Bought my first Prius with a blown engine

Hey everyone,

Pretty excited to be working on my first hybrid project car! I bought a 2008 Prius with just over 192,000 miles and a blown engine. The girl that owned it before me ran it out of oil and it threw a rod. The car is from California and in pretty good shape save for the scrape in the picture. I believe it has Package #6 because it has leather, backup camera, navigation, etc. The HV battery was replaced 3 years ago at 158,000 miles.

I picked up a used engine with 119,000 miles and am in the middle of swapping it out. Just got the engine and transmission out the bottom tonight after disconnecting everything yesterday. The worst part was fighting with it for over an hour until I realized the subframe needed to be dropped. That wasn't very hard. Duh.

This forum is a great source of information and I've been reading a lot to get up to date on Prius "quirks". I've always had VWs and Saabs so this is new territory. Anything specific I should keep an eye out for? I have Toyota Super Long Life coolant and ATF WS ordered, along with an eBay Mini VCI cable. The thing I'm most paranoid about is getting the coolant bled properly so I went ahead and ordered a coolant vacuum fill setup from Amazon.

Fingers crossed it all works when it goes back together! Going to be working on it evenings after work, so aiming to have it done by this weekend.

IMG_0067 by techguy802 posted Mar 19, 2018 at 8:55 PM

8A5A8EDB-2BD9-4EFF-9073-115FC4068FA9 by techguy802 posted Mar 19, 2018 at 8:55 PM

B0D14E43-2FFF-4DCC-8AE6-F02293F9307F by techguy802 posted Mar 19, 2018 at 8:55 PM

 

Haha! I've done a few VW engine swaps and one Mini Cooper. This one definitely has the most complicated wiring harness out of any of them! Back to it tonight before I forget how it goes back together.

The coolant worries me with all the possible air pockets and the inverter overheating but with the vacuum system I bought hoping that'll be straight forward.

I did drop the whole subframe... that was a first for me since the VWs and Mini I've worked on came right out the top. Everything I read said the Prius had to come out the bottom. There's a rigid AC line across the middle of the top, but even if I evacuated the AC I'm not convinced there would be room out the top. Everyone also said by the time you finagled separating the engine and transmission in the car, you might as well have dropped it out as a whole. I agree now!

Haven't looked in the ABS pump at all and have no idea where it is, more to read!

I am changing the transmission fluid with the proper Totota ATF WS. I was happy to find there is no filter to deal with and simple drain/fill holes.

Good points about the battery! The car did sit for about a month before I bought it. I surprisingly was able to drive it onto and back off the trailer with just battery power even though the gas engine wasn't running and had a hole in the bottom of it! Hoping I didn't drain the hybrid battery too badly from those 2 couple of feet drives.

 

I think it was a brand new battery... a dealership did it. This shows up on the Owner's site:



The person I bought it from also sent me a screenshot that the dealer had e-mailed them of the work order, but I couldn't tell anything more from that.

 

Finally got it back together the other night and she fired right up! HV battery showed about half a charge so I don't think it had time to discharge too much. I have a light bulb icon on the dash, looks like it has a side marker light out.

Bleeding the coolant was a pain. The inverter loop is set, but the ICE loop may still have some air in it. We bled it over a couple days after letting it cool each time. The radiator fill neck has been holding steady at full, and the bleeder screw no longer has any bubbles but the coolant recovery pump sounds pretty rough. We did cycle that a bunch of times while bleeding and it sounded fine then, but I guess we'll have to do it again.

Props to this forum for the great amount of info, couldn't have done it without it!