The Adventures of Chungus (1 Viewer)

[Roketdriver]

Once home, I scheduled an appointment at the dealership I'd used for other work in the past. Reading up on the EGR system stressed me out, I wanted a professional to look at it. This wound up being a huge problem.

The dealership assigned the new guy to this task. It took them a week to replace the EGR valve (had to wait for parts) but they neglected to actually troubleshoot the issue beyond throwing a part at it. They didn't even touch the melted vacuum lines. So back it went, and the shop proceeded to have it for another 3 weeks while they did basically nothing to resolve the issue. I took it to a different place with a more experienced team and they had it pinpointed in two days - a clogged catalytic converter. So off to the exhaust shop it went.

The owner of the exhaust shop informed me that the system was making 6 pounds of backpressure, when it's normally 1-2. This is what the defective cat looked like:

It's worth noting that this is the aftermarket Magnaflow cat that was put on only a few years ago, the OEM one is still fine.

With a new (generic) converter in place, the LX finally seemed back to normal.

On the drive home from the exhaust shop, I moved over a lane to give a tow truck driver some room to work. When looking in my mirror to merge back over, I noticed that they were staring at me. That's never a good sign. I turned down the radio and began to hear a metallic dinging sound from under the rig, as if metal were dragging. I pulled over and discovered that my swaybar had self-disconnected:

I removed the broken section and started collecting parts to replace the bar and all of the associated hardware and bushings. I should be knocking that out soon.

I celebrated the 4th of July with a knuckle service:

I replaced the clicking birfs with a set from RCV and kept the OEM ones as spares.

I missed the memo that the ABS rings needed to be swapped from birf to birf, which wound up being a giant pain without having a press. 1/10 hated doing this. Lots of torching, finagling, and hammering with a brass drift was involved.

With all of this maintenance out of the way, I was able to enjoy the LX for the rest of the camping and wheeling season without drama.

 

[Roketdriver]

Two weeks ago I did some camping and light trail running with some friends. The first night was great - brewskis around the campfire and bugling elk all around us.

We hit the trail the following morning and enjoyed some nice views and fall colors.

Once we hit washboard roads, things started to go awry the the 4Runner in the convoy. It began to experience power loss and could not rev past 3k. We found a spot to stop and diagnose.

We determined that the most likely culprit was a clogged fuel filter. It had been sitting for a while, and we suspected that the vibrations from the corrugations shook all of the floaties loose and plugged the system up. We limped it closer to the pavement then took a major detour to the parts store.

Returning to the disabled 4Runner, my buddy quickly installed the new component, only for it to start puking gas. The new filter came out and was compared to the old one - they were just ever so slightly different. It would later be discovered the part was not faulty, but incorrect altogether. The clogged filter went back in and we went looking for the nearest campsite, we weren't going to make it to the one I had planned.

The weather that night was weather. We were a little underprepared but nobody died.

The next day we returned to pavement and started heading towards a place where we could stash the broken rig for a few days. It could barely maintain 10 mph on flat roads, so the LX got put to work. We flat towed the 4Runner roughly 20 miles:

Thankfully this was pretty drama free, aside from a few aggro pickup drivers with no situational empathy. The 4Runner has since been repaired and driven home.

 

[Roketdriver]

New swaybar went in without a fuss.

Drives much nicer now. Flatter though the corners and less wobbly overall.