lebleup

My '89 3.0 VZE started catching my ear with a tapping sound that I cannot put my finger on. At 176k miles it still runs smoothe and strong. Not sluggish at all. The sound is present whether the engine is just started, hot, cold..it makes no diff. I'm reading in several posts around the internet that this is a normal sound on these Toyota engines as well as on the 22R 's.

Here's a link to the sound I'm hearing. Any thoughts?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqLGqP4i3wM

stihl460

Not a normal sound on a 3vze. How and when did it start?

lebleup

I noticed it while idling sitting in traffic coming home from a fishing trip the other night. Oil and filter changed when due religiously. Like I said, runs smoothe and no power loss. Plenty of pep. No cel. Guess it's drop the oil pan time and check for any metal shavings and such?

93yota93lude

ehhhh sounds like rod knock??? :/

93yota93lude

the little ticking is normal but the louder knocking sound when you rev it up is not..

Mucus

Sounds like you may be running on 5 cylinders! Allow me to explain why I think that is... I too have an '89 3vze with a stout 268,000miles on her! I rebuilt my motor at 256,000 because I had a noise just like that which I just couldn't pinpoint. I also had a similar issue with the ramping of rpms like in your video. What I mean is that it fired right up, ran fine and seemed to have no serious loss of power, yet I could hear that noise and when I would ramp the rpms, I could sense a hesitation it the motors ability to throttle up... like in your video. Running down the highway, I had no problem but from a stop I could sense that hesitation as I described earlier. Turned out that I was running on 5 cylinders (was on it's way to being 4 cylinders) and that is where the noise was coming from. As far as the other noise which you have read around the internet is normal (including on the 22's), yes.. that is the notorious Toyota tap and is common. The sound which is the problem here is linked to what i have described above.

Now what to do... I would check the compression in all your cylinders to be sure which one is faulty, then go from there. Most likely you have a loss of compression in one of the cylinders and will have to troubleshoot from there.
Happy wrenching!

p.s. -Rebuilding these motors is tedious but well worth it, despite what some think!

lebleup

I will certainly check that out this weekend. One thing that is curious about the posibility of running on 5 cylinders...I just got an emissions check for this years registration. You'd think that the emissions check would have failed without a cylinder firing properly. Right? It passed.