Another Misdiagnosed Dead Engine After a Broken Timing Belt 2004 2UZ

[Fzj80 1997]

I just wanted to put out another heads up in not trusting your mechanic when they say you need a new motor after a broken timing belt.

I rolled the dice on an 04 that snapped a timing belt a few weeks ago and got a chance to throw in a new belt today. Scoped the cylinders before starting on the belt and no piston/valve contact seemed evident. She fired right up after I plugged in the cam sensor I initially forgot to plug in. Before that, the truck sounded like it didn’t have any compression while cranking for whatever reason which momentarily made my heart sink.

I talked to the mechanic that misdiagnosed the truck before I bought it and he said he performed a leak down test and it failed 5 out of 8 cylinders. Not sure if he actually did it, but the coils were all unplugged and the bolts were loose. Anyways, screw that guy because there’s totally some missing bolts and sorry to the guy that was mislead into selling me his truck. Hope this data point helps someone that runs into this issue in the future

Also, this truck had a timing belt and water pump service around 100k according to the sticker and was overdue by ~1,200 miles. The belt was a Continental and the pulleys seemed fine. Just go OE Mitsuboshi

 

[Patassa]

1200 over and it snapped a belt? Whew. I went 25,000 over and the belt looked like it wanted to tell me I was wasting my time changing it.