Yo havnt been on in a while but ive been beating myself over my cylinder head recently. I need to get a valve job according to the last car repair shop the last owner took my 4runner too. So pretty much what the guy at the shop told me is they ghetto rigged it so the owner of the truck could save money. He said they put a shim in one of the valves that was too small-I dont know what that had to do with anything. So the result of this ghetto rig is my car clicks all the time and i run off about 4 cylinders. Right now after i get a couple $200 I am just going to pull my head out and bring it to a local machine shop to do the real valve job. So do any of you toyota gurus have any advice for me,should i tell the person at the shop about the shim and possibly buy a new shim for it? Or should I just pop the head out and bring it in get the valve job done and see what they have to say?Also Im sure I didnt give you guys enough information about the ghetto rig so when I call back to the shop what details should i ask them about what they did?

 

let the machine shop you take the heads to know what the history is. they should be able to advise you properly on what they can/cannot do.

lee

 

agreed

 

sounds kinda goofy to me...

Using too small of a shim will just give you a valve tick from excessive lash it wont magically seal up a bad valve. If it runs fine and compression checks out I would just pull the valve covers and check all the valve lash and adjust accordingly. If you have very low compression on 1 or more cyls then you may have a valve thats just out of adjustment or possible a burned valve if the lash specs out ok. If you have to pull the valve covers to inspect the lash and or change shims be sure to push on all the valve shims firmly to make sure you dont have a broken spring thats imitating a burned valve. I had a broken spring initially and it was only after I pulled the heads off that I found this simple problem but by then it was too late to just change a spring and be done. If I had checked the spring pressure on all the valves by hand prior to pulling the head I could have caught the problem and fixed it cheap.

edit... Just read the part about running on 4 cyls. Run a compression check first to establish which cylinders are so low on compression that its missing. You will want to pull the valve cover and check the clearance on the valves (lash). If the clearance looks good on all valves then you probably have a burned valve and need a valve job.