I've got a 96 4Runner SR5 V6 with 230000 km on it. The mileage has started getting pretty bad over the last year or so. I used to get about 400 km/58l and now I get about 250 km/58l (city driving with winter gas). Also, I can smell fuel in the exhaust. It starts and runs fine, no knocking or weird noises when I accelerate but the idle has a low-frequency resonance to it and it seems to have lost some power.

Yesterday I tried to take the MAF out to clean it, but there was one problem - it doesn't have the two screws on it to remove it. It looks as though the sensor and the duct are attached and are a single piece. I took the airbox out completely and tried to pull the whole MAF assembly out but I couldn't so I gave up. It's got 5 wires on the connector.

All the pics & diagrams that I've seen about this say just to remove the 2 screws. Am I missing something?

 

for the older maf there should be two 10mm bolts holding it to the air box

 

The MAF should pull out of the air box,then you can look down the center(will look like a torpedo) spray into the cross-hair looking piece...

 

The two screws are hard to see. The heads of the screws point towards the passenger side of the vehicle, and are hard to get to.

 

There's definitely something that looks like a crosshair... with 4 separate holes in it. So, can I just spray the CRC cleaner in there a few times and it'll do the trick, or do I actually have to remove it?

I found a pic somewhere on the web - it's the one on the left: