Good work pat! Nice turbo upgrade too.

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The first two photos are of bits I found lying around the valve train when I removed the valve cover to check valve clearances a few years ago when I first bought the car.
 

 

 
The third photo is of bits I found in the oil pan a couple of weeks ago when I removed the pan to have an inspection of the bottom end, crazy stuff!
 

 

that's nuts, how did your engine survive so long with random metal bits floating around?

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.

Thats absolutely right Mike, I was lucky to get away with it.
 
I'll get some photos up over the weekend.

Dudeman

stuka
Thats absolutely right Mike, I was lucky to get away with it.

The luck of the Tasmanians I guess. (thats a saying isn't it?)

 
if it wasn't a saying, it is now.