What started out as a turbo upgrade and a general clean up grew in to a lot more which has delayed getting the car back on the road.
First of all, the valve clearances were off, way off – 6 inlet valves and 1 exhaust valve, the inlets were tight and the exhaust loose. As the shims are over bucket and it was a bit of a challenge without the Toyota SSTs but it worked out good in the end. Having a pet octopus for this exercise is recommended.
Then I had a quick peak at the timing belt when I took off the top cover just to check on its condition. The belt was halfway off the pulley so I had to pulls things apart to determine the issue. I was dreading getting the crank pulley off but since I bought a ¾” shifter bar my life has become a lot easier. It turns out the idler pulley bolt was only finger tight, probably because thread lock was not used as recommended in the BGB. So I had a bit of fun with that too, and replaced the tensioner and timing belt while I had everything apart.
After this I had some dramas with the inlet manifold studs, they had a hard life and needed to be replaced. Then I had 2 exhaust manifold studs pull themselves out of the head (on separate occasions) as I was torqueing things up so I decided to timesert all of them so I wouldn’t have to worry about this again for a long time. I suspect this was the reason the original exhaust manifold warped in the first place – differential heating/cooling as the flange was not tight against the head. The timeserts are great to work with and apparently more durable than the traditional helicoils.
At this stage I was getting pretty pissed off about with whoever had worked on this car previously, particularly considering how complimentary I had been in the past about how well the car runs/performs since I bought it.
The inner CV boot to the right hand side driveshaft was also in right state and there wasn’t much grease left in there. So all in all I think this major service was timely as there were potentially a few catastrophic issues waiting to happenBut there were nice surprises too. It turns out there had a fair bit of headwork done to the car in the past. There has been a fair bit of meat taken out of the throats, Im not sure how much of an advantage this will provide, I guess the tuning will tell us.