550hp 2JZ 1978 Hilux Build

From the numbers ive calculated it should be 8.8:1 with the 2.4mm and GE pistons and VVTI head. Which is actually a lot more of a drop than I was figuring that'd be, not quite down to GTE compression but damn close. I wouldn't be surprised if just the head gasket lets the pistons survive 20psi, so just the rods will be the question mark at that point. I'm thinking drop to 10psi and see what it does.

I wonder how much power it was making at 20psi and 10.5 CR

E85 would be sweet, but I dont think there's any pumps within 60 miles with it. But if I do find some I just need a flex fuel sensor and should be good to go!

 

Oh yes, vvti head! I was basing off my non vvti head. Right on!

Enough to break a piston haha sorry. The motor could probably take 20 psi, with meth. Don't know about the ebay turbo though...

 

Today I tore the spare engine down, it definitely saw some shit in its final moments.





What the fuck is even that?



I took piston #1 because it vaguely looked the cleanest? I doubt it mattered, besides maybe that mega squanchy one.



I had a tub of purple power cleaner so poured the remains of it into the sonic cleaner and let it sit for 20 minutes, and it looks nearly brand new!



After consulting with some friends, it was established that the mis-matched interface would be between the wrist pin and piston. Both wrist pins were the same, so it seemed to make sense to swap only the piston over so there's as little mass above the mis-matched interface.



And since we're ballin on a budget here, I just kept the rings the piston had on it. I also didn't have a small enough ball hone so just took some scotch brite and roughed up the cylinder walls a bit, though they still had cross hatching left but it made me feel a little better. And back in she went!



And that about wraps up today. Until I get the head studs I'll just do other things, like painting the valve covers!



An extra treat from the spare engine is it has a Fluid Damper, which appears to cost $400+ by itself, so I'd say that $300 engine is more than paying for itself right now!

 

Don't sweat the piston swap. I've done it a couple times. One on a diesel and another on my sister's jetta that she had no money and I had a spare 1.8. Ran until she sold it 20k miles later.
Looking good!

 

Oof, but good to see it’s starting to heal. Is “Pissed an’ broke racing” (say it out loud) going to make it to a decal on that beast?

 

What a score on that damper, wow! I'm quite jealous of your spare engine. I'm on the hunt for a "junk" 2jzge with a good vvti head.... not many in my neck of the woods.

 

Got the head studs today, and she's back together!



Some exhaust upgrades to do tomorrow and she should be driving again! Not a bad turn around time from tear down.

 

Looking good! Did you address the waste gate to reduce psi?

 

Dude... I'm like seriously WTF here???

I'm retired and often can't find time to knock out a new 10-20 minute mod, and here you are tearing down and rebuilding engines for yourself while engineering new parts for us and doing installs on some of our rigs

I love watching your threads, but you're freakin' killing me over here...

 

Was going to save it for the next update, but yes! Yesterday machined the wastegate hole from <0.75" to 1.125" which is a ~2.25x increase in area.

Hahahaha, I'm fortunate enough to work from home and pick my own hours so that certainly helps the efficiency. Plus no kids, no family nearby, though I try to wrap up in the shop by 7ish so the wife gets attention. Don't worry, time is also my enemy though. The buggy hasn't moved in months for example

 

That little truck is going to move! What do you think the hp to weight ratio? Reminds me when I helped a friend plop a 350 into a rx7.

 

Back when you were talking traction and tires I had some thoughts but forgot to mention them. I think a common 350z diff ratio is something like 3.53 with a ~27" tall tire. Your hilux most likely has 4.10s (correct me.if I'm wrong), so to "match" the gearing of a Z with cd009 you'd need ~31" tire (or change diff gearing of course). Might get better drive ability and traction with something as simple as a taller tire.

 

I really can't say, when I first dyno'd it a long time ago it made 125whp. The engine in stock form should've made ~220hp new. And it made terrible compression around that time. During the dyno pull the engine could've been really hurt, or maybe it had recovered by then and had good compression. So the baseline number is questionable as she sits now which makes the boosted amount even harder to figure out. Some numbers I've seen thrown around is 8psi on the NA engine is like ~350whp, which if you extrapolate that out to 20psi would be in the 500-550whp range. Was it actually making that much power? When did the rings come loose and get compression back? I have no idea.

As for weight, I thought I attempted to weigh it with the crane scale and I came up with 2200lbs, on the one hand that sounds heavy for what it is, but it also has a full frame and not exactly small parts under it so maybe that's on the light side. I would think it's 2000-2500 though. I think 400whp/ton at 20psi wasn't unrealistic. And maybe now drop it to like 300whp/ton? Compare that to the Tundra which is closer to 150whp/ton

It's actually a lot worse than you're thinking. The axle has 4.56s and 26" tall tires just last week I was looking at gears and found out the axle isn't even a normal Toyota 8", it predates the 8" I think and is a 7.5" rear which the only gears out there are 4.56, 5.29, and 5.71 according to ECGS. We were just talking about alternate axles yesterday, but a big driver will be how high can it get geared, something in the low 3s would be ideal. Right now rpm is like 3500 at 80mph, it'd be nice to drop that into the low 2000rpm range, so like a 3.2 gear or higher. Not sure how many solid axles go that high, might be forced to do a Ford 9" just due to aftermarket support. Right now 1st is essentially useless, 2nd is easy to start in, and realistically you could launch in 3rd if not 4th with how low it's geared.

 

My 70 El Camino had factory 2.56s in it, and a posi . . . It was a 10-bolt.

 

I was wondering if only muscle cars would have common gearing like that! That puts me at ease. I've never looked into on road stuff whatsoever so looking for gearing options that aren't super low is the total opposite of what I normally do.

 

I was told that it was the highest ratio offered, and wasn't selected very often. Most folks went with the lower ratios for dragging. This vehicle was speced more for economy, and it only had a 350 in it, but it did get respectable mileage for what it was.

 

Wow what a week! We'll see how much I actually type out or say fuck it.

Exhaust got wrapped, including the header and a turbo blanket.







At this point, the engine is back together and running! After warming up the oil pressure is a bit low, 18-20psi at idle which is weird because it used to be at 35-40psi at idle. But revving it just a little and the pressure jumps up, so while concerning and odd it is running fine and does have fine oil pressure--just a lot lower than before.

I take it for a drive to test the amount of boost since porting the wastegate, and at 60% throttle and 4800rpm with the wastegate all the way open and it's already making over 10psi, so take my foot off the throttle to not overboost it and the engine dies. It was kind of odd, but I didn't think much about it and pulled over to check things over. I then cranked it and it wouldn't fire. Nothing from the datalog was showing anything weird, but I called my neighbor and his brother came and towed me home. On the way back I popped the clutch to roll start it and it fired right up, but when I got home it wouldn't start from cranking, so we again roll started it. After that I screwed with the cranking parameters and then it seemed to fire up fine. Why did it die on the road? No idea. But the starting was maybe just related to poor tuning? I had changed a fair bit in the tune, richened it out, changed timing, but I didn't change anything at idle or for cranking and it had never had an issue cranking before this so also odd.

I decided to port the wastegate even more, if I can't get the turbo to make lower pressure then I'm kind of hosed since the exhaust is built for this style turbocharger and it'd be a lot of work to redo it. I absolutely go to town on it, rotating the turbo all over and absolutely hogging out as much material as I can, and with a focus of angling the wastegate port down towards the exhaust flange to try and get smoother airflow into the wastegate instead of the abrupt angle it had before.



It's not pretty but this is what peak performance looks like



I cut the flapper off and make a new one to vaguely seal it up. I'm not worried about a perfect seal since it spooling up fast hasn't been an issue.



I finish that last night, get the turbo thrown back on and go for a rip to see how much boost it's making now. Somehow the truck making too much boost has become a big issue ironically.

The boost was a lot better, a couple psi getting on it (with the wastegate totally open again). I decided to do a full throttle pull to red line to see what the max boost it would make was. At 7000rpm it was making about 10psi, which is great! I can have the wastegate closed to spool it fast and then once boost is reached the wastegate can fully open to just hold at 10psi!

And then the engine just went weird. To back track a bit, leaving the neighborhood there was a point where the engine just felt draggier. Like I had to keep a bit more power to go the speed I wanted, it didn't feel as free revving and unrestrained compared to usual. I didn't think much of it, but did note it. When I did the pull to 7000 it was the same way, it just felt really slow to rev, it's making 10psi and I didn't even reach the rev limiter and it seemed so weird I decided to shift and when I put the clutch in the revs dropped a bit and the oil pressure went to zero. The laptop screen is flashing and freaking out, the engine is dying like the first test drive. I try to rev it and it refuses, so I let the clutch out to get the revs up and that brings the oil pressure back up but now it's only at like 20psi at 3000rpm, but at least it's running again.

I limp it home, keeping it in low gears to keep the revs up to keep it running and oil pressure. I did some testing and if I let it drop to idle the oil pressure would drop faster than the revs so at idle rpm it was flat out zero oil pressure. I was able to get it home and pulled the spark plugs to check compression, expecting one of the pistons exploded or something.



But compression was actually pretty consistent. 117 +/-5, which seems low but the compression ratio is a lot lower now. I then looked through the datalog but isn't anything obvious. But then I look at the VVTi and the actual vs commanded CAM timing totally desynced when this whole event occurred. Oil pressure was at 40psi, and when it revved out the VVTi went from commanding like 20deg cam advance and the actual cam advance being 20deg to actual advance being like 2deg. And then shortly after that oil pressure issues and it not wanting to run. I had replaced the VVTi solenoid with the one from the spare engine since I had broken those little bolt ears off the original, so maybe that was the issue the whole time?

With high hopes that it was as simple as the VVTi solenoid, and if not that then maybe the oil pickup was clogged since I had touched that too, I started to unbolt stuff this morning, but then checked the oil just to see if that revealed anything.



And that says a lot! The only question now was what had failed. This oil has 10 miles on it maybe.



So this morning I started to pull the engine, one of my friends came over and helped.



That little beam of the core support that the hood latches to was a bit in the way, so we cut that out. I'll make some brackets so it can be easily installed/removed.



And by noon we had everything out!



First time the engine had been out since I installed it.



Tearing into it, metal everywhere obviously. A LOT of metal came out of the VVTi port.





Highly concentrated there! There's a filter at the VVTi port. I think the engine started eating itself and that clogged the VVTi filter and that's why it wasn't doing what it needed.

Some big chunks in the oil pan!



And the grand finale!



And of course, from cylinder #1, the one I just swapped parts into. These are the rod bearings going to the crank.

When I pulled the bolts they were suspiciously not tight, certainly not compared to the other rod I also pulled. The consensus was the rod bolts were torque to yield, and I just tightened them to the same torque spec as an unused bolt. That was too loose, so right off the bat the #1 rod was bouncing around, and the more it bounced the more it wore out the bearings, the more the bearings wore out the more oil pressure was getting bled.

I had thought about reusing the rod bolts, but I said fuck it, how much of a difference can it be. You always hear of people reusing bolts on heads and stuff and how it ended up fine. Well in my case it wasn't fine!

I pulled #6 just to compare, and at least the crank looked fine on #6 and there was still bearing material left. The crank on #1 is scratched up, it can probably get polished out or I will just use the spare engine's crank.


So now the question is, what path to go down? I had instantly jumped to the thought of fuck it, build the thing. And really there's not much to build, just do new rods and pistons while it's apart and drop it off at the machine shop and make it nice. The whole engine needs to be torn down to clean the metal out anyway. I'm still leaning towards doing that, I don't want to tear into the engine again just because a rod bent or another ring land breaks. I want it to just be overbuilt and not worry the turbo is making too much power. Though some of my friends have different thoughts, clean it up, use the pistons and rods in it, just fix what I have since it will still make plenty of power and put the money from the other parts towards other stuff and does the little truck really need to be capable of tons of power? I don't know, there is something to that too.

At a minimum, my plan is to drop the block off at the machine shop, probably Tuesday so it at least gets in the que to get flushed and cleaned. What an adventure!

 

Clean it and build it. It’s gonna get built eventually. Might as well be now. Sell the spare engine to offset cost. Buy once cry once.

 

I'm siding with @centex, get it over with.

 

If it has to be torn apart then the only option is to build it? perfect reason to get er done.

 

Me being a cheap bastard would be to get it running with what I have...but you have it already pulled and dissected. Get it done right and know it's reliable. That part has me doing things right the first time instead of going back to fix problems that would of been preventable catastrophes.
Good luck!

 

Everything points towards building it fresh and removing all concerns. Isn't that what your truck is telling you with what it just put you through?!

 

Oh wow lol 4.56s, you sure? What's the axle code on the metal tag in the engine bay say? That's an uncommon factory ratio imo. Almost all 2wd trucks pre tacoma got the 5 lug axle with 7.5" gear whereas the 4wd got 6 lugs with 8" gear. The mk3 supra runs 8" gear and some have fitted the lsd carriers into 4wd trucks. The mk2 supra runs a 7.5" gear so I wonder if those guts would fit the 2wd trucks... 3.73s with lsd was an option in the mk2. Could even swap in a complete 8" axle from a 79-85 pickup depending how much wider it is. Would open up gear options and it's stronger with bigger drums. Or you could just build a 9" haha

Damn, sorry to hear about your motor... I vote on a mild build as well. Or at the very least, slap it back together and slowly build your spare short block as funds and time allow.

 

I have a 4.56 rear set that I was going to put in my 97 4WD Tacoma that I would donate, if you were to find yourself going down that road @snivilous.

 

I didn't realize all 2wd trucks had the 7.5", I thought it was some funky size that predated the 8". I was 90% confident from spinning it, but looking up the axle code it says it's a 4.11 8" so I guess I have no idea what's actually under it

I appreciate the offer, I should be able to find a 8" around here from one of my Toyota friends though. But I don't know if there's Toyota gears that are high enough to drop the rpms down, the 350Z axle ratio is 3.54, and I've read about 3.58 Toyota gears and tried to buy them but never got anywhere with that so not sure they even exist.

 

Forgot to respond to this bit and everyone else's comments.

Yes, my plan right now is for sure to rebuild the engine with all the goods I want. So far this week I haven't touched anything else, but the plan is to tear down both engines I have and essentially drop 2x of all the parts at the machine shop and tell them to mix and match whatever needs the least work. Both heads, all four cams, maybe both blocks, both cranks for sure, etc.

I found a website called Real Street Performance that seems to offer all the stuff I want for the 2JZ from one place. Right now I'm looking at Eagle rods, Wiesco pistons, one of the reworked oil pumps, some BC valve springs, new valve seals, head gasket, ARP for the mains (connecting rods come with them), and of course new bearings and some other miscellaneous things I'm forgetting. I will use the stock cams since cams aren't cheap, and seem way overkill for what I want, and then I'll reuse the crank, block, head, etc. Right now I'm holding off buying that stuff so I can measure the bores on both blocks and see if I need to get oversized pistons or not--though I might just go one size up and say fuck it since who knows how many miles are on both blocks and the machining cost difference won't be much. Once I get those I'll have the machine shop balance the rotating assembly too.

 

haha that makes more sense. Unless someone swapped the whole rear axle, I'm fairly certain it's a 7.5" with 4.11. They often get labelled as a 8" because people dont know they're different. If you can find a 3.73 diff from a mk2 supra, and run a 28" tire maybe that will bring you close enough?

Your plan sounds perfect. Real street is one of the best. Good call on the cams. Definitely can get away with stock.

 

Interesting, that sounds like the place I just purchased a replacement wideband sensor from as mine has been flaky for the past year and a half. Small world, the internet . . .

 

So the automatic 350Z came with a 3.3 ratio vs the 3.5 with the manual trans. I found this out the hard way because some asshat sold me a stock VLSD pumpkin with a 3.3 instead of the 3.5 he advertised it as.

My vote says swap in an entire subframe from an auto 350Z and get the IRS back there. Should be plenty of them in junkyards. And plan to upgrade the axles when you snap them.

 

Machine shop was slow AF to inspect things, but in a way it worked out since I bought everything during Black Friday. Got it today, and will drop off Monday. Hopefully I get the engine back by the end of the month.



Wiesco 8.4:1 pistons (-14cc I think) and 0.50mm oversize



Manley rods



ARP main studs



Brian Crowner cam springs and retainers



Another head gasket, but this one is the stock turbo thickness which should put me around 8.5:1



Powerhouse Racing modified oil pump



The clutch had some weird wear on it, at first I was going to swap it out but buying another $500 clutch when I never noticed a problem seemed kind of pointless. I did drop the flywheel off to get resurfaced for $60. I'll use the same pressure plate which has some hot spots but they said they couldn't surface it. Hot spots on pressure plate, funky looking wear on clutch, but the flywheel is freshened up so overall it should be better than the baseline of feeling good!




Now I can drop everything off to get balanced and machined. They're also going to coat the exhaust valves and head and pistons in some cerakote stuff to decrease heat. I was thinking of having them port the head since they have a new fancy 5th axis specifically for that, but not sure I want to wait on that, plus that is about 70 steps down in the "what is limiting horsepower" chain

Hopefully I'll have an update sooner rather than later!