Leak free!
Following this thread and through plenty of 80-tech ih8mud reading, I am finally leak free



It's been a long time coming. Since I bought her back in '01 there has always been some slow oozing oil leak coming from somewhere, and if I didn't stay on it, the undercarriage would end up coated in oil & grime, and then start to drip onto the driveway. Recently the oil pump cover started leaking pretty steadily, so it motivated me to chase it all down. Two weeks ago I cleaned up everything as best I could with degreaser, toothbrushes, zillions of shop towels, pressure washer, fingers, toothpicks, whatever to get the gunk out of all the crevices. And I found my leaks.
Pan arch is ok. Oil pan gasket is ok. PCV valve is new and leak free along with an oil catch can, as is the valve cover gasket. What was leaking was the dizzy o-ring, the oil pump cover gasket, the crank seal, and a couple of other little doodads I had not expected: oil level sensor gasket, crank position sensor, and the "galley plug" metal seal (the hex nut plug in front of the CPS). Rather than monkeying around with FIPG and trying to seal the CPS (I've read of unsuccessful attempts at this) I bit the bullet and ordered a new one from my local Toyota ($150).
Note that all of the old gaskets were brittle and crumbled upon removal.
So all cleaned up, sealed up, crank bolt torqued to 300+, refilled with Mobil 1 0-40w with an OEM filter, and running new OEM belts she purrs and has good oil pressure. The oil pump cover leaked/oozed from the bottom for 2 days, but once the new gasket swelled up it has been leak free.


Hope this helps anyone chasing down leaks. And a huge thanks to this thread.
i love mud
ps breaking the crank bolt loose is an adventure. i tried to tie down the pulley using rope to the frame but couldn't get it to grab, so I used the bump-start method and she broke free so easily I was kicking myself for wasting an hour trying other gentler methods. Bump start ftw. To re-torque I made a tool to bolt into the pulley, similar to other tools seen in this thread. All this done in one 7 hour wrenching session, with a couple of #6's along the way

...but I spent a good hour trying to rope down the crank pulley, another hour looking for metal and fabbing a tool to bolt into the crank pulley (I ended up repurposing a large carpenter's square, pretty soft metal and it bent but it worked...once), and about an hour getting my dang stubborn old oil filter off.

So in a perfect world this could be a 4 hour gig.
I've been saving this decal until my steering damper wasn't coated in oil: