Hi Guys

I'm new here, but a long-time lurker.

I'm based in Europe and last November bought a JDM Hilux Surf a 2.7 3RZ-FE / W59 (manual transmission), which is a very rare truck over here. I bought it pretty much blind and it turned out to be a bit of a dog. The engine had dropped a valve and needs a re-bore. Not that I regret the decision as it was the only one which has come up for as long as I have been watching (about a year).

I'm having difficulty getting hold of OEM +0.5 mm (020") pistons and found a company in the US, LCE Performance, who sell eutectic piston and rings sets for much less than the cost of OEM pistons. The pistons are made by Safety Auto Parts (US) and the rings buy Hastings (US). Hastings seem to get pretty good reviews but I couldn't find anything about 'Safety Auto Parts'.

Now I'm not afraid of shelling out for OEM but I was wondering if anyone had used the items from these guys or, even better, if anyone knew what kind of quality 'Safety Auto Parts' is?? On paper eutectic pistons should be better than stock cast pistons (and the 3RZ engine does have a bit of a reputation for piston slap) but this all depends on the quality of manufacture.

Can anyone give any advice?

Thanks!

 

You have all ready done the machine work and the cylinders cleaned up at .020 over ??

Don`t buy your pistons before you know.

LCE and I have never got along just personal

Never heard of Safety Auto Parts with the way companies come and go .

Might be a name change to protect the guilty !!

One company I do work for has had 6 different names in the last 10 years still owned by the same person .

A COD account for sure.

 

I know this is a somewhat old thread. But given the lack of any information on this topic, I thought it would be worth making a post. I went ahead and got the Safety pistons. Overall, quality seems to be fairly good.




One thing that is noteworthy is that both these and the original pistons both bear the 3FE mark on the top. Not sure what this means. But these pistons don’t seem to be identical with stock.



Also, the Safety pistons are coated, whereas the stock pistons aren’t. But admittedly, skirt coatings didn’t seem to be as much of a ‘thing’ back in 1998 (the year of this motor). In any case, the Safety pistons at least appear to be of good quality. So I would say that they are worth using.

I should note that there are four other stock replacement type pistons available that I know of that are available for this motor. They are NPR (available at Yotashop), ITM (available at RockAuto with rings), Enginetech (available at RockAuto without rings), and DNJ (various sources). I can’t vouch for any of these. But NPR does seem to have a decent reputation, and is rather popular among Honda folks. I don’t know about the others. But it is even possible that all four of these pistons (and the Safety pistons) are made by the same manufacturer.

Other than OEM, all other pistons available for this engine seem to be 2618 forged. These are stronger, but are not particularly well suited for stock (or fairly stock) naturally aspirated rebuilds that are going to see lots of low load miles. In any case, these Safety pistons look like they are at least a decent choice.