Engine Removal

It has been a bit more than a month since my last post, so I’m a bit overdue. Last time, we’d put a fair amount of effort in and didn’t even complete the install of the rear clam kit. And I made some sort of promise as to how far we’d get by the next (this) post. Given that everything we do seems to take three or four times as long as the instructions say, it’s a no-brainer that I over-promised. So it goes.

I wanted to (more or less) finish with the clam kit. The first step was to make that minor repair to the rear clam where the boot lid hinge attaches. I waited until we had a fairly warm day so that I wouldn’t have any issues with the epoxy. Given our stretch of weekends where it was cold, this simple step took a surprisingly long time. Sure, it was just a few minutes of actual work and an hour or three of drying time, but this elapsed over three weekends.

After that, Michael spent a few evenings after work tearing the car down. I’m pretty much useless for this portion of the work so I left him to it, venturing out to the garage after he was done each night to snap some photos.

Before long, he notified me that he’d gotten as far as he could and it was finally time to take the engine out of the car. Which meant it was time to go to Harbor Freight and pick up an engine hoist (some assembly required).

Silly me, I didn’t realize until we assembled it that it doesn’t include the load leveler bit. So, naturally, it was more than one trip to the store before we could get around to extracting the lump from the back of the car.

This is a major milestone.

With the motor out and the area around the back of the car more or less accessible, we figured it was a good time to test fit the clam back on the car. The word on the street is that sometimes things don’t line up exactly as expected and we might need to come up with a way to shim things so it all matches. From our quick look at things, we look to be in good shape. We didn’t tighten everything down, but everything lines up okay. That means, next time we need to get some room to work, we’re not looking at four hours to get the clam off. It should be more like fifteen minutes (famous last words).

Now let’s take a look at some (perhaps) interesting details.

I noticed what could be a date alongside some Japanese writing. I have no idea what it says. I shouldn’t be surprised to see Japanese writing inside my Toyota engine, but I got a kick out of it. Take a good look at the left side of the photo. This is why the engine has to go. That bit should be a nice machined surface and the snout needs to fit rather snugly inside the flywheel. Other than this bit of damage, the engine is still good. But replacing the crank is a bit more than we’re willing to deal with on our own. So the engine has to go.

Here’s one of the flywheel bolts. Note the damaged threads.

Here’s a closeup of the center of the flywheel. This bit mates up with the bit to the left of the Japanese writing. Not exactly a precision fit.

Finally, with the rear clam back on the car, it looks like a car again. Except for the giant hole in the center where the engine is supposed to be.

Next step is to order a gently used 2ZZ-GE long block, a flywheel, and flywheel bolts. The vendor is closed until the start of the year so I’ll need to be patient.

After a great deal of back and forth between “yes I will” and “no I won’t”, I’ve settled on “yes I will”. Yes, I will go with a lightweight flywheel. Several times now I’ve had the choice of whether to stick to the original equipment or to make a performance upgrade. So far, I’ve stuck with original equipment. Although I track the car a handful of times a year, I think of it as predominantly a street car. I don’t really want to make changes that result in it being hard to drive in traffic. But I’m going to go ahead with the light flywheel. Most everybody I’ve talked with regarding a light flywheel says it’s not a big adjustment.

One more piece of foreshadowing: There are some “creature comfort” features the car has that I never use.

One is the air conditioning. I’ve turned it on three our four times in the near-decade I’ve owned the car. It fails to cool the tiny cabin. We’ll leave the plumbing in but take out the heavy bits, the compressor and condenser. Since I never use the A/C, I don’t see the point of keeping it in the car given that with it all taken apart it’s a simple job of removing it. So we’ll need to figure out how long of a belt we’ll need as the original will now be too long.

The second is the radio. Even before I did the motor mounts, the radio was only of use when sitting at stoplights. I thought maybe I’d leave it in as it shows the time. But due to one thing or another, the time displayed was almost always wrong. I’ve already removed the two rear speakers. We’re not digging into the dashboard as part of this work, so I’ll have to take it to a car stereo place for the work. After some searching on the internet, I see I can replace it with a small storage area with a door. So it’ll be a mini glove box.

I probably need to make this video a bit shorter, but here’s us using the hoist to extract the engine.