I love how those decals look on that 4Runner!

I can imagine how hard it is to get those decals on because I struggle with model car decals, and they are only at most 2" long.

 

Thanks! I like how it looks too. I plan to (eventually) SAS this truck so we'll see if I can keep it at about the same height. They are 33x10.5R15. I have OME medium duty rears and stock up front. I did crank the torsion bars to bring the front end up about 1 inch. I had to trim the bottom of the fender liner and hammer the pinch weld to keep the 33's from rubbing.

 

Right on. Thank you!

I think that is the best way to go with IFS rather than BJ spacers.

 

I had the ball joint spacers for a while. Tires wore really weird. Even with a correct static alignment, the wheels travel through a different path during suspension cycling leading to an impossible to fix alignment during suspension movement. Also, lower ball joints wore out very fast. Even OEM Toyota ones. Would never recommend ball joint spacers.

 

Paid a pretty hefty bill to 22RE Performance the other day.

22RE Performance ships engines on Thursdays and Fridays so I'll call today to get the tracking info and pickup location. They can ship right to your house if you want, but they claim that's significantly more expensive. I chose to have it shipped to a local shipping depot where I can go and pick it up.

Jim said they got a new balancer they wanted to try out so he internally balanced my engine for free. Sweet! I bought their Stage 2. The Stage 2.5 comes with the internal balancing and ARP hardware for the head and rods. I didn't buy the ARP hardware, so I guess you could call this a Stage 2.25.

 

Those decals look great.... these threads make me sick. Looking at how clean these are and then I look at the 86 I just picked up.... I have a lot of work to do. Oh well it’s a labor of love I guess

 

Wow. It's funny because people say they install them and everything is ok, but they never mention the alignment.

You should be happy with your engine. I believe they are truly the best 22re rebuilders around!

 

How did you keep the lift after removing the bj spacers? did you crank the torsion bars? I would expect the camber curve to be different due to the spacers. Was there more to it than that?

EDIT: Sorry, late to the party...I see your comments on torsion bars above.

 

Sweet! A really high quality rebuilt engine plus a free balance!

Take some pictures when the engine arrives, and definitely post some pictures of the install!

 

I had a street driven 22re balaced on stock rebuild once. The difference was dramatic. I can't wait to hear your report.

 

I'm looking forward to it. I've already started tearing the 4Runner apart. I have the intake off and I'm slowly working on cleaning it. Sure is a lot of nasty gunk in there after over 400,000 miles. 22RE Performance was busy last week and didn't have enough pallets built, so my engine is hopefully shipping tomorrow or Friday. This was a bit disappointing but I guess I just have more time to take stuff apart and clean/prep parts for the install.

 

The 4Runner is looking great Alex, man a 22re perf engine....I'd love that. Those stripes look great, the paint job, all of it. That CB antenna that I see back in post #197, how is that thing mounted and what brand/model mount is it?

 

Thanks! It's coming along. The mount is a Firestik MK-274R. It comes with their FireRing which is a low profile coax cable connection, 18' of coax, and a solder-on PL-259 connector to fit the back of your radio. I have a 4' FS-4 antenna, and it's sitting on a SS-3H spring.

The mount goes into any space similar to a hood or trunk panel gap. It also has a swivel so you can angle it however you want. I have it at the same sweep as the factory FM radio antenna on the passenger side. I have it mounted between the cowl and the driver's side fender, at a forward-back location also about equal to the factory FM radio antenna. I don't have any pictures of how it goes on under the cowl, but I plan to install the exact same parts on my 88 Pickup as well, so I can post up some of that when I get around to it. I already have the parts, just need to buy a radio.

 

Current status of the engine bay.



Got the throttle body cleaned up and started working on cleaning the upper intake manifold. Sure is a lot of gunk in there. The previous owner installed an LCE big bore throttle body. The bigger bore is actually bigger than the hole in the upper intake manifold. That lessens the gains of the big bore throttle so I bored out the manifold to match.



And here's a close up of that antenna mount.

 

Alex - thanks for the antenna bracket close up. Engine removal looks like it is coming along nicely. Does your truck have the later 89+ upper intake and throttle body or the older slanted style?

 

Older slanted style. I know people speak about gains with the newer straight intake, and I actually had one in my posession a while back, but I decided against it.

 

A bit of a disappointment here. So I have an SR5 with the oil pressure gauge. I think most people would agree that the gauge is preferable since you can see how high the oil pressure gets while driving, and how low it gets while idling. But I often go a while before thinking, "Hmm, I should look at the oil pressure gauge." So far, it's never been anything but normal. But if it ever did drop while driving, would I notice in time? So I wanted to add an idiot light to have best of both worlds. A light for emergency notification, and a gauge for full understanding. To do this I'd need to add a second 1/8 BSP hole.

A quick google search found an adapter T fitting with one male 1/8 BSP thread and two female 1/8 BSP threads. Perfect, or so I thought. When it arrived, it looked like this.



So I emailed them saying it looked a bit damaged. Maybe the tool that forms the threads was worn, or maybe someone bought, installed, and returned it. I asked for a replacement. Here is their reply.



So apparently they take some other fitting and try to recut threads into it to make some bastard 1/8 BSP fitting. While this might not fail, it's not right. I'm not going to risk damaging the fine threads for the oil pressure sender in my freshly rebuilt engine. I found another solution though. I'll post that up once all the parts come in and are installed.

If anyone else tries to do this in to future I would not recommend buying from DriftMotion.com unless you want some hackjob parts.

 

Oh dear.....

 

I can see someone doing this in a pinch in their garage when they have no other option, but for a company to sell this is just crazy.

 

I got my money back for that adapter, but not until after Aaron called me and berated me for not wanting to use his part. Oh well. I bought a similar part from Pegasus Auto Racing and it is much nicer.

Anyway, the real big new is the engine is here! The engine left 22RE Performance on Monday and I picked it up from the terminal in Virginia the following Monday. I placed my order 9/24/2018 and the engine arrived at my house 6/24/2019 so about 39 weeks.

Unfortunately there's some stuff going on in my life that's going to delay me a few days to a couple weeks so I only get to work on the truck for maybe an hour a day if I'm lucky. But anyway, here's some pictures.

Here's the first picture I took. I already unwrapped the box of gaskets and the box of install parts, but you get the idea. Shipping papers said it was a 350 pound load.


So pretty.


A view of the port work both intake and exhaust. Bigger stainless valves are slightly visible.




How it's sitting now.


A few observations of mine: I'm happy it came with a new oil filter. I wasn't expecting that so that's nice. It didn't come with the billet 22RE Performance oil cap. I for some reason thought it did but it doesn't really matter. Would be nice though. I didn't know the oil pan was powdercoated the same as the valve cover. I thought it would be plain black. Doesn't matter either way, really, just something I was surprised to see. Overall the buying process was easy. I'm pretty sure there's only two guys that run the whole show at 22RE Performance but they do it well. Whenever I called they always knew who I was, they called back with answers fast, they arranged all the shipping, and they've done this many times so they have pretty much all the answers.