After owning an 80, and 3 100's and now currently without a cruiser, the disease is creeping back and I am back in the market. I'm looking at a higher mileage 97 80, with 270K+ miles. The owner admits the heater control valve has failed within the past year. Also, the head gasket hasn't been replaced or worked on from what I'm told. From reading, the failure of the HCV could be a major problem depending on the situation. Right now I don't have much detail on what happened or where it happened. I haven't seen the vehicle in person yet either. The price may be right, but should this situation give me any extra concern? Your advice would be appreciated.
Buyers advice - Heater Control Valve (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter PW24
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id want more info, heater control valve failure could be anything from just a crack causing a slight seep to a full blow out with major coolant lose. and even then did it overheat or did they catch it in time.
inkpot
SILVER Star
HCV failure means that the cooling system leaked out some or all fluids. It is not a big deal unless the rig was driven on continuously after that fail. It is a common age failure. We have replaced dozens of them. If it runs good, and sound goods, and the coolant looks OK, then it may be a good candidate.
Ask if it overheated due to the failure. If so than I can see your concern about the HG but in all reality if it has 270 miles on it you may end up wanting to refresh the top end anyway so if the price is right and you take into account the need for future HG rebuild I would say go for it. The HG may be just fine and heater control valves are cheap and easy to replace as stated by @Qball
Current price for an OEM heater control valve is a little more then 20 bucks I'm sorry to say, more like 85 bucks.It’s a 20 dollar part even for Oem.
P/N 87240-60170
Valve Assy, Heater Water
$85.10
87240-60170 Genuine Toyota Land Cruiser Lexus LX450 FZJ80 OEM Heater Water Valve | eBay
We are happy to take care of all your Genuine parts and accessory needs. We specialize in Japanese Auto Spare Parts: Toyota / Lexus, Nissan / Infiniti, Mitsubishi, Mazda, Subaru, Suzuki. Genuine OEM Parts.
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Some here, like to believe, promote, that the '80 is a frail weakling, I attest they are very robust, durable, capable of soaking up tons of abuse. When evaluating one, I fail to see the utility of a stack of receipts, consentrate on it's condition, how it runs now, less about the history.
PO of my LX450 had a heater valve failure @330K. When I bought it I replaced the valve and have had no issues with HG. Yes, still original HG at 338K. While some attest that you should do it as PM, I am of the mindset that if it's not giving issues (not broke), don't fix it. You're just wasting money. So to answer the original question, yes it should give you concern, but not any more than if the radiator ran dry from a leak and started to overheat. What really matters is how long, if at all, it ran over temp. And unless you do a pressure test or have starting issues with white smoke, misfires, etc, you won't be able to tell if it's had HG damage until you've driven it a few driving cycles (cold soak to operating temp). Most of your small headgasket issues reveal themselves on cold soaks (coolant pooling in cylinder(s)) . major headgasket issues once to operating temp (compression gases escaping in to cooling system).
