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Going to make one more attempt today to get the heads completely off before tomorrow. If not it looks like the project will be on hold for a few weeks.
Not what I expected from a quarter million mile motor. The 3VZE might have some bad head issues but looks like Toyota didn't mess around on the bottom.
Passenger side head gasket
Drivers side head gasket
I don't know how well you can see the cylinders in the pictures but that doesn't look to bad to me
So after dropping the heads, cams, and valve train off at the machine shop we found a few things. Vacuum testing the intake and exhaust ports showed a few cylinders not holding vacuum at all. Cylinder 5 wouldn't give use a reading at all on the exhaust valve.
Old redneck trick. 5W-30 added to the top of each cylinder. After 12 hours none of the oil had leaked down
Great idea with the egg container.
Went a little over bored and labeled every thing twice.
Trying to keep every thing organized. I found some scrap cardboard worked really well for holding the cam bearings.
Hopefully we will find out more information from the machine shop tomorrow. If the cams or heads are not salvageable it will put the nail in the coffin and we will be back into researching swaps.
So got a call back from the machine shop today. The heads are in excellent condition very impressive for a high milage motor. None of the valves are burnt and the issue seems to be from excessive carbon on the valves. Some of the valve springs are soft so we will be replacing them along with the valve seats. Both heads only took .006 to surface so that's also good news.
So now on to the next bunch of questions.
#1: LCE seems to have a good sale going on there street performer valve springs. They are actually cheaper then OEM springs. Is this a good option?
#2: I am only surfacing the head and not the block so I assume Toyota OEM head gasket is best.
#3: ARP head studs might be over kill but I like there 3 stage torque sequence. Plus it looks like the heads can be installed with the cams in with the studs (a nice benifit) if it does.
Sorry guys it's been a slow recovery and I have had some issues with infection and all that good stuff going on.
Machine shop is finished with the heads. Just waiting on the valve seals to get here from yota shop to finish them up. The dealer wanted $9 for intake and $12 exhaust per seal!!!!
I did work on one cylinders little bit over the last week and I think it cleaned up well.
New to this forum. Looks like alot of work, I just purchased a 91 4runner 3vze and now have mechanic rebuilding upper half because of bad head gaskets. New OEM knock sensor and pigtail harness now have code 52 Next step is possibly replace wire from ecu to pigtail. I will pick up tomorrow and find out how much difference the head gaskets made.
06-19-2016, 03:47 PM
