Most forums are dying, this one seems fairly active, so I may as well share and participate to do my part and keep things going.

Long story slightly less long, I have a YouTube channel, smallish, low buck, good times geared towards average people. I'm always looking for new content, and I needed a DD. I work for FCA, my old FJ Cruiser was fun for me to show up to work in, so when I saw this first gen 4Runner pop up locally, I decided I needed to own it.

Was listed as non-running, 91k on it,



Got it home, hot wired the fuel pump, bypassed the fusible link, and drove it off the trailer,



After a ton of research, some time with a multimeter and power probe, I determined the fusible link had shorted against the hood and taken out the main relay and 80a main fuse.

After I fixed all of that, it seemed to run fine. The lot pictured is a few blocks from my home, it made that trip fine several times.

So I brought it home, and stripped it down for some body repairs and paint,

I had about a softball sized area in each quarter that was rusty or missing, I just cut it out and covered it up with a few layers of fiberlass and smoothed it with Bondo. I know this type of thing tends to bring every professional SEMA winning body person on the internet running, but I simply don't care enough to patch this "the right" way, for something that's going to rub up against every tree in the forest and carry me to and from work in the snow and salt.



Once it was smoothed out enough, I went ahead and sanded the whole truck,




Then shot 2 gallons of Upol Raptor in Reflex Blue on it,



With that done, the EGR and AIR system deleted, and the wiring SNAFU repair, i took it on a short shakedown run,


Unfortunately that ended about 6 miles in with a loss of all power, got it to my nephews house nearby and found it to have no compression in cylinders 1, 3, and 4. 2 was pulling about a cups worth of water from the cooling system every revolution lol.

Fortunately, I bought it with a engine swap in mind, so to that end, I scored a R150 and case for 50 bucks off Facebook,



Which pretty much brings me to current day, I'll be heading out Friday to pick up a donor car for my engine swap, bit of a bummer I wasn't able to drive it through the winter, but it is what it is.

 

That is a decent looking 4runner, I like the blue you went with.

What engine are you planning to swap into it?

 

om617

 

Been a few weeks, just spent two weeks on vacation, but before I went I picked up this 84 300SD for 400 bucks as a donor car. Should be able to end up with the engine for free pretty easily.

 

Have the engine out, on the stand. Plan is to rebuild the injectors and reseal it over the winter.

I'd like to upgrade the pump before it goes in, but we'll see how that goes.

 

Your body work turned out pretty good. I just scored on a 95 runner with a blown head gasket and similar body rust. I was considering just cutting the rust out and having shorter body panels and bigger wheel wells. Same Idea, engine swap and mountain beater.
I look forward to seeing your progress. I've had my 93 pickup for 14 years and just 3.4 swapped it this year. That lead me to gain interest in this forum and really solidified my love for the Yotas. I'm beginning to enjoy watching other peoples ideas take shape in their projects. Best of luck with yours!

 

Typically, I would have done the same, I considered it.

Since you can't go very far into the wheel well without opening it to the inside on the first gen, I decided to just cover it all up.

I've always liked Toyota's, never really thought I'd have a classic one though lol.

In other news, found a melted piston, it's about .020 undersize, so I guess that was the source of the knocking sounds lol.

 

nice carnage!

i have a shelf in my garage for my own carnage. from my '48 dodge, when a rod bearing fails:

 

That's impressive!

 

So, if you didn't know, and you probably didn't, I didn't... Mercedes uses liners on these engines. No over sized pistons are available, off brand replacements are over 100 bucks each.

I'm the king of finding things in junkyards, haven't seen one of these from GR to Pontiac in 8 months of looking twice weekly. Not even one I missed someone got before me. I'm guessing rust and poor maintenance claimed them awhile ago.

There is one longblock available near Flint for 200, pulled for low compression, so I may well end up in the same boat. There is a set of pistons and rods on ebay, but they come in 3 sizes, 0, 1, or 2. And you may get all of one, or a mix of any in an engine. Mine was all 1's and 2's, new pistons could be all 0 for all I know. Then they'd be .002 undersize before I honed it.

I'm a real, do as little as possible kind of guy, slam it together, have fun. This kind of ˟˟˟˟ gives me anxiety, because it's precisely how projects wind up half finished, for sale, trying to desperately get 50 cents on the dollar because "life happened".

But, the wife is on board, she very much wants a small diesel 4x4, so.. I gave pulling the liners myself a whirl. Paying a shop 500 bucks to pull and 500 to install wasn't in the cards at all.

Ran some hot beads up and down, sat there had a beer or 3 until they stopped snap, crackle, and popping... I welded a little (large) turd in the bottom of each for a chisel to hit... Once they were cold, they tapped out fairly easily... Took about 2 hours with waiting and misc struggling of running out of wire, etc.

 

Ingenuity at it's finest! Beer helps, nicely done

 

Beer definitely helped lol. The first came out in pieces because I didn't wait long enough to start beating on it lol.

 

courtesy of the heavy cast iron crank and the long stroke!

 

So I wasted a bunch of time doing a bunch of crazy math to determine how cold I needed to get the liners and hot hot I needed to get the block in order to just drop them in without a press.

A differential of 300 F should have done it, in a perfect world. I don't live in that world. I fumble, trip, generally screw up things thanks to Murphy. Talking to a few other people who have done it, they had all tried that, and failed, and bought a press.

So I hopped on Marketplace, and found a NIB 12 ton HF press listed for 120 bucks. It had been up for 3weeks, so I offered 75 picked up in the morning and he took it. Then I showed up with 60 bucks like an asshole and he didn't care so... For less than the cost of a bunch of weird science, I now own a press I don't really want lol.

 

Only got 4 liners, had to order the fifth from another place. Went in with no troubles though.

 

The liners are in, I'll probably take the 5 best pistons and everything else down to the machine shop tomorrow.

In the meantime I continued work on the trans adapter, for the slow kids in the back, the wood is meant to be a template... I care alot less about throwing out a 8 dollar piece of plywood than I do a 75 dollar plate of alloy. It's easier to cut and handle also.

I had some complex ideas of how to do this, then I remembered I already had an adapter from Mercedes lol.

So I clamped that to the wood, drilled the pertinent holes out, and test fit it to the block.

Once I had that, I cut the hole for the crank flange, and installed a Mercedes crank to Toyota input adapter I 3D printed for trials. I don't have any woodworking tools, so I cut this with a body saw and a metal jig saw blade lol.

I didn't care for the way the adapter fit out worked though, so I drew up another to simply use the Toyota pilot bearing and printed it last night. Hopefully this makes it a little easier to find center.

I won't know until it comes back from the machine shop though, but that's the nice thing about a 3d printer, a few minutes in CAD, a few hours of unsupervised print time, and you can try again for 2.00 in filament.

Here's pics.

 

this is relevant to my interests.

carry on

 

One nice thing about having a printer is that it makes it easier to toss a bad idea, or non workable one out.

Going into this, I thought I'd be using a 3.4 flywheel because it's bigger, but then I forgot and bought a 3.0 one lol.

There is clearance between the flywheel and "adapter", I may use a shim, idk.. I'll probably wait to have the alloy one before I lock that in for sure, I can always change pilot bearing distance as needed easily.

I need to plug the flywheel holes and drill the Mercedes pattern, then the whole thing will stall while it sits in the machine shop being honed and balanced.

 

haha!! This is my favorite post of yours so far! lolz.....

 

Adapter done, time to work out the pilot bearing details