Here is the build thread of my 1989 Toyota Pickup DLX
3.0L V6, 5 speed, 4wd, ext cab
Here is the story and the progress of my truck I had started on two years ago. I will label the time frames of the progress until I get to present day.

June 2019
About a two years ago I was in need of a truck to help me out with hauling tools, and larger objects to and from places. I had a very tight budget so my search took way longer than expected. I was originally looking for something along the lines of a ford ranger because they generally go for so cheap. After months of sellers flaking and selling vehicles before I was able to get off work to see them, I found what is now my 1989 Toyota Pickup. One day I was driving over to a friends house and I took the backroads out into the country to try and see if I saw any abandoned trucks that someone might be willing to sell. Sure enough out of the corner of my eye I saw the toyota.





The truck was technically one owner. The woman I bought it from said it was her first truck ever, and then she eventually let her husband drive it around up until the point it started sitting. The truck sat for about 10 years because the husband was unable to use the clutch because of his knee.

I asked her how much she wanted, and she said she wanted the front brakes on her kia done. $60 later and new pads and rotors on her kia I had a toyota pickup!

Here is some pictures of what it looked like on the tow truck. You can really see the patina




I got the truck home and gave it a very thorough cleaning. It turns out the color of the truck was black!




You can really see how crusty the interior of the truck was.. Yes those are two dead lizards that were hidden under all the Mtn Dew and beer cans that covered the floor of the truck. (3 trashbags full of junk came out!!)

Next order of business was to get this beast running! First thing I did was drain all of the oil and coolant out. The oil was actually a gold color so they must have changed the oil before letting it set. The coolant however was just rusty mud that came out.

I changed the oil put distilled water in the radiator, put a battery in it, changed the thermostat and fuel filter. I next used a breaker bar to try and turn the engine by hand. It turned. I then used the key to try and crank the truck, crank and cranked with no start. I was getting spark but no fuel. I confirmed this by taking the fuel filter out and seeing if fuel would shoot out when cranking. It didn't, not a huge shocker the fuel pump went bad after 10 years sitting.

I figured it would be easiest to just take the bed of the truck off to gain access to the pump. So I enlisted the help of some neighbors and friends!



With the new fuel pump in, I then cleaned the back of the back of the cab real good and power washed the rear of the frame before I put the bed back on. I don't have any pictures but the frame was solid, not even surface rust was on it.

Attempt number two and starting the truck. I got in and cranked it. It took a couple bursts of 10 second cranks.. and then it fired up! It blew some rust out the tail pipe from the muffler internals collapsing

Onto the next problem! Tires! I took the old dry rotted tires (that surprisingly somehow still held air) off and replaced them with some all terrains.
Before:


After:

 

Looking good!
Just keep making it get better. Oh, and let us see HOW you make it better

Looking forward to more as it happens. Have fun!
Pat☺

 

July 2019

After getting new tires and getting the truck running I decided to go for a test drive and see how everything feels.

The the first test drive was around the neighborhood, the steering wheel would shake and jerk around quite badly, lots of fluid smells coming from the engine bay too. So I parked back in the driveway to figure out the newly found problems.

I first decided to tackle the steering issue. I jacked the truck up and moved around all the linkages to find the idler arm had massive amounts of play in it. You could hear it clunk when moving it.



Onto the fluid smells next. First thing I noticed was the oil was already below the dipstick level. I had only driven about 5-6 minutes during the test run and already leaked a significant amount. I put a quart in before it filled back up to the proper level.. so this means I am leaking about a quart every 5 minutes.. After looking under the engine, it made sense. You can even see on the above picture some of the oil spots on the new driveway. I decided to tackle the valve cover gaskets, even though I figure every single one of those gaskets is leaking after 10 years.


Tackling this with just a handheld Milwaukee spotlight was a little frustrating for the lighting situation. But the whole process of removing the plenum wasn't that bad. The biggest struggle was removing that little hose from the PAIR valve on the bottom of the plenum.



Once finally getting the valve cover off, you can see the condition of the camshaft was in pretty good shape, doesn't have any bad wear marks, or sludge buildup. The oil color that was stained on the lobes and head casting still has a golden tint to it. For 220,000 miles its not bad looking!

With new valve covers and plugs installed, the truck still leaked, but not as bad. It will have to do for now. Next order of business is the coolant leak. The original radiator (brass? copper?) was still in the truck, and I could see corrosion marks from coolant most likely leaking out from the places. I pulled the radiator and went to the radiator shop. They said the bottom tank was fine, but the top tank had about 25 places that needed repair. It would be cheaper to just buy a new one. So I bought one from the local parts store. Unfortunately plastic, but in the future ill go back to the OEM style one. That actually fixed the only coolant leak I had! Power steering is leaking too but that's not a necessity as of now to fix for me.

 

September 2019

During the early spring and most of the summer months I work for a race team, and during August and most of September I had very little time to work on the yota between my normal job and the race team. I am one of the race car mechanics for the team, here is some pictures from the test runs at VIR preparing us for the championship!




Once I got back to my normal schedule I was able to pick back up where I left off on the yota! I took the truck out for the second drive since doing repairs, and I decided to drive it to the gas station a couple miles down the road. The steering was working good, I smelled power steering fluid the entire time but at least the truck worked!

....Until it didnt...

I was literally 100 feet from the gas station, and when I slowed down to downshift into 2nd to turn in, the truck stopped. Engine was running but the truck just stopped. I put it in first and really gave 'er the beans, it only moved a couple inches. White smoke was pouring out from under the front of the truck. The darn calipers seized up on me, and the brake fluid boiled out. Worst part I blocked the only entrance to the gas station, I called my friend that has a rollback and we towed it back to my place.




A picture of the old crusty calipers and brake assembly, compared to the new! I repacked the wheel bearings, put new rotors, pads, calipers on the front. The rear drum brakes appeared to be in good shape so I just adjusted them and left them as is. I don't know how 10 year old calipers seizing up didn't cross my mind when I was going through the truck.

 

October 2019
After getting the brakes straightened out, I had the opportunity to use a lift so I used that time to pull the transmission and do a clutch service. (flywheel, clutch, pilot bearing, throw out bearing, rear main seal, slave cylinder etc.).




After replacing all of those components, I decided to tackle the oil pan gasket and get that leak squared away. No need to fight with the transmission a second time for those rear oil pan bolts!



The bottom end looked fairly decent for 220,000 miles, the hardest part of this job was moving the front axle around and lining it back up. My bushings under there don't look the greatest but I was unable to find any reasonably priced new ones (not paying $150 for a single bushing from dealership!). Some users I found had locals shops cut some poly ones, so that may be in store for the future. I had also noticed one of the freeze plugs above the rear main seal had a minor leak due to corrosion on one of the edges.

Now this next part, was devastating to the build of my yota. After the oil pan repair, I had a hunting trip in Northern Michigan planned so I had left my truck outside the shop until I returned. I got a call from my buddy and he asked if he could roll the truck in and change out that freeze plug. I told him that's fine, and we planned to put the transmission back in when I got back. Well I got back and my friend wanted to break the news to me in person. When he took the freeze plug out, my cylinder ended up with 3 holes in the wall of it. Turns out the clearance between the freeze plug and the cylinder wall was very very small. He apparently tried to hit the plug to spin it, to pull it out with pliers (i'm sure we've all used that trick) but due to the little clearance it didn't work so he used a small drill bit.. and didn't realize when he had gone through the freeze plug, and ended up through the cylinder..

Well the plans for putting the tranny back in weren't going to happen now. Looks like I have to pull the motor.

 

November 2019
I had no other choice now but to pull the motor. Whether I find a donor, swap a bigger one in, repair what I have, it needs to come out. Luckily with the transmission already out, the motor only took about 3 hours to get the rest of everything disconnected and ready to pull.



I found no donor 3VZE Blocks within 100 miles of me, but the guy that owned the shop had a 5VZ he pulled a few years ago with about 270,000 miles on it, pulled for low compression. He said I could swap the engines out if I wanted to, or take just the block if it would fit.



Now i'm probably going to get a ton of ˟˟˟˟ for my decision.. but I decided to just go ahead and get my block machined. The main reason why I did not decide to do the swap is because I did not know what I do now about the swap. I briefly looked into it and mating the cab wiring to the engine harness just seemed like a huge headache, ontop of having to find all of the missing parts the 5VZ pictured was missing (including ECU and harness, none with a manual in any of my junkyards at the time).

With my decision being made, I started stripping my engine to the block.






Here is two of the three holes..




I gotta say, I was upset at first having to now pull the engine, rebuild it and go through all this hassle. But as I started doing it I wasn't upset because with 220,000 miles, who knows when the engine would've died. I am unsure of how the previous owners had treated the truck. I had only driven the truck maybe 20 miles before the ongoing rebuild so there could've been something else to go wrong too. Now it will be reliable once its done!

 

December 2020
I finally got to the bare block of the engine

I sent the block, heads, and crankshaft into the machine shop. Unfortunately the wait for the machine shop was going to be at least a couple months. During that time of the wait, I decided I would clean all of the greasy engine parts, and make them look nice.



On that 5VZ I was offered by the shop owner earlier in the thread, he let me take the oil cooler off of it. After doing some research on it, there is very slight differences, but I figured I could make it work.



Update for the oil cooler (8/1/2021):
The hoses that will work for the oil cooler are the longer hose from the 5VZ and the shorter "C" shaped hose from the 3VZ. These are used for mounting the 5VZ cooler on to the 3VZ engine.

The crush washer gasket (bolt head gasket) from the 5VZ will be used, but the O-ring that seals the cooler to the block kept blowing out.

It took some time but I eventually found the solution. The channel the o ring sits in is square cut, so a square cut o ring would be ideal right? What parts use square cut o rings? I can only think of two. Calipers, and OIL FILTERS! So I carried my oil cooler into the parts store and literally spent about 3 hours in there trying every single oil filter gasket they had on this thing. I ended up finding the lucky match! Part number: 51040 is the oil filter you need. The gasket is just slightly smaller, but it will fit in there, and is still working to this day of the post update 8/1/2021




Well I have a long time to wait until my parts get machined, and my engine is going to have 0 miles on it pretty soon. Meanwhile my transmission is just sitting around collecting dust..

 

that truck looks like a diamond in the mossy mold covered back field
how is the machine shop handling the holes in the cylinder bore?

 

It sure was!!

The machinist is going to overbore the damaged cylinder, and sleeve it. The rest of the cylinders are being bored over 0.20” more (sleeved cylinder will match that)

The crank is being polished to get some of the wear off from the years

The heads are being decked on the bottom just to be safe of any warpage that might’ve been there, also pressure and vacuum checked.

I also had him press my new pistons on the rods for me!