Enjoy!!!! Most shop have a sign up Employees Only beyond this point. They "say" that this is for insurance reason. Well that's in partly true, as they amount of tools & parts being thrown across the shop floor in anger can be dangerous. They also don't wont their reputation tarnished by the four letter words coming from under the hood & racks. They actual have red warning lights that comes on at each bay whenever a customer is coming in the shop, only air tools can be heard when red lights on!
Talk about a PITA vehicle. I saw a guy working on his Range Rover yesterday in O'Reilly's parking lot, replace two coils. He said he was pulling the intake manifold to get at them, he wasn't kidding! He went on to say he bought two wrecks then had rebuilt the engines, now just sitting on garage floor waiting to swap out. Now that's a PITA car.
Did you know some sports cars must have engine pull just to replace spark plugs or tune.
All kidding aside; I find the 100 series one of the best engineered and easier to work-on vehicles I've worked on, at least for the PM stuff. Sure they're are some bolts that are PITA. But with the right tools, frustration can be reduced. Sure the starter under the intake seems counter productive to place an electric motor in such a hot spot. But Toyota used such a good starter they last longer then any I've seen. Perhaps it was a trade off for the engineers to keeping starter placement above waterline (silt & mud). May have been nice to see alternator a bit higher up, but easy to swap out anyway.
Yes the rear air compressor bolt or the DS exhaust manifold are a couple more of the tight spots, but not impossible to deal with.
But what did get my language skills to regress, is when they went too the no dip stick transmission and premix only SLL coolant "Pink", that was crossing the line in my book.
From what one mud member posted on replacing front heater core, well if I ever need to replace I may change my opinion of Mr. T's engineers, but is just one more reason to do proper PM.
What I really like about the 100 series, is if properly maintained they don't need much. I was at Slee this week picking up parts, and a comment was made to me that "most work we do is correcting what corner shop's have done". This is one thing I've found very true on the rigs I've worked on, as 90% is corrective work I do. I go further to say some Toyota & Lexus Dealer shops are in that basket, depending on which mechanic you get!
