with the trigger changed that fixed that also! So for whatever reason, my 2JZ runs the 2JZ basemap settings for some things and is 180deg different on other things! Which is crazy, literally two menu items that swapping them in the tune fixed everything, and if I had done that first would've saved me probably 15 hours of troubleshooting in the past week!
With the updated cam trigger settings, I was able to open the throttle body up again so it wouldn't be sticky and it idled great! It would rev up fine, everything was working so I took it for a drive. First around the neighborhood, then got gas, made some more tweaks to the tune, and then drove into town a bit, more tweaking, and drove home.
There was some weird things though, the turbo seemed to make this high pitched squeal at certain rpm. The turbine wheel had a ****ed up blade, so I figured it was just that making noise. But on the return from town I got into boost for the second time and heard it spool up and then a high pitched suction sound, and a puff of smoke! I wasn't sure if the engine had exploded, a boot had popped off from boost, or what, but the truck was still running fine and had oil pressure so I continued home. When I got home though, the compressor wheel wasn't spinning at all. I just took it apart, and the compressor wheel can free spin on the shaft and actually the turbine wheel spins fine too.
I think part of the turbine wheel came off, and jammed the turbine, and the compressor momentum loosened it (it's only held on with a nut). The turbine wheel is well chewed up, and seems to have bent the shaft since there's quite a bit of run out.
I pulled the shaft, which also ended up breaking the end pulling the nut off (so it wasn't getting tightened back down anyway). I'm hoping my neighbor has a spare shaft/turbine wheel lying around since the rest of the turbocharger seems fine. We already knew this turbo was going to need some refreshing, I just didn't think it'd need it THAT fast.
But otherwise lots of success! The truck and ECM are finally running correctly. I need someone to take me for a drive so I can adjust the tune and get some steady state load on it. I made 6.2psi on the second pull when it blew, and when the turbo comes on it's insane feeling. There is so much power, I thought I was going to have the rear tires break free at 60mph. One of my friend's was saying that if I had an electronic wastegate it would help it spool up faster since it would only bypass air when peak boost was hit, instead of the mechanical wastegate that is throttle dependent, so I might go to one of those sooner than I was thinking. I only got into boost twice, but it really needed some rpms to get going. The second time when it made 6psi it was at 6400rpm:
And the first time it was near 7000rpm, so it really needs to get up there to get the turbo going. But in some ways that's nice, the truck feels totally normal driving around until you go WOT and give it a second for the turbo to spool up. I just wished it was a bit more linear power delivery, but I only have one drive a lot of tuning to do still so we'll see if I can dial it in and get used to it. Can always run a different turbo setup too.
Hopefully next update is all about tuning and getting it dialed in driving. Turbo might be ****ed, but the Hilux is back in action!
ntsqd
technerd
At least some of the KKK (Borg-Warner) turbos use a left-hand 7mm threaded nut to hold the compressor wheel in place. No idea about other turbo mfg's.
Sounds awesome
- Thread starter
- #67
Sniv's Sunday Storytime!
A lot has happened in the past week, we'll see how much I remember to write down. We left off with the first turbo having issues. I was hoping I could replace the turbine shaft, but it ended up that when the thing went poof and the compressor wheel got loose that it had moved forward and started rubbing on the compressor housing, which the housing could be fixed but the wheel was toast, so I would need a whole new core section to replace it.
After coordinating with people my neighbor knew (he works at a diesel shop, thus why I'm getting free diesel turbos), I wasn't able to get parts to fix the first turbo since it's a tweaked one with a different compressor/turbine wheel setup than a factory turbo. Luckily, his brother had a turbo laying around that he said I could have!
This one is a HE341, which I guess was only offered for one year on the 5.9 cummins before being changed out for the HE351---the first turbo was a modified HE351 with a larger exhaust turbine. That last point being critical, and overlooked by myself and everyone else.
I had left the exhaust housing on the engine, no point in unbolting it from everything when it had the same bolt pattern as the new turbo and presumably would work with it. I took the "new" turbo apart, rewelded the wastegate mount onto the inlet housing, and then installed it into the previous exhaust housing.
This turbo made no boost whatsoever. Fast forward some ****ing around, and then the epiphany that even though all the mounting interfaces are IDENTICAL, the HE341 has a smaller exhaust turbine than the MODIFIED HE351 I was running, so obviously there was no boost since the exhaust was just skirting around the turbine and not actually spinning it. I then pulled the turbo apart, cleaned up the correct exhaust housing, bolted it all together, etc. etc. ANNNND it still makes no boost.
Pull the second turbo apart, and the turbine is rubbing on the exhaust housing and dumping oil.
No one seems quite sure how it made no boost at all, it would still spin up fine and had a squeal to it, but somehow refused to make boost. The shaft had quite a bit of run out and had gotten bent somehow, presumably before I received it. I think this updates us to like Sunday last week. So at this point, I've gone through two free turbos, and I could buy a new turbo from the diesel shop which was expensive plus they didn't have any in stock for a size that everyone thought would be good suited for the truck. Thus, on Sunday I bought a chinese HE351!
Three different turbo setups in that picture that the truck ran within a week span! The modified HE351 for the diesel guys on the top right, the old HE341 for a stock 5.9 cummins, and then my new stock HE351---also for a 5.9 cummins. But the diesel guys thought that the modifications they do to their HE351 on the exhaust side was actually detrimental to me, which is why I didn't just buy one of those from them and went with the stock style HE351----plus this bad boy was $140 shipped!
And fast forward a bit, reweld the wastegate bracket AGAIN, and we finally have a functional turbocharger that hopefully lasts!
Almost everything about the new turbo looks identical to the first turbo, I wouldn't be surprised if they are essentially identical. I won't be pushing this turbo with much boost, so between that and everything looking solid, I'm not too worried, and for $140 can't go wrong---and there's an intercooler to filter stuff at the intake hahaha
Time flies, I think the new turbo was installed on Friday since there was a car meet in town with a bunch of out of town drift cars showing up so I took the Hilux to that which is when that video I posted was taken.
A lot more screwing with stuff than I was expecting, but finally has a good turbo and runs awesome! More tweaking of the tune to get it dialed in more, and probably have 100 miles on it with the new ECM and everything is working great! The power is absolutely insane, boost comes in around 3000rpm and then it just lights the tires up, but it's not an abrupt hit and feels like a nice and progressive increase in power. But trying to launch it is impossible, and full throttle even rolling from a slow speed, once it gets deep into boost it'll spin through 4th gear and then I let off since it's terrifying. I did one half hearted 0-60 pull where it was like 6.5s which isn't bad, but the entire thing was just babying the throttle trying to prevent it spinning which it still did. Tires and wheels are high on the list, so none of the spinning is really a surprise.
With that said, there are some "big" issues. At first the turbo seemed to be making like 12psi of boost. I wanted like 7psi which is what I had read people said the stock NA 2JZ could handle. I kept backing off the wastegate, which for anyone who's like me and doesn't understand how a wastegate on a turbo works--it's closed initially which forces all the exhaust through the turbine to spin it up, once a certain amount of boost is built, the wastegate starts to move which opens a flap to bypass exhaust around the turbine which stops it spinning up so the boost doesn't increase---well I kept backing the wastegate off to bypass more exhaust and it didn't seem to do much. And on top of that, I hadn't actually used 100% throttle and held it. Well I tried that yesterday during some tuning, and it made 20+ psi!
I even backed the wastegate off more, to the point it's wide open so it's bypassing as much exhaust as possible even at idle---still made 20psi! The issue is the turbo is meant for 40psi on a diesel, so I'm trying to limit it way beyond what it wants to do, there's physically no way to make the turbo put out less boost without drilling out the wastegate port to try and allow more exhaust flow (soon to happen).
And 20psi on a built 2JZ is great, that's what I want down the line, but right now I need a lot less than that! And I may have gotten too frisky right away.... I took my neighbor for a rip today, and during a pull there was a puff of smoke from the front. When we got back to the house, it seemed to have come from the crankcase vent. But she was still running fine. Then a friend stopped by who was driving by and I took him for a rip and just let it eat to show him how wild it was to spin through four gears, huge puffs of smoke. To the point of oil covering the windshield at the end. But truck is still running fine, get home, and the crank case vent had absolutely puked oil out of it.
On the down side, I don't have the catch can hooked up, but the plus side was I could see it blowing all the smoke to know something was up?
Get home, running fine, turn the truck off, inspect stuff, seems alright---go to start it and won't start!
This was like an hour ago this happened.
We pushed it back into the shop, and I pulled the plugs and did a compression test.
Plugs look fine, a bit rich which I was expecting but no oil on them and not lean by any stretch.
Check compression, for reference what it was when I first measured this engine like two years ago:
1 - 150
2 - 130
3 - 110
4 - 90
5 - 70
6 - 150
And now?
Cylinder #1 is certainly hurt, but the engine is actually running better than ever! I think the rings were maybe seized up when I got the engine and have broken free since the compression is actually amazingly good now! Not at all what I was expecting.
And that's where I called it. What's next? I will reinstall the plugs and see if it starts, I don't know why it didn't start in the first place, five good cylinders should start easily. This of course was the one drive I've done without the laptop (since I don't have a dash yet) so for all I know fuel pressure was low, or one of the engine fail safes decided to keep it off---but it shouldn't be compression related at least which is good!
After that, I'm thinking of pulling the head and pulling piston #1 and actually swapping it with a piston from my spare 2JZ. The 2JZ oil pan is this weird two piece thing, and the bottom piece only covers the front four cylinders, and I don't think (albeit have yet to try) that I can pull the upper half of the oil pan with the engine still installed in the truck. Meaning, I can drop the pan easily, pull the head, and pull the #1 connecting rod and piston without pulling the engine. But since I can't access the back two pistons that way, and I don't know if I feel like pulling the whole engine right now, so as a quick and dirty fix I can swap just the #1 piston and do a quick ball hone on it and fix whatever is wrong with it and slap it back together.
Another option or two, is if I can access the connecting rod bolts for the rear cylinders, then just swap all the connecting rods and pistons to stronger/low compression ones without dropping the engine. If I can do that, I think I'll definitely do it since that's the main reason to build an engine is to lower the compression ratio and get stronger connecting rods (the NA 2JZ ones are known to be weak). I wouldn't get all the fancy block work done, but that's why I bought a second engine so I can do that later (if I really care to even). The second option, is I could just pull the whole engine to do what I just said anyway. At the end of the day that's a couple hour job, the harness unplugs easy, I'm going to pull the turbo and exhaust ANYWAY to heat wrap it and drill out the wastegate port, I'm gonna have to pull the intercooler and crank pulley to get to the timing belt... so pulling the engine is really just unbolting the bell housing and intake and harness at that point.
Which typing it out, seems insane not to just do a quick build of the engine, it's like $1500 for new pistons/rods/rings and then it should be able to handle whatever I throw at it. As long as the block doesn't need to get honed, that's probably what I'll do. If the #1 cylinder walls are jacked, then I'll probably just slap it back together and send it while I start building the other engine and drop it at the machine shop. But if I can avoid needing to wait on the machine shop, then I can have the bottom end built by next weekend and then run the full 20psi the turbo is putting out and everything will be happy.
Stay tuned! Lot is happening
A lot has happened in the past week, we'll see how much I remember to write down. We left off with the first turbo having issues. I was hoping I could replace the turbine shaft, but it ended up that when the thing went poof and the compressor wheel got loose that it had moved forward and started rubbing on the compressor housing, which the housing could be fixed but the wheel was toast, so I would need a whole new core section to replace it.
After coordinating with people my neighbor knew (he works at a diesel shop, thus why I'm getting free diesel turbos), I wasn't able to get parts to fix the first turbo since it's a tweaked one with a different compressor/turbine wheel setup than a factory turbo. Luckily, his brother had a turbo laying around that he said I could have!
This one is a HE341, which I guess was only offered for one year on the 5.9 cummins before being changed out for the HE351---the first turbo was a modified HE351 with a larger exhaust turbine. That last point being critical, and overlooked by myself and everyone else.
I had left the exhaust housing on the engine, no point in unbolting it from everything when it had the same bolt pattern as the new turbo and presumably would work with it. I took the "new" turbo apart, rewelded the wastegate mount onto the inlet housing, and then installed it into the previous exhaust housing.
This turbo made no boost whatsoever. Fast forward some ****ing around, and then the epiphany that even though all the mounting interfaces are IDENTICAL, the HE341 has a smaller exhaust turbine than the MODIFIED HE351 I was running, so obviously there was no boost since the exhaust was just skirting around the turbine and not actually spinning it. I then pulled the turbo apart, cleaned up the correct exhaust housing, bolted it all together, etc. etc. ANNNND it still makes no boost.
Pull the second turbo apart, and the turbine is rubbing on the exhaust housing and dumping oil.
No one seems quite sure how it made no boost at all, it would still spin up fine and had a squeal to it, but somehow refused to make boost. The shaft had quite a bit of run out and had gotten bent somehow, presumably before I received it. I think this updates us to like Sunday last week. So at this point, I've gone through two free turbos, and I could buy a new turbo from the diesel shop which was expensive plus they didn't have any in stock for a size that everyone thought would be good suited for the truck. Thus, on Sunday I bought a chinese HE351!
Three different turbo setups in that picture that the truck ran within a week span! The modified HE351 for the diesel guys on the top right, the old HE341 for a stock 5.9 cummins, and then my new stock HE351---also for a 5.9 cummins. But the diesel guys thought that the modifications they do to their HE351 on the exhaust side was actually detrimental to me, which is why I didn't just buy one of those from them and went with the stock style HE351----plus this bad boy was $140 shipped!
And fast forward a bit, reweld the wastegate bracket AGAIN, and we finally have a functional turbocharger that hopefully lasts!
Almost everything about the new turbo looks identical to the first turbo, I wouldn't be surprised if they are essentially identical. I won't be pushing this turbo with much boost, so between that and everything looking solid, I'm not too worried, and for $140 can't go wrong---and there's an intercooler to filter stuff at the intake hahaha
Time flies, I think the new turbo was installed on Friday since there was a car meet in town with a bunch of out of town drift cars showing up so I took the Hilux to that which is when that video I posted was taken.
A lot more screwing with stuff than I was expecting, but finally has a good turbo and runs awesome! More tweaking of the tune to get it dialed in more, and probably have 100 miles on it with the new ECM and everything is working great! The power is absolutely insane, boost comes in around 3000rpm and then it just lights the tires up, but it's not an abrupt hit and feels like a nice and progressive increase in power. But trying to launch it is impossible, and full throttle even rolling from a slow speed, once it gets deep into boost it'll spin through 4th gear and then I let off since it's terrifying. I did one half hearted 0-60 pull where it was like 6.5s which isn't bad, but the entire thing was just babying the throttle trying to prevent it spinning which it still did. Tires and wheels are high on the list, so none of the spinning is really a surprise.
With that said, there are some "big" issues. At first the turbo seemed to be making like 12psi of boost. I wanted like 7psi which is what I had read people said the stock NA 2JZ could handle. I kept backing off the wastegate, which for anyone who's like me and doesn't understand how a wastegate on a turbo works--it's closed initially which forces all the exhaust through the turbine to spin it up, once a certain amount of boost is built, the wastegate starts to move which opens a flap to bypass exhaust around the turbine which stops it spinning up so the boost doesn't increase---well I kept backing the wastegate off to bypass more exhaust and it didn't seem to do much. And on top of that, I hadn't actually used 100% throttle and held it. Well I tried that yesterday during some tuning, and it made 20+ psi!
I even backed the wastegate off more, to the point it's wide open so it's bypassing as much exhaust as possible even at idle---still made 20psi! The issue is the turbo is meant for 40psi on a diesel, so I'm trying to limit it way beyond what it wants to do, there's physically no way to make the turbo put out less boost without drilling out the wastegate port to try and allow more exhaust flow (soon to happen).
And 20psi on a built 2JZ is great, that's what I want down the line, but right now I need a lot less than that! And I may have gotten too frisky right away.... I took my neighbor for a rip today, and during a pull there was a puff of smoke from the front. When we got back to the house, it seemed to have come from the crankcase vent. But she was still running fine. Then a friend stopped by who was driving by and I took him for a rip and just let it eat to show him how wild it was to spin through four gears, huge puffs of smoke. To the point of oil covering the windshield at the end. But truck is still running fine, get home, and the crank case vent had absolutely puked oil out of it.
On the down side, I don't have the catch can hooked up, but the plus side was I could see it blowing all the smoke to know something was up?
Get home, running fine, turn the truck off, inspect stuff, seems alright---go to start it and won't start!
This was like an hour ago this happened.
We pushed it back into the shop, and I pulled the plugs and did a compression test.
Plugs look fine, a bit rich which I was expecting but no oil on them and not lean by any stretch.
Check compression, for reference what it was when I first measured this engine like two years ago:
1 - 150
2 - 130
3 - 110
4 - 90
5 - 70
6 - 150
And now?
Cylinder #1 is certainly hurt, but the engine is actually running better than ever! I think the rings were maybe seized up when I got the engine and have broken free since the compression is actually amazingly good now! Not at all what I was expecting.
And that's where I called it. What's next? I will reinstall the plugs and see if it starts, I don't know why it didn't start in the first place, five good cylinders should start easily. This of course was the one drive I've done without the laptop (since I don't have a dash yet) so for all I know fuel pressure was low, or one of the engine fail safes decided to keep it off---but it shouldn't be compression related at least which is good!
After that, I'm thinking of pulling the head and pulling piston #1 and actually swapping it with a piston from my spare 2JZ. The 2JZ oil pan is this weird two piece thing, and the bottom piece only covers the front four cylinders, and I don't think (albeit have yet to try) that I can pull the upper half of the oil pan with the engine still installed in the truck. Meaning, I can drop the pan easily, pull the head, and pull the #1 connecting rod and piston without pulling the engine. But since I can't access the back two pistons that way, and I don't know if I feel like pulling the whole engine right now, so as a quick and dirty fix I can swap just the #1 piston and do a quick ball hone on it and fix whatever is wrong with it and slap it back together.
Another option or two, is if I can access the connecting rod bolts for the rear cylinders, then just swap all the connecting rods and pistons to stronger/low compression ones without dropping the engine. If I can do that, I think I'll definitely do it since that's the main reason to build an engine is to lower the compression ratio and get stronger connecting rods (the NA 2JZ ones are known to be weak). I wouldn't get all the fancy block work done, but that's why I bought a second engine so I can do that later (if I really care to even). The second option, is I could just pull the whole engine to do what I just said anyway. At the end of the day that's a couple hour job, the harness unplugs easy, I'm going to pull the turbo and exhaust ANYWAY to heat wrap it and drill out the wastegate port, I'm gonna have to pull the intercooler and crank pulley to get to the timing belt... so pulling the engine is really just unbolting the bell housing and intake and harness at that point.
Which typing it out, seems insane not to just do a quick build of the engine, it's like $1500 for new pistons/rods/rings and then it should be able to handle whatever I throw at it. As long as the block doesn't need to get honed, that's probably what I'll do. If the #1 cylinder walls are jacked, then I'll probably just slap it back together and send it while I start building the other engine and drop it at the machine shop. But if I can avoid needing to wait on the machine shop, then I can have the bottom end built by next weekend and then run the full 20psi the turbo is putting out and everything will be happy.
Stay tuned! Lot is happening
- Thread starter
- #68
Pictures will tell the story. And if you want to think on this:
-Low compression
-Lots of blowby
-Leak down shows it through the crank
-Bore scope shows clean cylinders and intact piston
What am I?
Below was me being retarded and not realizing there were extra bolts holding the cam cover on. Luckily I have a whole engine of spare parts!
According to Car Care Nut this head gasket has blown 17,364 times
Confirmed, can only access the front three connecting rods. And to make matters worse, the only way to pull the "upper oil pan" is by removing bolts that go into the transmission---except I have an adapter plate to run a 350Z transmission (CD009) so those bolts can't even be access without removing the transmission entirely.
I can't believe these haven't been replaced:
-Low compression
-Lots of blowby
-Leak down shows it through the crank
-Bore scope shows clean cylinders and intact piston
What am I?
Below was me being retarded and not realizing there were extra bolts holding the cam cover on. Luckily I have a whole engine of spare parts!
According to Car Care Nut this head gasket has blown 17,364 times
Confirmed, can only access the front three connecting rods. And to make matters worse, the only way to pull the "upper oil pan" is by removing bolts that go into the transmission---except I have an adapter plate to run a 350Z transmission (CD009) so those bolts can't even be access without removing the transmission entirely.
I can't believe these haven't been replaced:
- Thread starter
- #69
And there we have it!
Funny enough, the first engine on my buggy had the same exact failure, and this piston will join one of the ones from the buggy as desktop memorabilia!
Path forward:
Engine is in great shape. I will pull a piston from the backup engine and swap it in. I already ordered the 2.4mm Cometic gasket and ARP head studs. I will drill out the turbo wastegate port so boost can come down to a normal level, and I will richen out the tune a bit. Otherwise she's going back together to party another day, and continue the original plan of building the spare engine for the future.
Funny enough, the first engine on my buggy had the same exact failure, and this piston will join one of the ones from the buggy as desktop memorabilia!
Path forward:
Engine is in great shape. I will pull a piston from the backup engine and swap it in. I already ordered the 2.4mm Cometic gasket and ARP head studs. I will drill out the turbo wastegate port so boost can come down to a normal level, and I will richen out the tune a bit. Otherwise she's going back together to party another day, and continue the original plan of building the spare engine for the future.
- Thread starter
- #70
Today I tore the spare engine down, it definitely saw some s*** in its final moments.
What the **** is even that?
I took piston #1 because it vaguely looked the cleanest? I doubt it mattered, besides maybe that mega squanchy one.
I had a tub of purple power cleaner so poured the remains of it into the sonic cleaner and let it sit for 20 minutes, and it looks nearly brand new!
After consulting with some friends, it was established that the mis-matched interface would be between the wrist pin and piston. Both wrist pins were the same, so it seemed to make sense to swap only the piston over so there's as little mass above the mis-matched interface.
And since we're ballin on a budget here, I just kept the rings the piston had on it. I also didn't have a small enough ball hone so just took some scotch brite and roughed up the cylinder walls a bit, though they still had cross hatching left but it made me feel a little better. And back in she went!
And that about wraps up today. Until I get the head studs I'll just do other things, like painting the valve covers!
An extra treat from the spare engine is it has a Fluid Damper, which appears to cost $400+ by itself, so I'd say that $300 engine is more than paying for itself right now!
What the **** is even that?
I took piston #1 because it vaguely looked the cleanest? I doubt it mattered, besides maybe that mega squanchy one.
I had a tub of purple power cleaner so poured the remains of it into the sonic cleaner and let it sit for 20 minutes, and it looks nearly brand new!
After consulting with some friends, it was established that the mis-matched interface would be between the wrist pin and piston. Both wrist pins were the same, so it seemed to make sense to swap only the piston over so there's as little mass above the mis-matched interface.
And since we're ballin on a budget here, I just kept the rings the piston had on it. I also didn't have a small enough ball hone so just took some scotch brite and roughed up the cylinder walls a bit, though they still had cross hatching left but it made me feel a little better. And back in she went!
And that about wraps up today. Until I get the head studs I'll just do other things, like painting the valve covers!
An extra treat from the spare engine is it has a Fluid Damper, which appears to cost $400+ by itself, so I'd say that $300 engine is more than paying for itself right now!
- Thread starter
- #72
Wow what a week! To conclude the exhaust upgrades, I ported the wastegate port on the turbo. I machined the wastegate hole from <0.75" to 1.125" which is a ~2.25x increase in area.
Exhaust got wrapped, including the header and a turbo blanket.
At this point, the engine is back together and running! After warming up the oil pressure is a bit low, 18-20psi at idle which is weird because it used to be at 35-40psi at idle. But revving it just a little and the pressure jumps up, so while concerning and odd it is running fine and does have fine oil pressure--just a lot lower than before.
I take it for a drive to test the amount of boost since porting the wastegate, and at 60% throttle and 4800rpm with the wastegate all the way open and it's already making over 10psi, so take my foot off the throttle to not overboost it and the engine dies. It was kind of odd, but I didn't think much about it and pulled over to check things over. I then cranked it and it wouldn't fire. Nothing from the datalog was showing anything weird, but I called my neighbor and his brother came and towed me home. On the way back I popped the clutch to roll start it and it fired right up, but when I got home it wouldn't start from cranking, so we again roll started it. After that I screwed with the cranking parameters and then it seemed to fire up fine. Why did it die on the road? No idea. But the starting was maybe just related to poor tuning? I had changed a fair bit in the tune, richened it out, changed timing, but I didn't change anything at idle or for cranking and it had never had an issue cranking before this so also odd.
I decided to port the wastegate even more, if I can't get the turbo to make lower pressure then I'm kind of hosed since the exhaust is built for this style turbocharger and it'd be a lot of work to redo it. I absolutely go to town on it, rotating the turbo all over and absolutely hogging out as much material as I can, and with a focus of angling the wastegate port down towards the exhaust flange to try and get smoother airflow into the wastegate instead of the abrupt angle it had before.
It's not pretty but this is what peak performance looks like
I cut the flapper off and make a new one to vaguely seal it up. I'm not worried about a perfect seal since it spooling up fast hasn't been an issue.
I finish that Saturday night, get the turbo thrown back on and go for a rip to see how much boost it's making now. Somehow the truck making too much boost has become a big issue ironically.
The boost was a lot better, a couple psi getting on it (with the wastegate totally open again). I decided to do a full throttle pull to red line to see what the max boost it would make was. At 7000rpm it was making about 10psi, which is great! I can have the wastegate closed to spool it fast and then once boost is reached the wastegate can fully open to just hold at 10psi!
And then the engine just went weird. To back track a bit, leaving the neighborhood there was a point where the engine just felt draggier. Like I had to keep a bit more power to go the speed I wanted, it didn't feel as free revving and unrestrained compared to usual. I didn't think much of it, but did note it. When I did the pull to 7000 it was the same way, it just felt really slow to rev, it's making 10psi and I didn't even reach the rev limiter and it seemed so weird I decided to shift and when I put the clutch in the revs dropped a bit and the oil pressure went to zero. The laptop screen is flashing and freaking out, the engine is dying like the first test drive. I try to rev it and it refuses, so I let the clutch out to get the revs up and that brings the oil pressure back up but now it's only at like 20psi at 3000rpm, but at least it's running again.
I limp it home, keeping it in low gears to keep the revs up to keep it running and oil pressure. I did some testing and if I let it drop to idle the oil pressure would drop faster than the revs so at idle rpm it was flat out zero oil pressure. I was able to get it home and pulled the spark plugs to check compression, expecting one of the pistons exploded or something.
But compression was actually pretty consistent. 117 +/-5, which seems low but the compression ratio is a lot lower now. I then looked through the datalog but isn't anything obvious. But then I look at the VVTi and the actual vs commanded CAM timing totally desynced when this whole event occurred. Oil pressure was at 40psi, and when it revved out the VVTi went from commanding like 20deg cam advance and the actual cam advance being 20deg to actual advance being like 2deg. And then shortly after that oil pressure issues and it not wanting to run. I had replaced the VVTi solenoid with the one from the spare engine since I had broken those little bolt ears off the original, so maybe that was the issue the whole time?
With high hopes that it was as simple as the VVTi solenoid, and if not that then maybe the oil pickup was clogged since I had touched that too, I started to unbolt stuff this morning, but then checked the oil just to see if that revealed anything.
And that says a lot! The only question now was what had failed. This oil has 10 miles on it maybe.
Yesterday morning I started to pull the engine, one of my friends came over and helped.
That little beam of the core support that the hood latches to was a bit in the way, so we cut that out. I'll make some brackets so it can be easily installed/removed.
And by noon we had everything out!
First time the engine had been out since I installed it.
Tearing into it, metal everywhere obviously. A LOT of metal came out of the VVTi port.
Highly concentrated there! There's a filter at the VVTi port. I think the engine started eating itself and that clogged the VVTi filter and that's why it wasn't doing what it needed.
Some big chunks in the oil pan!
And the grand finale!
And of course, from cylinder #1, the one I just swapped parts into. These are the rod bearings going to the crank.
When I pulled the bolts they were suspiciously not tight, certainly not compared to the other rod I also pulled. The consensus was the rod bolts were torque to yield, and I just tightened them to the same torque spec as an unused bolt. That was too loose, so right off the bat the #1 rod was bouncing around, and the more it bounced the more it wore out the bearings, the more the bearings wore out the more oil pressure was getting bled.
I had thought about reusing the rod bolts, but I said **** it, how much of a difference can it be. You always hear of people reusing bolts on heads and stuff and how it ended up fine. Well in my case it wasn't fine!
I pulled #6 just to compare, and at least the crank looked fine on #6 and there was still bearing material left. The crank on #1 is scratched up, it can probably get polished out or I will just use the spare engine's crank.
So now the question is, what path to go down? I had instantly jumped to the thought of **** it, build the thing. And really there's not much to build, just do new rods and pistons while it's apart and drop it off at the machine shop and make it nice. The whole engine needs to be torn down to clean the metal out anyway. I'm still leaning towards doing that, I don't want to tear into the engine again just because a rod bent or another ring land breaks. I want it to just be overbuilt and not worry the turbo is making too much power. Though some of my friends have different thoughts, clean it up, use the pistons and rods in it, just fix what I have since it will still make plenty of power and put the money from the other parts towards other stuff and does the little truck really need to be capable of tons of power? I don't know, there is something to that too.
At a minimum, my plan is to drop the block off at the machine shop, probably Tuesday so it at least gets in the que to get flushed and cleaned. What an adventure!
Exhaust got wrapped, including the header and a turbo blanket.
At this point, the engine is back together and running! After warming up the oil pressure is a bit low, 18-20psi at idle which is weird because it used to be at 35-40psi at idle. But revving it just a little and the pressure jumps up, so while concerning and odd it is running fine and does have fine oil pressure--just a lot lower than before.
I take it for a drive to test the amount of boost since porting the wastegate, and at 60% throttle and 4800rpm with the wastegate all the way open and it's already making over 10psi, so take my foot off the throttle to not overboost it and the engine dies. It was kind of odd, but I didn't think much about it and pulled over to check things over. I then cranked it and it wouldn't fire. Nothing from the datalog was showing anything weird, but I called my neighbor and his brother came and towed me home. On the way back I popped the clutch to roll start it and it fired right up, but when I got home it wouldn't start from cranking, so we again roll started it. After that I screwed with the cranking parameters and then it seemed to fire up fine. Why did it die on the road? No idea. But the starting was maybe just related to poor tuning? I had changed a fair bit in the tune, richened it out, changed timing, but I didn't change anything at idle or for cranking and it had never had an issue cranking before this so also odd.
I decided to port the wastegate even more, if I can't get the turbo to make lower pressure then I'm kind of hosed since the exhaust is built for this style turbocharger and it'd be a lot of work to redo it. I absolutely go to town on it, rotating the turbo all over and absolutely hogging out as much material as I can, and with a focus of angling the wastegate port down towards the exhaust flange to try and get smoother airflow into the wastegate instead of the abrupt angle it had before.
It's not pretty but this is what peak performance looks like
I cut the flapper off and make a new one to vaguely seal it up. I'm not worried about a perfect seal since it spooling up fast hasn't been an issue.
I finish that Saturday night, get the turbo thrown back on and go for a rip to see how much boost it's making now. Somehow the truck making too much boost has become a big issue ironically.
The boost was a lot better, a couple psi getting on it (with the wastegate totally open again). I decided to do a full throttle pull to red line to see what the max boost it would make was. At 7000rpm it was making about 10psi, which is great! I can have the wastegate closed to spool it fast and then once boost is reached the wastegate can fully open to just hold at 10psi!
And then the engine just went weird. To back track a bit, leaving the neighborhood there was a point where the engine just felt draggier. Like I had to keep a bit more power to go the speed I wanted, it didn't feel as free revving and unrestrained compared to usual. I didn't think much of it, but did note it. When I did the pull to 7000 it was the same way, it just felt really slow to rev, it's making 10psi and I didn't even reach the rev limiter and it seemed so weird I decided to shift and when I put the clutch in the revs dropped a bit and the oil pressure went to zero. The laptop screen is flashing and freaking out, the engine is dying like the first test drive. I try to rev it and it refuses, so I let the clutch out to get the revs up and that brings the oil pressure back up but now it's only at like 20psi at 3000rpm, but at least it's running again.
I limp it home, keeping it in low gears to keep the revs up to keep it running and oil pressure. I did some testing and if I let it drop to idle the oil pressure would drop faster than the revs so at idle rpm it was flat out zero oil pressure. I was able to get it home and pulled the spark plugs to check compression, expecting one of the pistons exploded or something.
But compression was actually pretty consistent. 117 +/-5, which seems low but the compression ratio is a lot lower now. I then looked through the datalog but isn't anything obvious. But then I look at the VVTi and the actual vs commanded CAM timing totally desynced when this whole event occurred. Oil pressure was at 40psi, and when it revved out the VVTi went from commanding like 20deg cam advance and the actual cam advance being 20deg to actual advance being like 2deg. And then shortly after that oil pressure issues and it not wanting to run. I had replaced the VVTi solenoid with the one from the spare engine since I had broken those little bolt ears off the original, so maybe that was the issue the whole time?
With high hopes that it was as simple as the VVTi solenoid, and if not that then maybe the oil pickup was clogged since I had touched that too, I started to unbolt stuff this morning, but then checked the oil just to see if that revealed anything.
And that says a lot! The only question now was what had failed. This oil has 10 miles on it maybe.
Yesterday morning I started to pull the engine, one of my friends came over and helped.
That little beam of the core support that the hood latches to was a bit in the way, so we cut that out. I'll make some brackets so it can be easily installed/removed.
And by noon we had everything out!
First time the engine had been out since I installed it.
Tearing into it, metal everywhere obviously. A LOT of metal came out of the VVTi port.
Highly concentrated there! There's a filter at the VVTi port. I think the engine started eating itself and that clogged the VVTi filter and that's why it wasn't doing what it needed.
Some big chunks in the oil pan!
And the grand finale!
And of course, from cylinder #1, the one I just swapped parts into. These are the rod bearings going to the crank.
When I pulled the bolts they were suspiciously not tight, certainly not compared to the other rod I also pulled. The consensus was the rod bolts were torque to yield, and I just tightened them to the same torque spec as an unused bolt. That was too loose, so right off the bat the #1 rod was bouncing around, and the more it bounced the more it wore out the bearings, the more the bearings wore out the more oil pressure was getting bled.
I had thought about reusing the rod bolts, but I said **** it, how much of a difference can it be. You always hear of people reusing bolts on heads and stuff and how it ended up fine. Well in my case it wasn't fine!
I pulled #6 just to compare, and at least the crank looked fine on #6 and there was still bearing material left. The crank on #1 is scratched up, it can probably get polished out or I will just use the spare engine's crank.
So now the question is, what path to go down? I had instantly jumped to the thought of **** it, build the thing. And really there's not much to build, just do new rods and pistons while it's apart and drop it off at the machine shop and make it nice. The whole engine needs to be torn down to clean the metal out anyway. I'm still leaning towards doing that, I don't want to tear into the engine again just because a rod bent or another ring land breaks. I want it to just be overbuilt and not worry the turbo is making too much power. Though some of my friends have different thoughts, clean it up, use the pistons and rods in it, just fix what I have since it will still make plenty of power and put the money from the other parts towards other stuff and does the little truck really need to be capable of tons of power? I don't know, there is something to that too.
At a minimum, my plan is to drop the block off at the machine shop, probably Tuesday so it at least gets in the que to get flushed and cleaned. What an adventure!
This is a wild story similar to my own but I only have 4 cylinders to deal with.
Clean it up, rebuild it, and please properly size a turbocharger for your horsepower and airflow targets
Diesels run lean, boosted spark ignition does not
Clean it up, rebuild it, and please properly size a turbocharger for your horsepower and airflow targets
Diesels run lean, boosted spark ignition does not
- Thread starter
- #74
AFTER MONTHS OF WAITING
Got the bottom end parts back from the machine shop Friday night. They were wrapping up cerakoting the head but let me grab the bottom end to start assembly.
Pistons, valves, and head are coated with some special cerakote ceramic coating that the shop swears by to keep temps down, sounded fun and experimental and they only charged for labor to do it.
Saturday got the rotating assembly put together. I'm pretty lazy when it comes to gapping rings, so the spread is .028"-.032". That's a bit looser than the 30psi call out of ~.026-.028". Piston #1 has the tightest pair of rings, working up to the loosest pair on #6. My neighbor who used to work at the performance diesel shop in town said that's what they would do with the idea being the rear most cylinders get the hottest so they get the looser gaps, not sure how true that is but I like the logic.
The pistons are -15cc Wiesco forged pistons, and are +0.5mm oversized. The block is machined +.001" for 20-30psi. Everything is balanced down to the flywheel and pressure plate. The rods are Manley forged H beams with ARP bolts and Manley bearings. The main caps are also using ARP studs and Manley bearings.
Didn't grab any photos from today. Painted the block, got the rear main seal in, and waiting on the front main seal to show up. Mostly spent the day cleaning parts.
I should have the head back tomorrow hopefully, though there's still plenty to do before that's slowing me down. With any luck the engine build will be done by the end of the week!
Got the bottom end parts back from the machine shop Friday night. They were wrapping up cerakoting the head but let me grab the bottom end to start assembly.
Pistons, valves, and head are coated with some special cerakote ceramic coating that the shop swears by to keep temps down, sounded fun and experimental and they only charged for labor to do it.
Saturday got the rotating assembly put together. I'm pretty lazy when it comes to gapping rings, so the spread is .028"-.032". That's a bit looser than the 30psi call out of ~.026-.028". Piston #1 has the tightest pair of rings, working up to the loosest pair on #6. My neighbor who used to work at the performance diesel shop in town said that's what they would do with the idea being the rear most cylinders get the hottest so they get the looser gaps, not sure how true that is but I like the logic.
The pistons are -15cc Wiesco forged pistons, and are +0.5mm oversized. The block is machined +.001" for 20-30psi. Everything is balanced down to the flywheel and pressure plate. The rods are Manley forged H beams with ARP bolts and Manley bearings. The main caps are also using ARP studs and Manley bearings.
Didn't grab any photos from today. Painted the block, got the rear main seal in, and waiting on the front main seal to show up. Mostly spent the day cleaning parts.
I should have the head back tomorrow hopefully, though there's still plenty to do before that's slowing me down. With any luck the engine build will be done by the end of the week!
- Thread starter
- #75
Got the head back, as mentioned the valves and combustion chamber are cerakoted.
Painted the block with the only orange-ish paint that Ace had. But I like it, the truck ideally someday will get painted the TRD Pro inferno red/orange so this seemed fitting.
Upper oil pan, baffle, pickup, oil pump, lower oil pan all installed. This took a day or two of waiting since I needed the front main seal which installs into the oil pump and it had to get shipped from out of state. The 2JZ is very cool, there are only a handful of normal seals, the majority of interfaces use RTV or O-rings. All the oil connections use O-rings. I'm slightly nervous I may of missed one since I didn't double check it was in position on the block, but I had already laid all the O-rings in position so I'm 90% sure it was there when I installed the upper oil pan, time will tell if I have oil pressure!
Head installed. Reusing the ARP studs for the head, and then a factory turbo thickness head gasket which will put me around 8.5:1 compression ratio.
Cams in. The heads and cams are from the second 2JZ I had, the cams got polished but otherwise were in good shape compared to the metal shaving eating cams from the previous setup. I'm using Brian Tooley valve springs and retainers. Stock valves and keepers, though I think all the valve seats were re-cut.
I was debating just sending it, but good call I didn't since a number of the valve clearances were off. I measured all of them, identified the ones out of spec, and was able to grab some shims from the previous head to swap in.
I was debating just sending it since these are the shims, buckets, and valves that came with this head. But as stated, I think all the valve seats were gone through which explains why some are off. On the intake side, 1/2/3 were off by .002-.003", and exhaust side 2/3/5/8/9/10 were off anywhere up to .006". All the valves were tight, which would make sense if the seats were cut and moved up slightly. All of them had clearance, but not to the stock spec of .006" for intake and .010" for exhaust. After swapping the shims on the ones that were off, we rechecked those valves and they were on the money!
Another thing that took a bit of extra time was the VVTI timing gear. I took it apart since the spare one seemed pretty gross, and this one was clean but had the metal shaving salad from before. I took it apart, and what a cool little mechanism. But I'm pretty sure I put it back together wrong and the little center interior gear in the top right I think I put in upside down. When I torqued the gear on it felt weird and squishy, and then I heard the pop and that little gear had gotten cracked. Luckily I have an entire spare 2JZ of parts, so I grabbed the spare VVTI gear, and said **** it and just installed it without risking pulling it apart. There's also a big O-ring on the inside that I don't have a replacement for, so I was worried the one I broke might leak anyway (though it's easy to pull off relatively since it's at the front of the engine). To avoid any leakage---with the gear I've never run---I just installed it and said **** it. Once it was installed it did rotate freely which is the real test if the VVTI internals are alright, so I think it will be fine.
With the valve lash set, the new timing gear on it was just a matter of bolting the front parts on. I also put the valve covers, spark plugs, and the coil packs in.
Not too shabby, I probably spent less than 16 hours building it. The 2JZ feels really simple compared to the "simple pushrod" of the LS stuff I've messed with prior, or even any V engine. Granted there's two cams, but they're just chilling on top, one head, no lifters or pushrods, no weird seals or funky things to make stuff line up, 80% of the sealing surfaces use RTV or off the shelf O-rings, nearly everything has alignment pins. The main caps only have two bolts, everything being in a line and stacked vertically just felt really simple. I browsed through a manual, but really someone could easily fake their way through the entire build since there's just not that many parts and it's very intuitive. I really liked it!
That about wraps up today. I pulled the engine off the stand, tomorrow I should get the clutch and transmission bolted up. I should be installing everything into the truck Sunday I think!
Painted the block with the only orange-ish paint that Ace had. But I like it, the truck ideally someday will get painted the TRD Pro inferno red/orange so this seemed fitting.
Upper oil pan, baffle, pickup, oil pump, lower oil pan all installed. This took a day or two of waiting since I needed the front main seal which installs into the oil pump and it had to get shipped from out of state. The 2JZ is very cool, there are only a handful of normal seals, the majority of interfaces use RTV or O-rings. All the oil connections use O-rings. I'm slightly nervous I may of missed one since I didn't double check it was in position on the block, but I had already laid all the O-rings in position so I'm 90% sure it was there when I installed the upper oil pan, time will tell if I have oil pressure!
Head installed. Reusing the ARP studs for the head, and then a factory turbo thickness head gasket which will put me around 8.5:1 compression ratio.
Cams in. The heads and cams are from the second 2JZ I had, the cams got polished but otherwise were in good shape compared to the metal shaving eating cams from the previous setup. I'm using Brian Tooley valve springs and retainers. Stock valves and keepers, though I think all the valve seats were re-cut.
I was debating just sending it, but good call I didn't since a number of the valve clearances were off. I measured all of them, identified the ones out of spec, and was able to grab some shims from the previous head to swap in.
I was debating just sending it since these are the shims, buckets, and valves that came with this head. But as stated, I think all the valve seats were gone through which explains why some are off. On the intake side, 1/2/3 were off by .002-.003", and exhaust side 2/3/5/8/9/10 were off anywhere up to .006". All the valves were tight, which would make sense if the seats were cut and moved up slightly. All of them had clearance, but not to the stock spec of .006" for intake and .010" for exhaust. After swapping the shims on the ones that were off, we rechecked those valves and they were on the money!
Another thing that took a bit of extra time was the VVTI timing gear. I took it apart since the spare one seemed pretty gross, and this one was clean but had the metal shaving salad from before. I took it apart, and what a cool little mechanism. But I'm pretty sure I put it back together wrong and the little center interior gear in the top right I think I put in upside down. When I torqued the gear on it felt weird and squishy, and then I heard the pop and that little gear had gotten cracked. Luckily I have an entire spare 2JZ of parts, so I grabbed the spare VVTI gear, and said **** it and just installed it without risking pulling it apart. There's also a big O-ring on the inside that I don't have a replacement for, so I was worried the one I broke might leak anyway (though it's easy to pull off relatively since it's at the front of the engine). To avoid any leakage---with the gear I've never run---I just installed it and said **** it. Once it was installed it did rotate freely which is the real test if the VVTI internals are alright, so I think it will be fine.
With the valve lash set, the new timing gear on it was just a matter of bolting the front parts on. I also put the valve covers, spark plugs, and the coil packs in.
Not too shabby, I probably spent less than 16 hours building it. The 2JZ feels really simple compared to the "simple pushrod" of the LS stuff I've messed with prior, or even any V engine. Granted there's two cams, but they're just chilling on top, one head, no lifters or pushrods, no weird seals or funky things to make stuff line up, 80% of the sealing surfaces use RTV or off the shelf O-rings, nearly everything has alignment pins. The main caps only have two bolts, everything being in a line and stacked vertically just felt really simple. I browsed through a manual, but really someone could easily fake their way through the entire build since there's just not that many parts and it's very intuitive. I really liked it!
That about wraps up today. I pulled the engine off the stand, tomorrow I should get the clutch and transmission bolted up. I should be installing everything into the truck Sunday I think!
- Thread starter
- #76
Didn't make any progress yesterday, but got the engine in today!
Yesterday I was able to scan the engine and transmission, and today scanned the engine bay. I'd like to convert the truck to AWD eventually so got the scans of things I can't easily access down the line.
If anyone wants these files, they can be downloaded from GrabCAD.
Today I started with machining a new pilot(?) bushing. The one I had originally machined never fit right and I sometimes get a rattle from the transmission which I think is the sloppy fit. The new one is much nicer with a .0015" radial clearance of the input shaft and a .0005" radial press fit on the crank.
Then it was bolting up the flywheel and clutch and adapter plate:
And finally mated to the 350Z CD009 transmission!
No photos after that, but it dropped in pretty easy doing it by myself. Cutting the core support out when I pulled it definitely helped a ton!
I then spent hours and lots of swearing messing with the exhaust, which in classic fashion barely fits. At the end, I cut off one of the exhaust hangers since it was a bitch to work around, and then beat the exhaust with a hammer in a number of locations and also took the grinder to the transmission and sanded down every support rib or excess feature in the vicinity, oh I also hit the floor with a hammer a few times. The exhaust now actually slides into place pretty easily, but the V band off the downpipe I can't seem to get to line up well enough, so the next step will be to cut one of the V bands off and then weld things until it actually fits.
On the plus side, after this work it should be smooth sailing to get the exhaust in and out---which considering it's 3.5" the whole way will be quite the accomplishment on this little truck!
What else do I have left? The core support needs some fabrication so it can bolt back in. The intercooler needs to get installed. The engine needs oil and a filter, and the wiring harness needs to be hooked up. Need the battery installed... I think that's about it. I'm also thinking of finding someone who specializes in 2JZ tuning and have them at least check out the tune and see if they have any recommendations or tweaks they'd implement, the truck was running great before but my big concern is timing and the knock sensors aren't exactly easy to read and figure out. I did a similar thing on my LS build, got it running and driving fine and then had someone come in to tweak the tune and iron out what I had done.
Once I get those couple things done, she should be ready to fire up! I doubt all of that will happen tomorrow, mainly since the exhaust is gonna take some time to get fit correctly.
Yesterday I was able to scan the engine and transmission, and today scanned the engine bay. I'd like to convert the truck to AWD eventually so got the scans of things I can't easily access down the line.
If anyone wants these files, they can be downloaded from GrabCAD.
Today I started with machining a new pilot(?) bushing. The one I had originally machined never fit right and I sometimes get a rattle from the transmission which I think is the sloppy fit. The new one is much nicer with a .0015" radial clearance of the input shaft and a .0005" radial press fit on the crank.
Then it was bolting up the flywheel and clutch and adapter plate:
And finally mated to the 350Z CD009 transmission!
No photos after that, but it dropped in pretty easy doing it by myself. Cutting the core support out when I pulled it definitely helped a ton!
I then spent hours and lots of swearing messing with the exhaust, which in classic fashion barely fits. At the end, I cut off one of the exhaust hangers since it was a bitch to work around, and then beat the exhaust with a hammer in a number of locations and also took the grinder to the transmission and sanded down every support rib or excess feature in the vicinity, oh I also hit the floor with a hammer a few times. The exhaust now actually slides into place pretty easily, but the V band off the downpipe I can't seem to get to line up well enough, so the next step will be to cut one of the V bands off and then weld things until it actually fits.
On the plus side, after this work it should be smooth sailing to get the exhaust in and out---which considering it's 3.5" the whole way will be quite the accomplishment on this little truck!
What else do I have left? The core support needs some fabrication so it can bolt back in. The intercooler needs to get installed. The engine needs oil and a filter, and the wiring harness needs to be hooked up. Need the battery installed... I think that's about it. I'm also thinking of finding someone who specializes in 2JZ tuning and have them at least check out the tune and see if they have any recommendations or tweaks they'd implement, the truck was running great before but my big concern is timing and the knock sensors aren't exactly easy to read and figure out. I did a similar thing on my LS build, got it running and driving fine and then had someone come in to tweak the tune and iron out what I had done.
Once I get those couple things done, she should be ready to fire up! I doubt all of that will happen tomorrow, mainly since the exhaust is gonna take some time to get fit correctly.
- Thread starter
- #77
She runs!!!
Yesterday got the exhaust fixed. I slit one side to bend the V band into the right spot then overlaid a tube to seal it up and tacked it then pulled it and welded it.
Not the prettiest thing, but she lines up great now and I actually have a little bit of wiggle room in the exhaust everywhere after all the work and beating on it!
Today I grabbed oil and filter and coolant and got the engine ready to start. A parts store opened not too far away so my current commuting vehicle is the mini bike
I hooked up the harness and long story short, it wouldn't get oil pressure at first or start in general. I cranked it a lot and figured I should've had pressure by then, so ran over to the machine shop and borrowed their oil primer and pumped some oil through it. I also told the ECU to cycle the injectors and nothing happened, so pulled up my fuse diagram and saw there was no fuel injector fuse! Fixed that and cranked it and it fired right up! I started and stopped it a couple times before it got oil pressure. On my previous LS build it took probably a minute to get oil pressure, so I was prepped this time that it might be a second, but still hard to let the engine run very long with no pressure!
Once it got oil pressure though, it got ALL THE OIL PRESSURE. The gauge maxed out at 100psi, so I let it run a couple minutes then turned off. The oil regulator on the new pump is probably stuck, which is both ironic and kind of expected. The oil pump is supposed to be this fancy customized stock unit WITH AN IMPROVED REGULATOR. The stock oil pump has really high pressure, and apparently isn't consistent so this pump claimed to fix that. Can't say I ever had issues with the stock pump, but if I'm buying a new one and these morons claim to make it better then sure. I suspect whatever s*** they did made the regulator get stuck. The regulator isn't that bad to reach, but I do have to pull the crank pulley and s*** off the front. I think I can access it without pulling the timing belt or cam pulleys which is all that really matters.
I also forgot to tighten the nuts on the turbo drain so that was squanching everywhere, and forgot to tighten the turbo flange bolts which one of them in classic fashion is inherently stripped out so I pulled the turbo to probably just weld the stud into the flange and call it good.
And that wraps up today! Big success having it fire up and getting oil pressure! Now to make it have less oil pressure and get the remaining things fixed up!
Yesterday got the exhaust fixed. I slit one side to bend the V band into the right spot then overlaid a tube to seal it up and tacked it then pulled it and welded it.
Not the prettiest thing, but she lines up great now and I actually have a little bit of wiggle room in the exhaust everywhere after all the work and beating on it!
Today I grabbed oil and filter and coolant and got the engine ready to start. A parts store opened not too far away so my current commuting vehicle is the mini bike
I hooked up the harness and long story short, it wouldn't get oil pressure at first or start in general. I cranked it a lot and figured I should've had pressure by then, so ran over to the machine shop and borrowed their oil primer and pumped some oil through it. I also told the ECU to cycle the injectors and nothing happened, so pulled up my fuse diagram and saw there was no fuel injector fuse! Fixed that and cranked it and it fired right up! I started and stopped it a couple times before it got oil pressure. On my previous LS build it took probably a minute to get oil pressure, so I was prepped this time that it might be a second, but still hard to let the engine run very long with no pressure!
Once it got oil pressure though, it got ALL THE OIL PRESSURE. The gauge maxed out at 100psi, so I let it run a couple minutes then turned off. The oil regulator on the new pump is probably stuck, which is both ironic and kind of expected. The oil pump is supposed to be this fancy customized stock unit WITH AN IMPROVED REGULATOR. The stock oil pump has really high pressure, and apparently isn't consistent so this pump claimed to fix that. Can't say I ever had issues with the stock pump, but if I'm buying a new one and these morons claim to make it better then sure. I suspect whatever s*** they did made the regulator get stuck. The regulator isn't that bad to reach, but I do have to pull the crank pulley and s*** off the front. I think I can access it without pulling the timing belt or cam pulleys which is all that really matters.
I also forgot to tighten the nuts on the turbo drain so that was squanching everywhere, and forgot to tighten the turbo flange bolts which one of them in classic fashion is inherently stripped out so I pulled the turbo to probably just weld the stud into the flange and call it good.
And that wraps up today! Big success having it fire up and getting oil pressure! Now to make it have less oil pressure and get the remaining things fixed up!
- Thread starter
- #78
Past two days have been an absolute pain in the ass. First go to bleed the clutch and nothing comes out, have to pull the master and spill brake fluid all over the place just to conclude that the clutch pedal wasn't set right so the master couldn't fully extend and draw in fluid. Maybe this explains the weird clutch wear if the clutch wasn't able to fully release. Also the brake and clutch fluid have a common reservoir, and holy s*** is the brake fluid nasty. Need to flush the lines since the fluid is like brown red from presumably all the rust on the original brake lines.
The next absolute pain in the ass was bleeding the cooling system, which I have down pretty well now. The rear axle needs to get jacked up like 2ft so the engine becomes level and then the bleed port at the rear of the head will collect all the bubbles. I was an absolute retard and fully pulled the cap on the bleed port which is an AN4 fitting. Normally I loosen it but it was taking so long for the air to slowly bleed out I went full impatient retard and pulled the cap, and since AN fittings are the absolute worst fittings when it comes to aligning and cross threading, once the coolant flushed through the head I couldn't get the cap back on. So there goes like two gallons of coolant on the shop floor. And that fitting is absolutely ****ed. Today go to weld another fitting on after unsuccessfully trying to untuck it, and the aluminum is so nasty from sitting in coolant for years that it's just disgusting s*** bubbling up everywhere. So I went back to my original janky NPT concoction from a long time ago, somehow still had that. But at least that uses a Schrader valve so is easy and no worry about unscrewing and stripping stuff.
Oh and then the oil pressure "issue". Apparently that's somewhat common on 2JZs, so that is a plus is I didn't have to take the oil pressure regulator apart. Once the engine got warmed up the warm idle oil pressure was ONLY 60psi. It still hits 100psi before 2000rpm.
All of this s*** to "fix" stuff that's not actually wrong and spending two days spilling s*** all over the place. But at least today I finally got to actually drive it! That's all I wanted was to know it's functional!
I just drove around the block a few times. Nothing exciting whatsoever, which is good. She absolutely purrs. The header is soaked in oil so it looks like it's about to catch fire constantly, but otherwise no issues! Running at 172deg like before, going down a slight hill and coolant was at 154, so all acting the same as before. I had a 500psi sensor laying around so plugged that in and recalibrated the tune and did another drive, I didn't rev it out a lot but oil pressure was around 130psi at 3000 or 4000rpm. So I think oil pressure is fine, and is inline with other 2JZs ive read about. One guy in particular was at 130psi at cold idle, swapped in another brand new stock oil pump on his new engine, and the oil pressure was the exact same proving the oil pump was fine. And even with the old used engine oil pressure was routinely over 60psi and that had 200k on it, so I was freaking out over nothing. Still weird to me, my LS cold idle is like 45psi.
Anyway, no other photos, no cool news, but she got her first drive for 2025 in! Now I can focus on wrapping up the front end and dialing in the tune and then start seeing how the boost responds and get some videos!
The next absolute pain in the ass was bleeding the cooling system, which I have down pretty well now. The rear axle needs to get jacked up like 2ft so the engine becomes level and then the bleed port at the rear of the head will collect all the bubbles. I was an absolute retard and fully pulled the cap on the bleed port which is an AN4 fitting. Normally I loosen it but it was taking so long for the air to slowly bleed out I went full impatient retard and pulled the cap, and since AN fittings are the absolute worst fittings when it comes to aligning and cross threading, once the coolant flushed through the head I couldn't get the cap back on. So there goes like two gallons of coolant on the shop floor. And that fitting is absolutely ****ed. Today go to weld another fitting on after unsuccessfully trying to untuck it, and the aluminum is so nasty from sitting in coolant for years that it's just disgusting s*** bubbling up everywhere. So I went back to my original janky NPT concoction from a long time ago, somehow still had that. But at least that uses a Schrader valve so is easy and no worry about unscrewing and stripping stuff.
Oh and then the oil pressure "issue". Apparently that's somewhat common on 2JZs, so that is a plus is I didn't have to take the oil pressure regulator apart. Once the engine got warmed up the warm idle oil pressure was ONLY 60psi. It still hits 100psi before 2000rpm.
All of this s*** to "fix" stuff that's not actually wrong and spending two days spilling s*** all over the place. But at least today I finally got to actually drive it! That's all I wanted was to know it's functional!
I just drove around the block a few times. Nothing exciting whatsoever, which is good. She absolutely purrs. The header is soaked in oil so it looks like it's about to catch fire constantly, but otherwise no issues! Running at 172deg like before, going down a slight hill and coolant was at 154, so all acting the same as before. I had a 500psi sensor laying around so plugged that in and recalibrated the tune and did another drive, I didn't rev it out a lot but oil pressure was around 130psi at 3000 or 4000rpm. So I think oil pressure is fine, and is inline with other 2JZs ive read about. One guy in particular was at 130psi at cold idle, swapped in another brand new stock oil pump on his new engine, and the oil pressure was the exact same proving the oil pump was fine. And even with the old used engine oil pressure was routinely over 60psi and that had 200k on it, so I was freaking out over nothing. Still weird to me, my LS cold idle is like 45psi.
Anyway, no other photos, no cool news, but she got her first drive for 2025 in! Now I can focus on wrapping up the front end and dialing in the tune and then start seeing how the boost responds and get some videos!
- Thread starter
- #79
Lots of updates. First is I called 2JZ Motorsports in Salt Lake City to ask about tuning, and they directed me to a guy named JR Crosby who does all of their tuning, and they are a well known shop (and in the same state) so I figured that was a good place to start. I had done a lot of reading about tuning features I didn't fully understand, primarily getting the knock sensors calibrated and working right, and decided it'd be better to have someone who knows the 2JZ to at a minimum look over my tune and get it dialed in. My main concern was getting the timing correct, and since it's a huge adventure just to get the knock sensors working let alone the questionable results they may be giving, it seemed like it'd be money well spent to at least get a timing table from someone. JR said it'd be $650 and he could remotely tune it as long as I can hotspot off my phone. The cool thing about aftermarket ECMs is you plug into them and can see everything on the laptop in real time and change it in real time, so if I can hotspot off my phone I can just drive around and someone can remotely tune it on the spot which is awesome. JR said remote tuning it wouldn't be an issue, though I told him I could come up if he wanted to put it on a dyno but he said that wouldn't be needed, and keep in mind I'm not shooting for a lot of power (relative to what the engine can make). If I can have a good tune and beat on it and it's happy, whatever power level that ends up being will be more than what the truck can handle anyway. JR also said he could set up stuff like launch control and boost limits (I didn't even know that was a thing, apparently the ECM can be set so when it hits a boost threshold it will just pull fuel to prevent overboosting and hurting itself), so dude seemed to know his stuff and he said it's a one time fee so if things change over time he'll help dial it in. Awesome!
I'm TENATIVELY getting it remote tuned on Tuesday or Wednesday depending on his schedule, though there's a short window of him being available and me being available until the following week so we'll see when it happens. Knowing the truck can drive, and now with a plan in mind to get it tuned, I didn't plan to drive it any more until the tuning session so JR can look the tune over before I risk hurting the engine. That kind of forced me to step back and just look at the remaining detail work since I couldn't rush into messing with the engine side until JR was ready.
To start things off I fixed the core support. I made some brackets that indexed into the core support and some stock holes on the body side, and then also added some more holes with nut certs. I also had a relief that I remembered how to weld and indeed the nasty aluminum for the engine bleed port was just that, nasty!
The brackets are welded to the core support, and then two bolts on each side bolt into the body and there's a bent section to increase the stiffness so it's not just a flimsy flat plate since this has to hold the hood down and the intercooler.
The wife helped me align the front end with the string method too. The steering wheel has always been off center, but both tires were toed in by an inch or more! This should help the handling a bit, maybe help with the no power steering too! The underside is pretty clean actually, one of the tie rods I took the wire brush to but everything else was great and a pipe wrench made easy painless work of adjusting the tiny tie rods. I also greased a bunch of stuff and flushed the brake and clutch lines of all the nasty brake fluid while I was under it.
Another thing to fix or at least inspect was the wastegate. JR said I should hook it up since the ECM has the boost failsafes even though I was worried of overboosting based on last times experience. I first took all the wastegates I had laying around and pressurized them and measured the stroke, effectively getting a spring rate, and then used the softest wastegate. I then actuated it with the compressor with it installed to see if the stroke matched, and it did not! The wastegate valve was really sticky, so after some screwing with it I figured out where it was actually happy and fixed some things sticking. It still doesn't move far, but this is probably a lot better than before! You can also see I took the TIG and blobbed some weld on one side to help it seal up better in its new position, though I'm not particularly worried about how much it seals at the moment.
Oh, and a stud had stripped the holes in the adapter plate for the turbo to the manifold, and I had tried drilling it out and tapping it and using a bolt, that didn't really work though so while I had the turbo moved around I welded the stud directly into the adapter. If that has issues and needs to get pulled, I will cross that bridge when I get there!
The next thing I wanted to do was install the carpet if possible, but first was to get the sound deadening in. And before that I took some random paint and hit all the bare metal spots. Everywhere black is places I had welded and/or added metal to the floor.
I also cleaned up the nasty residue from the roof liner, and then cleaned everything with alcohol, and finally put some 2mm dense sound deadener in. Initially I used the remaining Dynamat I had laying around, and luckily Amazon was able to next day some random equivalent sound deadener that showed up today which I finished most of the truck with. I should've bought more, but essentially everything besides the bottom of the A pillar and behind the door cards has the 2mm dense stuff on it.
I also grabbed some 4mm sound deadener, not sure which is better for what, but I figured stacking them can't hurt anything! I think just the floor will get the 4mm stuff which is really just some sticky foam. The carpet doesn't go up the back and I don't think the foam would last or look as good as the Dynamat so debating just leaving the back as it is. The roof won't get the 4mm either since it will get overlaid with some boat decking/hydroturf to act as headliner.
And then lastly for the interior (kind of) is the carpet. Which absolutely does not fit at all.
This carpet supposedly was for this truck, but none of the dimensions were remotely correct but there's an integrated little plastic traction mat on the driver's side that seems to match some photos of other trucks... Nothing else though seems correct, and the trans tunnel hump in the carpet is ****ing huge! We kind of trimmed it into shape and then ended up cutting it in half along the driver's side trans tunnel fold to overlap the two sides and try to get the trans tunnel hump to sit lower. In retrospect I think we should've cut the carpet into left right and center while it was still oversized, and then the center portion could be cut down to sit where it needs to. Regardless, I'm not entirely sure what the next step is. We're leaving it like this overnight to see if the carpet will flatten out and help fit the body better.
I saw a video a couple days ago of a similar generation truck with some cool headlights that had a LED ring around each light, and it turned out one of the headlights had gone out on the Hilux and the entire headlight has to be replaced since it's a sealed assembly. Keeping in the spirit of anything that needs to be touched will be upgraded, I started looking around for the style of headlight I had seen on the other truck. My first thought was a headlight off a Challenger or something, and it turns out the 5.75" round headlight is pretty universal and I was able to order a four pack for like $150 on Amazon. I had these brand new headlight surrounds from Thailand that I got a long time ago, and when I went to start pulling the stock headlights off most of the bolts were seized, so it was time to throw these on!
And then today got the headlights which bolted right up!
They are HIDs and have the same 3-wire plug as the original headlights, so were literally directly plug and play which is kind of wild. I then had to wire up the running lights if I wanted to use those, which I tapped into an ignition powered wire. The LED halo also flashes orange with the blinkers, and I had already run the blinker wire to the front but never hooked it into anything.
In stock form the outer lights on the Hilux are low beam, and then all four switch to high beam, which is how I'm leaving it for the moment.
I think they're cool, only thing I'm not a fan of is the weird red center glow when the halo is on. We'll see if I keep the running light white halo on, mainly I wanted the halo as a blinker and don't want to push it too far into the ricer territory. In the shop they seemed super bright and were pumping out some heat, I'm excited to see what it's like at night and finally have blinkers. And since there's four headlights, I can have the outer two angled down for low beams and then they'll switch to high beams which is a lot of light, but then I have the middle two high beams which can be separately angled too so I think high beams will have a crazy amount of light output since high beam isn't really slaved to the low beam location which is cool.
Oh I also got a new battery, the Optima had issues since day 1 and I finally got around to warrantying it today. If anyone forgot, here is how the 3.5" exhaust is routed and the bedside dump.
And I think that wraps up everything I've done in the past three days. She's really starting to come together!
I'm TENATIVELY getting it remote tuned on Tuesday or Wednesday depending on his schedule, though there's a short window of him being available and me being available until the following week so we'll see when it happens. Knowing the truck can drive, and now with a plan in mind to get it tuned, I didn't plan to drive it any more until the tuning session so JR can look the tune over before I risk hurting the engine. That kind of forced me to step back and just look at the remaining detail work since I couldn't rush into messing with the engine side until JR was ready.
To start things off I fixed the core support. I made some brackets that indexed into the core support and some stock holes on the body side, and then also added some more holes with nut certs. I also had a relief that I remembered how to weld and indeed the nasty aluminum for the engine bleed port was just that, nasty!
The brackets are welded to the core support, and then two bolts on each side bolt into the body and there's a bent section to increase the stiffness so it's not just a flimsy flat plate since this has to hold the hood down and the intercooler.
The wife helped me align the front end with the string method too. The steering wheel has always been off center, but both tires were toed in by an inch or more! This should help the handling a bit, maybe help with the no power steering too! The underside is pretty clean actually, one of the tie rods I took the wire brush to but everything else was great and a pipe wrench made easy painless work of adjusting the tiny tie rods. I also greased a bunch of stuff and flushed the brake and clutch lines of all the nasty brake fluid while I was under it.
Another thing to fix or at least inspect was the wastegate. JR said I should hook it up since the ECM has the boost failsafes even though I was worried of overboosting based on last times experience. I first took all the wastegates I had laying around and pressurized them and measured the stroke, effectively getting a spring rate, and then used the softest wastegate. I then actuated it with the compressor with it installed to see if the stroke matched, and it did not! The wastegate valve was really sticky, so after some screwing with it I figured out where it was actually happy and fixed some things sticking. It still doesn't move far, but this is probably a lot better than before! You can also see I took the TIG and blobbed some weld on one side to help it seal up better in its new position, though I'm not particularly worried about how much it seals at the moment.
Oh, and a stud had stripped the holes in the adapter plate for the turbo to the manifold, and I had tried drilling it out and tapping it and using a bolt, that didn't really work though so while I had the turbo moved around I welded the stud directly into the adapter. If that has issues and needs to get pulled, I will cross that bridge when I get there!
The next thing I wanted to do was install the carpet if possible, but first was to get the sound deadening in. And before that I took some random paint and hit all the bare metal spots. Everywhere black is places I had welded and/or added metal to the floor.
I also cleaned up the nasty residue from the roof liner, and then cleaned everything with alcohol, and finally put some 2mm dense sound deadener in. Initially I used the remaining Dynamat I had laying around, and luckily Amazon was able to next day some random equivalent sound deadener that showed up today which I finished most of the truck with. I should've bought more, but essentially everything besides the bottom of the A pillar and behind the door cards has the 2mm dense stuff on it.
I also grabbed some 4mm sound deadener, not sure which is better for what, but I figured stacking them can't hurt anything! I think just the floor will get the 4mm stuff which is really just some sticky foam. The carpet doesn't go up the back and I don't think the foam would last or look as good as the Dynamat so debating just leaving the back as it is. The roof won't get the 4mm either since it will get overlaid with some boat decking/hydroturf to act as headliner.
And then lastly for the interior (kind of) is the carpet. Which absolutely does not fit at all.
This carpet supposedly was for this truck, but none of the dimensions were remotely correct but there's an integrated little plastic traction mat on the driver's side that seems to match some photos of other trucks... Nothing else though seems correct, and the trans tunnel hump in the carpet is ****ing huge! We kind of trimmed it into shape and then ended up cutting it in half along the driver's side trans tunnel fold to overlap the two sides and try to get the trans tunnel hump to sit lower. In retrospect I think we should've cut the carpet into left right and center while it was still oversized, and then the center portion could be cut down to sit where it needs to. Regardless, I'm not entirely sure what the next step is. We're leaving it like this overnight to see if the carpet will flatten out and help fit the body better.
I saw a video a couple days ago of a similar generation truck with some cool headlights that had a LED ring around each light, and it turned out one of the headlights had gone out on the Hilux and the entire headlight has to be replaced since it's a sealed assembly. Keeping in the spirit of anything that needs to be touched will be upgraded, I started looking around for the style of headlight I had seen on the other truck. My first thought was a headlight off a Challenger or something, and it turns out the 5.75" round headlight is pretty universal and I was able to order a four pack for like $150 on Amazon. I had these brand new headlight surrounds from Thailand that I got a long time ago, and when I went to start pulling the stock headlights off most of the bolts were seized, so it was time to throw these on!
And then today got the headlights which bolted right up!
They are HIDs and have the same 3-wire plug as the original headlights, so were literally directly plug and play which is kind of wild. I then had to wire up the running lights if I wanted to use those, which I tapped into an ignition powered wire. The LED halo also flashes orange with the blinkers, and I had already run the blinker wire to the front but never hooked it into anything.
In stock form the outer lights on the Hilux are low beam, and then all four switch to high beam, which is how I'm leaving it for the moment.
I think they're cool, only thing I'm not a fan of is the weird red center glow when the halo is on. We'll see if I keep the running light white halo on, mainly I wanted the halo as a blinker and don't want to push it too far into the ricer territory. In the shop they seemed super bright and were pumping out some heat, I'm excited to see what it's like at night and finally have blinkers. And since there's four headlights, I can have the outer two angled down for low beams and then they'll switch to high beams which is a lot of light, but then I have the middle two high beams which can be separately angled too so I think high beams will have a crazy amount of light output since high beam isn't really slaved to the low beam location which is cool.
Oh I also got a new battery, the Optima had issues since day 1 and I finally got around to warrantying it today. If anyone forgot, here is how the 3.5" exhaust is routed and the bedside dump.
And I think that wraps up everything I've done in the past three days. She's really starting to come together!
- Thread starter
- #80
First tuning session is done!
Threw the seats in yesterday and then checked some things and got gas and got her warmed up and dude remoted into the computer and spent a half an hour or more adjusting things and then we spent over an hour just driving around and adjusting everything. The biggest thing I actually notice is the off idle throttle response, which before was really laggy and now is super snappy and makes leaving from a stop easy and smooth. For the WOT tuning at the end I had to do it in 4th gear since 3rd was spinning the tires (while rolling, with the differential welded). It took me a bit to actually get high enough in the rev range to be useful since the truck pulled so insanely hard that when I felt like it was time to shift we were only around 5000rpm. Finally I got the balls to hold it a bit and got shy of 6000rpm, and the limiter is at 7500, and before 6000rpm we already making too much boost and hitting the boost cut.
As I expected, even with screwing with the wastegate it can't bypass enough air to calm it down. What dude suggested is to mount the wastegate directly to the exhaust housing, since the exhaust flow is directly inline with the wastegate it will give it a lot of control versus being mounted at 90deg off of the header. Plus what's nice about this setup is I don't have much room for a wastegate beneath the turbo, and the exhaust has the front three and rear three cylinders group together and then combine at the turbo flange, so I'd have to run dual wastegates or do a lot of work to get one wastegate to bypass all the cylinders, or have some cylinders with less exhaust pressure than others. Mounting the wastegate directly to the housing fixes all the issues that had stopped me from getting an external. He also recommended the Summit one which is only $100 and is an exact copy of the Tial 44mm one. This picture is how I'll setup the wastegate:
We also talked about tires, he recommended I get the tallest tire possible and that (which I don't quite follow) is more important than the tire width for traction. He said if I can fit a 27 or 28 that will hook a lot better than the 26" tires the truck currently has. He recommended the Mickey Thompson ET or the Nitto 555 which are a bit more street friendly. I'll probably go with the 555 since I've seen people recommend those, and probably run a 28" and he said like a 265 would work well. He said that's what he has on his 900hp Supra and he's able to get traction in 2nd, of course I don't have any weight out back but if I can have full throttle on tap and not be terrifying in lower gears than 4th that'd be great! I also have a boost controller I already bought, so I'll get that wired up with the new wastegate and we can then set boost limits in the tune depending on a bunch of parameters, so we could limit boost to keep it from spinning at lower speeds.
There's still a decent bit of tuning left, I'd guess we're at 80%, and the next thing is for me to get the boost under control. But otherwise it's running like an absolute champ, really responsive, and a ton of fun! The sound deadening seemed to help quite a bit, but it's still pretty loud but I don't think any of it is from the exhaust, mostly wind and firewall noise. The alignment we did is absolutely TRASH. I take the thing out to start tuning and the steering is so ****ing twitchy and floaty. I don't know if the steering is just totally worn out, or the alignment we did is actually just that bad. I kind of suspect it being so toed in before made the tires preload the steering so the sloppiness wasn't noticeable, but it's hilarious how excited I was about finding the original alignment being so bad and yet there's a chance it was intentionally bad and that made it good hahaha
Oh and another thing I found, the alternator cable was hanging low. It turns out it wasn't even connected! The end of the wire was just flopping around and the nut was still connected to the alternator! Hopefully that's the only thing I failed to hook up. I got lucky it wasn't sparking around since that huge wire goes straight to the battery! Besides that quick fix, after tuning we threw the hood on and took the truck to dinner to give the wife a ride.
Definitely needs a bigger intercooler, it looks pretty retarded. But I think the Hilux is properly back and better than ever, and hopefully next week can get a bit more tuning and some fatty tires and really see what this little missile can do!
Threw the seats in yesterday and then checked some things and got gas and got her warmed up and dude remoted into the computer and spent a half an hour or more adjusting things and then we spent over an hour just driving around and adjusting everything. The biggest thing I actually notice is the off idle throttle response, which before was really laggy and now is super snappy and makes leaving from a stop easy and smooth. For the WOT tuning at the end I had to do it in 4th gear since 3rd was spinning the tires (while rolling, with the differential welded). It took me a bit to actually get high enough in the rev range to be useful since the truck pulled so insanely hard that when I felt like it was time to shift we were only around 5000rpm. Finally I got the balls to hold it a bit and got shy of 6000rpm, and the limiter is at 7500, and before 6000rpm we already making too much boost and hitting the boost cut.
As I expected, even with screwing with the wastegate it can't bypass enough air to calm it down. What dude suggested is to mount the wastegate directly to the exhaust housing, since the exhaust flow is directly inline with the wastegate it will give it a lot of control versus being mounted at 90deg off of the header. Plus what's nice about this setup is I don't have much room for a wastegate beneath the turbo, and the exhaust has the front three and rear three cylinders group together and then combine at the turbo flange, so I'd have to run dual wastegates or do a lot of work to get one wastegate to bypass all the cylinders, or have some cylinders with less exhaust pressure than others. Mounting the wastegate directly to the housing fixes all the issues that had stopped me from getting an external. He also recommended the Summit one which is only $100 and is an exact copy of the Tial 44mm one. This picture is how I'll setup the wastegate:
We also talked about tires, he recommended I get the tallest tire possible and that (which I don't quite follow) is more important than the tire width for traction. He said if I can fit a 27 or 28 that will hook a lot better than the 26" tires the truck currently has. He recommended the Mickey Thompson ET or the Nitto 555 which are a bit more street friendly. I'll probably go with the 555 since I've seen people recommend those, and probably run a 28" and he said like a 265 would work well. He said that's what he has on his 900hp Supra and he's able to get traction in 2nd, of course I don't have any weight out back but if I can have full throttle on tap and not be terrifying in lower gears than 4th that'd be great! I also have a boost controller I already bought, so I'll get that wired up with the new wastegate and we can then set boost limits in the tune depending on a bunch of parameters, so we could limit boost to keep it from spinning at lower speeds.
There's still a decent bit of tuning left, I'd guess we're at 80%, and the next thing is for me to get the boost under control. But otherwise it's running like an absolute champ, really responsive, and a ton of fun! The sound deadening seemed to help quite a bit, but it's still pretty loud but I don't think any of it is from the exhaust, mostly wind and firewall noise. The alignment we did is absolutely TRASH. I take the thing out to start tuning and the steering is so ****ing twitchy and floaty. I don't know if the steering is just totally worn out, or the alignment we did is actually just that bad. I kind of suspect it being so toed in before made the tires preload the steering so the sloppiness wasn't noticeable, but it's hilarious how excited I was about finding the original alignment being so bad and yet there's a chance it was intentionally bad and that made it good hahaha
Oh and another thing I found, the alternator cable was hanging low. It turns out it wasn't even connected! The end of the wire was just flopping around and the nut was still connected to the alternator! Hopefully that's the only thing I failed to hook up. I got lucky it wasn't sparking around since that huge wire goes straight to the battery! Besides that quick fix, after tuning we threw the hood on and took the truck to dinner to give the wife a ride.
Definitely needs a bigger intercooler, it looks pretty retarded. But I think the Hilux is properly back and better than ever, and hopefully next week can get a bit more tuning and some fatty tires and really see what this little missile can do!
