Hello everyone, I have browsed this forum for a while but this is my first time posting. My Dad bought a 1980 FJ40 in 2018 not running and let it sit for a year. One day he told me that if I could get it running it would be mine to drive. So I called my Grandpa up and we got into it, ended up replacing the water pump and thermistor. This made it drivable, but still seemed to have a lot of issues. For a high schooler it was a good time though and I wasn't too worried about the lack of performance. This wasn't helped by the fact that I didn't have the mechanical experience to even start trying to diagnose them. Then the 40 sat for a year while I went off to college, only getting driven when I came back for breaks. It sat for another year until finally I needed a vehicle and I very luckily got to take it. Trailered it over the mountains and just drove it briefly to the store or to others houses. Then I decided to start trying to fix some of the other issue, I had learned a lot from friends I had made working on their cars and decided it was time the 40 got some love. Did some work on the distributor, replaced the spark plugs along with the wires, and fixed some vacuum leaks. Decided after this to take the 40 on some longer drives and get it off the road. After about an hour of driving uphill got horrible vapor lock, ended up flat towing it up, letting it cool off, and drove it back. On the way down had some backfiring and my buddy behind me claims he saw a 6 foot flame jet out of the exhaust. So we got started on trying to diagnose all these issues. Compression test showed 70-80 with no compression in the rear two cylinders. While doing this we made a major mistake and tried to do some testing after draining the oil. Turns out that is a really bad idea and we locked the engine. Everyone in the room had a bruised head after banging them repeatedly into the nearest wall. At this point it was finals and summer internship time so we did a quick bearing replacement, got it to turn over, but had rod knock, and left it to sit for the summer. Based on all the previous issues and the dumb stuff we caused we decided it was time to do a rebuild. This is my first engine rebuild and while I have some experienced friends helping me they don't know anything about 2F engines. I'm just trying to get it back to factory, nothing fancy. I've looked around here for peoples rebuilds but I'm not sure if there was a thread delete or something but I keep finding people saying to go look at this or that thread and when I do a search find nothing, maybe I'm just not digging deep enough. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, I've got a Haynes manual that I'm using to guide me through the teardown. However I'm not sure what the common issues would be and what I should get done. Right now I'm looking at new cam, rings, bearing, gaskets, and some machining, but I'm sure that will change as I get into it. Just pulled the engine yesterday and got into tearing it down today, first notice is that there is lot of play with the valves, but none appear to be stuck. Any advice on how to best proceed with a rebuild would be greatly appreciated. I'm looking to do everything I can on my own, based on budget and for the experience. I've got about $2000-3000 I can put into the rebuild but I'm sure most of that will be spent on a machinist (anyone know a good one around Golden, CO). Attached are some pictures for anyone interested. Thanks for reading my story, I hope to update as this goes on and I'm happy to be finally joining the discussion instead of just viewing them.
