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Blown Head gasket rebuild....@297k

Discussion in 'Gen 3 Prius Care, Maintenance & Troubleshooting' started by danlatu, May 8, 2017.

  1. danlatu

    danlatu Senior Member

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    There are actually a lot of oil galley plug all over the motor, Some of them have a ballbearing at the block off instead of the threaded galley.
    I still think your safe @ 10k intervals. The internals of this engine were fairly clean. The carbon build up in the combustion chamber is to be expected. Oil catch should help keep it cleaner.
     
  2. Mendel Leisk

    Mendel Leisk Senior Member

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    upload_2017-5-14_11-20-57.png

    What are the green dabadoos, break-in grease?
     
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  3. Raytheeagle

    Raytheeagle Senior Member

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    Lucas Assembly lube;).

    It was in a pic prior.
     
  4. danlatu

    danlatu Senior Member

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    It helps to lubricate everything @ start up since the majority of the oil will be at the pan. It is sticky and likes to hang around. I usually use lithium grease. The bearings/cams are what really need it.
     
    #64 danlatu, May 14, 2017
    Last edited: May 14, 2017
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  5. Montgomery

    Montgomery Senior Member

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    Yes, necessary and very well thought out by danlatu!
     
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  6. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    What were the specs for chain stretch, and how did yours measure up?

    Did you happen to get a count of the links, or get any picture, before you buttoned the timing cover back up, that would allow counting them? I can see there are 18 teeth on the crank sprocket and 36 on the cam sprockets, and I think I could almost count the chain links from one pic you posted, only the chain guides make some of them hard to see.

    Because the manual says to and it's their first try on a particular model and they assume if the engineers didn't say the easy way would work, there must have been a reason, so they're reluctant to try?

    That's one of the best takeaways from what you've posted here, that upward removal is possible. It seems much less daunting to contemplate.

    Did you have to loosen any transaxle mountings, or was there enough room to swing the engine sideways and clear the input shaft and bell housing?

    Still waiting eagerly to find out how easily you lower it back in, with that big fat 16-valve head on top.

    I wonder if that plastic impeller, that from a recent photo I take to be molded in two pieces then stuck together, and coming apart with age, looks like something that could be practically 3D-printed in one piece? Of course I don't know anything about the temperature ranges of the typical printing materials, or compatibility with hot Toyota coolant.

    If it's like the first gen, it's not even separate shims; it's one-piece lifter buckets machined in 35 different sizes. You need enough on hand to be able to select the 16 you need in whatever sizes your assembly measurements indicate. (Unless you want to place the order only after reassembling and reaching the measurement step, and leave the car apart while they ride the boat from Japan.) That's a lot of inventory if you want to be in the game, especially at Toyota prices of, like, $11 each. Pretty well rules out DIY.

    So that's a very good reason to like the hydraulic adjusters on the 2ZR. Makes working on your engine practical again.

    Speaking of piston coatings, the New Car Features manual mentions the low-friction resin coating used on the piston skirts. Is there still any sign of that after 297k?

    -Chap
     
  7. danlatu

    danlatu Senior Member

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    It's @ 105mm at full stretch for 15 link count.. I do not have a weight scale to pull the chain @33ft. lbs. to get this measurement.
    I'm hitting it were it lies.
    No transaxle removal/loosening required. Engine motor mount, ac compressor, pulley and it came straight out. Tomorrow is the engine install day. I will let you know and be sure to take a pic. I have to get a chain for the engine hoist in the morning. I've also had quite a few honda's and yet it is possible to remove the engine with pulley on, it is a hell of a lot easier with it out. I have an electric impact gun which makes taking the pulley bolt off a breeze. Some people are thinking if they could do this kind of work themselves, the right tools and technique are key.
    Hydraulic lifters were seized and sat for a week in penetrationg oil and then worked loose, they are moving quite nicely now.
    95% of coating is gone on the pistons and heads. 70% of the piston skirt coating was gone. It almost looked as if it was anodized on like diamondyze. If the motor had less miles I would have been more inclined to ceramic coat the pistons, heads and exhaust ports. Then put a coating on the piston skirts.

    I understand everyones concern with the chain, water pump and whatnot. I was here to get this up and running for as cheap as possible. I was shocked to see very little wear on the components. The rings on the pistons still had good tension, oil control rings clogged and 95% crosshatch pattern was still seen in the cylinders. I have seen more wear on vw's and fca cars with 80k miles on it. I really wanted to see how long this thing will run as is. I really do not mind ripping it apart again. I see way too many of these prius' blowing head gaskets like chevrolet LT1 engines.
     
    #67 danlatu, May 14, 2017
    Last edited: May 14, 2017
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  8. danlatu

    danlatu Senior Member

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    With as high tech as cars are today, wouldn't the prius show water pump not working as a cel? Not enough heat/temp in storage tank? I had a brand new water pump with 10k miles after a rebuild motor fail, impeller slit in half and it was plastic on my wj. That ended up blowing a radiator up. I thought it was from offroading. My old setup. 8mpg on the wj. I could purchase weather stripping anymore for the del sol and water in the car sucked. Other than that both vehicles on the road were a real head turner. I want to drop the prius on air suspension like kreper's setup so bad but the roads out here in maryland are really bad. I'm not into modding cars like I used to I guess, I feel old.
    IMG_2681.JPG
     
    #68 danlatu, May 14, 2017
    Last edited: May 14, 2017
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  9. Yippeekyaa

    Yippeekyaa Active Member

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    Looking closely at the head gasket and comparing the holes in the gasket to the size of the water jackets and opening in the heads has me confused. It appears that the small holes in the gasket are being used as an intentional restriction to slow coolant flow in/out of the head. guessing it has to help heat retention in the head to promote more efficient combustion. But the holes on one side of the gasket still look too small to me.
     
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  10. danlatu

    danlatu Senior Member

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    Made in japan, we will see if it works. BeckArnley gasket kit.
     
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  11. Mendel Leisk

    Mendel Leisk Senior Member

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    Sounds like hydraulic adjusters are just great, until they aren't.

    Toyota, take a page from Honda, use screw adjusters. Gives guys like me (splashing around in the shallow end) something constructive to do...
     
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  12. Patrick Wong

    Patrick Wong DIY Enthusiast

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    Do you have the original gasket to compare the aftermarket part to?
     
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  13. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    My first car had a Mitsubishi 4G32 engine with screw adjusters that I think I could complete a valve adjustment on in something like 20 minutes start to finish. At the time I think I viewed it as a sacred adolescent privilege to be exercised as often as possible. My next car was a Mazda with hydraulics, and I somehow found myself with less time on my hands than I remembered from high school, and I didn't mind not having to fuss with them.

    The Mazda got stolen and I ended up with a Ford 2.8 V6 with screw adjusters, and I found those very frustrating to get right (or, easy to think I had right, crank down the locking nut, and then find to be wrong). Now, there could be a couple possible reasons for that. One could be that the Ford screw adjustment was really more difficult than the Mitsubishi. Another could be that I was a dozen years older and more likely to notice how my performance on a task differed between my imagination and reality. :) I do remember that during that period I envied a friend who had a Ford 289 that came, even back in 1965, with hydraulic adjusters.

    But for DIY purposes, I guess I could live with either kind. The screws, if they need adjustment you adjust them. The hydraulics, if they get stuck you soak them in penetrating oil or replace them (and that probably happens a lot less than screw adjusters needing adjustment).

    The one arrangement that just throws DIY out the window is the 1NZ fixed bucket lifters. You mean I can't adjust my valves if they need it without first measuring the clearances and then buying special-order parts and waiting for them to come in? Or, I just need to have 16 ✕ 35 = 560 of them on hand before I start, for a cool up-front outlay of six grand, to be sure I'll be able to choose the sixteen I need?

    Now, a more actuarially-minded person would probably say, well, it's really unlikely you need all 560, just buy a smaller bunch of them in a Gaussian distribution favoring the middle part of the range, and most likely you'll have the ones you turn out to need, and put some of the money you save under the mattress against the small risk that you need to order some others and rent a car for a month while they come in.

    And an approach like that works great at the factory, where they even have massive data on the statistical distribution of which sizes they need how often, and I'm sure that's exactly how they do it. But for DIY? Not very practical.

    I think I can be perfectly happy with hydraulics that might need to sit in some penetrating oil every couple hundred thousand miles or so.

    And anyway, there's an extra cool thing about these hydraulic adjusters. In both my old Mazda and my friend's older Ford, they lived on the ends of the moving rocker arms, and were probably at least as heavy as a screw and locknut, maybe heavier. In the 2NZ, they sit stationary in the head, where their inertia doesn't contribute to the forces on the valve train. Nifty....

    -Chap
     
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  14. Yippeekyaa

    Yippeekyaa Active Member

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    Could the gasket design be because of the electric water pump? With fan driven pumps the flow varies with engine speed. Is the Prius water pump a one speed unit or does it vary speed as needed? With expierence working on chevy v8's the giant water ports in the Prius head look like overkill, but the small holes in the head gasket still intrigues me.
     
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  15. m.wynn

    m.wynn Senior Member

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    The pump is variable speed between ~2600-3000 rpm as I have observed with Techstream. This being from cold start through closed loop up to mid-190's F temp. Not sure if it turns faster at higher temps, but it is indeed speed variable.

    This is a big takeaway for me, Dan. I've been assuming that a head pull/ oil pan drop will allow the pistons up and out as I've seen done with Corolla engines. However, having followed the thread, I'm not as put off by the engine pull as I've previously been. Anyone know if the Gen 2, 1NZ-FXE uses the same long block design?..
     
  16. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    1NZ is the same in terms of having the two-piece bottom, one a small stamped pan, the other a casting that can't be removed or replaced without separating the engine and transaxle.

    -Chap
     
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  17. danlatu

    danlatu Senior Member

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    That is why I am taking as many pictures as I can. there are not enough online to show what is involved. No one else had it ripped it apart yet. Doing a motor swap would help no one but myself. Im sure there will be another prius to fix (my girlfriends)
    I used to have a trans am LT1 with a tremec t56 transmission. I could take the tranny out all day long whole but it would never go back in the way it came out. You had to remove the bell housing to get it in. Driving it hard was eating clutches, cracked a flywheel, blowing up pilot bearings. You should not shift from 6th to 3rd gear doing a burnout on the freeway!
    I also saw this with the corolla, I was able to take the first piston out without removing that lower bell housing from the block. The prius 3rd gen motor could stay in, that lower bell housing(crankcase stiffener) comes off like the head does and the rest of the block is bolted to the tranny. I needed to change the main seal, and it was easier to put pistons in with the engine out and on a stand. Screen Shot 2017-05-15 at 9.09.32 AM.png


    BeckArnley
    Screen Shot 2017-05-15 at 8.27.50 AM.png
    Apex
    Screen Shot 2017-05-15 at 8.28.04 AM.png
    MAHLE ORIGINAL/VICTOR REINZ
    Screen Shot 2017-05-15 at 8.28.20 AM.png
    FelPro
    Screen Shot 2017-05-15 at 8.28.37 AM.png
     
    #77 danlatu, May 15, 2017
    Last edited: May 15, 2017
  18. ChapmanF

    ChapmanF Senior Member

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    That may be the fly in the ointment though. In the 1NZ, there is no separate housing for the main seal: it is pressed directly into a round bore whose top half is in the engine block and bottom half is in that "lower bell housing", or "oil pan no. 1" as the Gen 1 manual calls it.

    So if 2ZR is that way too, any time you take that lower housing off, your old main seal is toast, you need to press a new one in after reassembly, and I don't see that working out with the engine on the tranny.

    -Chap
     
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  19. milkman44

    milkman44 Active Member

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    I sure appreciate all the explanation and pictures of this adventure. A lot of my questions about the gen3 engine is being answered, but one answer I haven't seen yet is about the rings, especially the oil ring. The new rings you put in are different from the originals and I'd like to know if they are the recommended replacements and are they being used in the newer Prius? If so, when did they change to the new more open oil ring? If not, why not. I'm thinking the more open oil rings would have helped lessen or eliminated the oil consumption problem.
     
  20. danlatu

    danlatu Senior Member

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    The answer is not they. The answer is "I" decided to change the oil ring because a lot of toyota's are burning oil. This is the same oil control rings used in honda's. My ridgeline has 157k miles and does not burn oil, My old integra with 180k never burned oil. I do not like the design of the oil control spring, it is too tightly wound up causing small amounts of carbon to clog it up.