flatspeed

Ground the welds down on the flywheel and bolted 'er up!

flatspeed

And..bellhousing on
I had to shim the starter back by about 1/8" with a couple washers, for proper gear engagement.

flatspeed

Engine back in. Sitting 3" further back now, with room in the front for a rad! I must have removed and installed that engine about 10 times by the time the swap was done. Cutting the rad support out saved alot of headaches. I ended up bolting it back in after, which will make it easy to remove the engine again if I ever have to..

HiMax

Finally! I've been prepping for this exact swap for nearly a year, I'm gonna bug the crap outta you with questions.

could you have left the drive train and crossmember alone if you angled the motor/tranny and bulged the hood? (just for crossmember clearance, obviously still have the radiator problem)

flatspeed

No problem, ask away.

I basically looked at every option including clocking the engine, hood scoops, modding the oil pan..etc.
Cutting the crossmember was by far the best option, and turned out to be easier than I thought.
The engine sits level, the hood closes properly, and the rad fits but not by much. Also, if you were to not move the drivetrain back, you would have huge issues with getting a rad in there. It would be in place of the grill and bumper, then you'd have to throw a pusher e-fan in front of that still. Not happening. I did 3" back, because any further would have pushed the transmission into contact with the tunnel, and you can't lower the transmission and engine TOO far, or else the bottom of the engine hits the diff.
Hope this helps.

flatspeed

Here is the crossmember after I cut it.
I basically put the engine in with the oil pan resting on the crossmember, as centered as possible, and traced out the oil pan on the crossmember. Then I added a half inch on either side and cut it out. I would probably do a little more than half inch. 3/4" to be safe, because when you weld plates back in, you lose a bit of clearance, and I forgot to take this into account, as well as the soft engine mounts letting the engine rotate a bit under load. (once in awhile accelerating in 1st gear it contacts the side of the oil pan, so i'll have to pull the engine again at some point to cut it out wider)

flatspeed

And here it is, after I welded it back up. I used 1/8" steel plate I believe..

flatspeed

After the crossmember was cut, I put the motor back in, resting on some wooden shims (to take into account that the engine would settle a bit on the rubber mounts) and made the engine mounts. I reused as much toyota mount as I could. The rest is 1/4" steel plate.

flatspeed

All done,

flatspeed

I wanted to use the mercedes pulley on the toyota alternator, so I bored out the merc pulley, and turned down the toyota pulley until it fit inside, then welded them together.

flatspeed

I Cut out the mercedes bracket to get the toyota alternator to fit, and used a mazda FC3S alternator bracket, had one lying around from my RX7 days and it worked great!

flatspeed

I put the toyota wiring harness back in and wired in the glow plug relay. Most of the tacoma connectors are unused, and I plan on cleaning it up. someday.
I got really frustrated because sledding season was looming and I wanted to be out there shredding pow, not working on the truck. So I did the following but didn't take pictures (If anyone needs pics of what I did, i'd be happy to post some):

-Routed the throttle cable and made a bracket for it
Hooked up the vacuum system including vacuum shutoff solenoid (Toyota vsv solenoid) to a switch in the cabin
-welded up a 3" downpipe that terminates just past the starter, it sounds insane
-moved the shifter hole 3" back to accomodate the drivetrain move
-put the rad and oil cooler in, this was the biggest pain ever. I thought I had plenty of room in front of the pulley, but I ended up with only about 1" clearance after the rad was in place. No fan installed right now, but its minus temps, so i'm not worried. Will have to put a pusher e-fan in place once it starts warming up.
-oil pressure sensor hooked up, I ended up drilling and tapping a hole in the banjo fitting for the turbo oil feed line. I believe its 1/8 british pipe taper thread.
-water temp sensor hooked up, believe it or not, the mercedes and toyota probes give out the same resistance readings per degree, the graphs are spot on. so I hooked up the toyota sensor wire to the mercedes probe (lh side of the block between glow plugs) and it works great.

Things I haven't done yet:
-I would like to get the now-useless check engine light wired up to my glow relay, and use it as my glow plug indicator, but haven't figured that one out yet.
-Tach. The mercedes engine has a 2-wire sensor on the front pulley, I plan on adding two more tabs to it at 120 degree spacing, and wiring the sensor into the existing toyota tach wiring. The 5vzfe, unlike most other toyotas, gets its tach signal from the ignitors, so i'm hoping this works. Otherwise I will have to find a different speed sensor, like an abs sensor etc. but i'm not too worried about it at this point.

flatspeed

So fast forward..
Everything was hooked up and the dang engine would not start. I bled the fuel numerous times, still nothing. Found one bad glow plug and replaced it. Still nothing. This went on for about a week. We were hitting a low of about -15C (5 degrees F) overnight, so I figured it was cold soaked. Plus the compression was probably low after sitting for a couple years. I put a bit of oil in the cylinders, reamed out the glow plug holes (tons of carbon came out) and tried again. Nothing!

I got pissed and put a heater on the oil pan overnight, and a heater right on the injector lines.
BOOM! started, and smoked out my garage so bad, I couldnt see the doorway and almost had to crawl out of the garage to get fresh air. I finally got the garage door cracked and a fan blowing out the smoke (it was night time and I didn't want to open the garage the whole way and piss off the neighbors).

I'm not sure why it had such a hard time starting the first time, but now it starts great, even after sitting outside for extended periods of time (no block heater installed either).

Video of it running for the first time.

PowerstrokeJoe

The pumps are a real pain to get all the air out of. You can get fuel through them but it still won't start. I spent a ton of time getting mine bleed the first time.

ravenr106

Did you have to balance the flywheel? I am in the middle of doing this swap myself into a 1994 toyota pickup. So like HiMax I will be asking lots of questions.

Transplanter

Both the Toyota and Mercedes flywheels are balanced to zero, so there's no need to.

flatspeed

Yea i had fuel bled right to the top of the injectors and I thought that was good enough, but I guess not? I thought I was going to burn out my starter with the amount of cranking I did!

flatspeed

Like transplanter said, already balanced. GL with the pickup! Here is some motivation


i'll try to get some more footage next time i'm out and about. I love how it sounds, it's suprisingly quiet (for a 3" 2 foot dump) but its got some ridiculous turbo whistle.

flatspeed

I've put in about a month of daily driving, maybe more. Two tanks of diesel and i've switched over to waste jet A now (guess working on helicopters has some perks..). I'm mixing Jet A 100:1 with two stroke and it seems to like it..runs about the same.
Fuel economy, i'm getting about 25mpg, or roughly 600km to a tank (55L). Tires are 32's, stock gearing, so i'm probably getting a tad more than that, but who cares, since my old 22re truck was getting 380kms max out of 55L.

Power is about the same as the 22re. Torque is alot better. Will idle around in first/reverse no prob without touching the gas pedal. Built this thing to haul the sled around and it's great, no issues there. Only problem at this point is the lack of power off-boost. I will be doing my timing chain to address that, as suggested in that other thread, as well I might mess with the ALDA a bit.

More pics and vid to follow

ravenr106

I would like to see pics of the vacuum setup.