Update on Gen 3 issues

Engines coming up and out just like always you can take them out through the bottom but I'm not sure why I mean unless you just want to disassemble the car like it was assembled kind of at the factory and drop the whole suspension and everything and just push the chassis back and you have your hole business laying there but then you have to separate it pick it up and do all the stuff you were going to do with it when the chassis was sitting over it so you might as well just get it unbolted like you need to lift it up and out deal with your damper and anything else back there that might be needing rear seal maybe since it's out The damper that is the rear seal level just maybe put on because of mileage maybe not it's only going to drip on the ground it's not like it's going to get on a clutch face or anything.

 

When my transmission damper was clanking and clunking and making a racket it wasn't because the damper was bad I can send you a picture of one it's a pretty large round thing that I don't just see it going bad if someone was to drive the engine with a head gasket leak or with a broken rod like my Gen 3 had I guess you could possibly run it long and hard enough so that the clanking of the damper would actually break something which in my case it did the center girdle section of the engine that's a big hole in it. So when you go to looking around for stuff there's a reason that something's clanking in that area like something maybe out of balance possibly broken. If you've had the engine apart maybe a bolt's not tight sticking out enough to smack I've seen this on torque converters or flex plates. But to just imagine that something's gone wrong with the engine damper just out of nowhere is a little tricky for me to get wrapped around.

 

The engine to transaxle damper is essentially a manual clutch plate with no way to disengage it. It does have friction material and springs holding it to the flywheel and it does transfer ice power to the transaxle. It's purpose is to slip if and when the engine rpm is not perfectly in sync with the electric motors in the transaxle. That slipping makes the severe metal to metal rattle and the engine shakes. It rarely if ever slips except when one or more of the cylinders are out, typically coolant caused plug misfires after a hg fail. However any plug, coil or injector fail can do it.

A hole in the block is caused by coolant in the cylinder creating hydrolock. This bends rods and they eventually break. Usually because the owner was in hg denial too long.

 

We didn't get any time to deny anything I pulled the head or had the head pulled as soon as I smelled and saw the coolant on number two but the damage was already done The Toyota mechanic who had it apart did not notice in the boar that the cylinder was trying to essentially roll around on its side. So on an open deck design like this without three grand worth of machine work and parts and six grand in a motor is probably not worth doing the fixing given the JDM supply of these two z engines.

 

The disc in the damper does indeed look like a typical clutch disc, and like one of those, it has a couple jobs that are related but different:



You can see the friction material around the edge, and the coil springs arranged around the center.

The friction edge is what's clamped between the pressure plate and the engine flywheel. In another car's clutch, the pressure plate could be released by a pedal, but in the Prius it's just permanently bolted down. There is enough friction there to carry all the torque the engine and transmission are built to normally handle. It will only ever slip if something happens to put higher torque than that on the components, maybe a bad engine stumble while the car has forward momentum, or if something in the engine or transmission seizes up while the other is turning.

That slipping action doesn't make any banging noise or shakes. People in cars with clutches don't get banging noises as they put in or let out the clutch.

The coil springs around the center have the job of taking up small bounces between the motions of the engine shaft and transmission shaft. The engine really supplies power in four bounces every two revolutions, and the car's ECUs do their best to try to spin the electric MGs in synchronization with that, but perfection is elusive, especially if the engine might be running a little roughly, a tire hits a pothole, etc.

The disc is really two discs with a common center. The outside friction edge is on one disc, the center transmission splines are on the other. The coil springs sit in cutouts between the two discs, so that one can bounce a little ahead or behind the other, compressing the springs.

This normally doesn't make any noise either, but if there is a big enough bounce to compress the springs completely, that'll make a metal-to-metal clank. If there is a reason, like a routinely misfiring engine. to make a lot of bounces that big, that'll be a lot of clanks.

If that continues long enough, say an engine misfiring issue that doesn't get fixed, eventually those coil springs will fail. You can reach into the bell housing through the little hand opening and find spring fragments in the bottom. That leaves nothing at all in those openings in the disc, and so the two disc portions are then free to clank ahead and behind each other by the full width of the spring cutouts with nothing absorbing the bounce, and that is a really awful racket.

 

sorry - new here and having trouble finding where to post .

2015 Prius brake light switch .

My Prius ( 45,000 miles ) is sometimes not shifting out of Park . It can take 10 minutes of maneuvering to get it to shift .
My 12 v battery is new .
Dash lights include the traction sign .
My research points to the brake light switch .
Question: there’s an extended warranty on the brake actuator . Is this switch part of the actuator ?

 

Just click the name of the forum up at the top here, then click Post New Thread.

The brake light switch isn't part of the actuator. It is mounted up near the top of the brake pedal arm, under the dash.

 

I envy your way with words! .......EXCELLENT! ......

 

Thanks!

 

For gen 3 to make it into mid-life without imploding, you gotta be a Prius whisperer.

 

$100?????
Are you certain it's the correct one? That price is pretty low.
Are they used? Which would not be worth the risk.

 

A story like this would make me want to investigate whether there was some prolonged engine rough running issue that beat the damper up in the first place ... before it beats a replacement damper up.

I guess in this thread there were P030x codes for a while, which would indicate that kind of an issue, at least for some time before it was resolved.