When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
Yesterday I began disassembling a 1994 3vze 3.0 V6 engine that I bought as a CORE for $75 a number of years ago. The wrecking yard that sold it to me said that the vehicle came to them because the engine needed a head gasket (no surprise there). It was stated that the engine had around 170,000 miles on it. I have the engine on a stand and I am starting at the top and working my way down with the goal of getting the heads off to see what kind of condition they are in, to check the condition of the block decks/cylinder head mating surfaces, and to check the condition of the cylinder bores. After that, I will pull the oil pan and check out the bearings. So far, I managed to get the upper manifold off and was able to strip off the remains of the wiring harness, which the wrecking yard cut just outboard of the passenger side cylinder head. I noticed that the plastic enclosure for the wiring harness branches that run alongside the injectors on both the left and right cylinder heads had crumbled or was ready to crumble at the first touch. When I attempted to remove the wiring plugs from the injectors, I found the retaining clips breaking off on five out of the six. Luckily, this is not the harness I intend to use. Strangely enough, my 1993 harness is much less crispy than this '94, which I guess could be explained by the fact that the 93 has about 60,000 less miles on it. Even so, it has at least one injector plug that has a broken retaining clip, so I was thinking I might as well replace all the injector plugs while I am at it. Having very little experience with OEM connectors, I searched on these forums for some information about techniques and suppliers. I did not find anything helpful, but when I searched with Google I was directed back to yotatech to this post:
The post is eight years old, but it has the information I was looking for and the important links are still working. I was not able to join the thread, which only had a single post by the original poster, but I did get the information I needed regarding where to buy the plugs and how to install them.
Thanks again, yotatech.
Last edited by wrenchtech; 07-23-2018 at 12:45 AM.
I believe that was me.......My first and only tech write up. Wish the pics were still there but I think they were hosted on photo bucket so no longer available.
The crimper is the most vital part.
Also somewhere here on yotatech i can remember someone posting the part # for the OEM connectors.
You CAN get these connectors with pig-tails; the idea is that you solder the wires together or use hardware-store straight crimps. Not only is this very cheesy, it's just as much (if not more) work than putting on new connectors. You can clip off the old ones right at the wire crimp; this shortens the wire by only 3-6mm, and you have enough slack for that.
This will make the "B" shape described by AndyA. DON'T try to do this with your standard hardware-store crimper; it will just smash the small connector pin.
I believe that was me.......My first and only tech write up. Wish the pics were still there but I think they were hosted on photo bucket so no longer available.
The crimper is the most vital part.
Also somewhere here on yotatech i can remember someone posting the part # for the OEM connectors.
Again, yotatech to the rescue! The price in the eBay auction is half the price of the parts in the link that you provided earlier. I am always up for Learning new skills related to Toyota 4 x 4 repairs, upgrades and modifications. It will be my first time replacing some factory terminals by disassembling them. In fact, I've already ordered the parts and the crimping tool.
Last edited by wrenchtech; 07-23-2018 at 09:26 AM.
I broke the first connector trying to figure out how to take it apart. It turned out one of the tabs on the pin was actually bent out of position and hanging up on the connector body. But once I knew how it worked the next two were pretty easy. A paperclip and a very small straight bladed, precision screwdriver, where the right tools for the job
Rebuild these one at a time. I'm 99% sure that there is no polarity to the injector connection, but it's always easiest to have one untouched connector to look at.
Not to worry, I had the same thought myself. The harness in the picture is not the one I intend to rebuild. It is the one that the salvage yard cut. I try to operate like that as much as I can. Before I started to rebuild this engine I studied Toyota FSM pretty thoroughly and I took two junk 3vze engines apart, saving parts that I thought might make good spares and familiarizing myself with them along the way. I used to have an almost perfect memory for this stuff, taking complex things apart and putting them back together again without any pictures, notes or much use of manuals. As I get older I find I have adopted the opposite approach, choosing instead to be over-prepared. Of course, when I was young, I might've imagined that I was doing better work than I actually was.
Pretty common in general. When my TT supra was ten years old (100k) at least half of them crumbled. EZ fix.
Owning a vehicle with a Toyota turbo in-line six is one of those things that I hope to do sooner rather than later. I imagine it looking like this though:
...but, I digress.
Last edited by wrenchtech; 07-23-2018 at 11:14 AM.
07-23-2018, 12:11 AM
