It's not that bad to be truthful. Just a lot of taking your time and marking every thing so you can put it all back.

Finished pulling the oil cooler, clutch, fly wheel and harmonic balancer. Loaded it up and dropped the hole bottom end off at the machine shop.

The days are dragging on while I wait for the machine shop to get back to us. Really hoping no grinding on the crank or boring on the block is needed. I would be very happy with a simple hone on the cylinders and polish on the crank but only time will tell.

In other news not much is going on. I will probably brake out the pressure washer and give the engine bay a much needed detailing and start powder coating misc components and brackets in the mean time. I also need to pick up the heads from the machine shop and install the Crower cams so I can get the correct shims.

Howdy. Glad it's at least trudgin' along.
Sorry to be a real spaz, but I totally missed any discussion (in this thread) about the Crower cams. Re-reading it appears you sent your factory's off to them and they changed the lobe profiles? Would you mind sharing what that's supposed to do, and perhaps what it set you back? I've been lolly-gaggin around doing my tranny tunnel transform, and almost put the heads back on a few weeks ago (but went to work, then days off went thru Utah's various canyons). If that seems worthwhile, I might look into it.

TIA

I have another thread on the cams but here is the info.

The stock cams measured at 206 duration intake and exhaust on 111lsa and .387 lift.
The Crower cut cams are as followed
210 intake duration
216 exhaust duration
.397 intake lift
.399 exhaust lift
110 LSA and 4 degrees of advance cut into the cam

crower will spec and cut your cam to what ever the customer wants and has very good customer support. Cost is $175 for the pair.

So we hit a road block on the build A very expensive one at that. The cylinders are out of tolorance. I know the motor didn't have any oil burning issues and generally ran strong before so I am going to run the stock bottom end. It's just not worth spending $1500 or more to bore and buy Pistons for a 3vze. So I am going to clean every thing as good as I can and replace the front and rear main deal along with re sealing the oil pump and oil pan and call it a day.

$1500 or more????

First rate machine shops around here bore for $40 a hole, sometimes less.

A good Japanese made set of NPR pistons and rings can be got on EBAY for around $125.

That looks like considerably less than $500 to me.

Sorry to hear of the troubles, cbr. Not sure what you intended to spend on the short block initially, but as millball mentioned the only additional cost should be bore, pistons and rings. Definitely understand if you do not want to go that route. Them purdy camshafts wants some new cylinder plugs

$1500 being the total cost on everything for the short block (oil pump, grinding on the crank, polishing, bearings, rings, pistons, seals, boring, decking the block, etc) Figuring I already have $500+ in the heads and cams and would need to spend at least $200 more on gaskets and mid items that just doesn't make sense. I would have $2200 in a 3vze and for that cost I could probably have a running OM617 diesel swap or maybe even a 3.4.

Sorry to hear that man. Honestly, if you have the $$, I would go for the rebuild on the short block. Preforming an engine swap is not entirely fool proof and you might spend more than rebuilding the engine. For $1500 rebuilding the entire short block, that is not bad at all. When I had mine rebuild last year, it cost me $2800.

Otherwise, hope the current build goes well.

Yeah I typically would to however that's $1500 that could go along way for a new truck. Might be picking up a 2010 TRD tundra I'm a few months from my wife's brother who is upgrading. Plus I may sell the 4Runner when I leave NY for good any way so I don't really want to spend that kind of cash on a rig I may or may not have in 6 months.

On a pisitive not we should have a good idea how crowers cams perform on a well used 3VZE so hopefully I can give a good review once it's all said and done.

Going to start on the oil pan and seals tonight if I get the chance. Wish me luck.

Making slow progress

Order the remaining shims for the cylinder heads along with a set of flamethrower injectors. Hopefully the last few seals will be in from Toyota today and we can start getting the oil pump, tray,oil pan, and other parts of the short block set up.

Figured I would clean up the intake manifold a bit. Before

After. Home powder coating FTW.

Looks good cbr.

Did you have to order 12 shims or were you able to reuse any of your old ones?

Yeah 12 new shims to bring them into spec. Intakes lash is roughly .009 and exhaust are .012. I probably have had the heads apart 6 times to get them there but each set is with in 0.0005 of each other after pulling the valves back out and doing some light surfacing.

Oil pump is back on with new main seal. Using Toyota FIPG and torquing the bolts to 180 in-lbs

So I was looking for a oil filter for the break in and found somthing interesting. I didn't want to waste money on a Toyota filter that I was going to run for 300 miles and throw away so I compared a few at the auto parts store.

Left to right. Stock size filter, common upgrade from some ford v6, and a V8 F150 filter from the 80s. I used the part number on the last one to track down a matching Bosch filter with a drain back valve built in. Total cost was $5.80 for a filter that is probably 3 times the size of the OEM. Don't worry I will cross back over to Toyota filters soon but I am hoping this will help with engine priming and filtering.

that Bosch part number was 3500 by the way.