550hp 2JZ 1978 Hilux Build

I just remembered you were planning to swap in a CD009 trans. Be sure to upgrade the piece of crap plastic slave cylinder in the CD009. The stocker barely holds 300hp. I forget who, might be Southbend, but there’s a company that makes an all metal construction internal slave and someone else makes a conversion to mount the slave cylinder outside the trans.

 

I've had a CD009 since day 1 I have a Wilwood slave cylinder and an all metal throwout bearing.

 

Ok you’re all over it. Disregard my ignorance.

 

Yes sir, one of the later year CD009s with the triple syncros, a Collins adapter which is a steel spacer plate and the fancy aluminum flywheel so let's me run a stock 350Z type clutch with the 2JZ. I then have an autosports engineering top mount shifter which removes the stock shifter that hangs off the back, and is a short throw setup that places the shifter right on top of the transmission through the top access port so the shifter sits in the right spot inside the cab.

The Hilux did come with a stock transmission, but I was never going to run that. First two things I bought was the 2JZ and the CD009, and then spent a lot of money to make the two work together and get the shifter to fit in the right spot since it's so much longer than the stock transmission. Bottom of page 1 and top of page 4 show most of the transmission work.

 

AFTER MONTHS OF WAITING

Got the bottom end parts back from the machine shop Friday night. They were wrapping up cerakoting the head but let me grab the bottom end to start assembly.



Pistons, valves, and head are coated with some special cerakote ceramic coating that the shop swears by to keep temps down, sounded fun and experimental and they only charged for labor to do it.



Saturday got the rotating assembly put together. I'm pretty lazy when it comes to gapping rings, so the spread is .028"-.032". That's a bit looser than the 30psi call out of ~.026-.028". Piston #1 has the tightest pair of rings, working up to the loosest pair on #6. My neighbor who used to work at the performance diesel shop in town said that's what they would do with the idea being the rear most cylinders get the hottest so they get the looser gaps, not sure how true that is but I like the logic.



The pistons are -15cc Wiesco forged pistons, and are +0.5mm oversized. The block is machined +.001" for 20-30psi. Everything is balanced down to the flywheel and pressure plate. The rods are Manley forged H beams with ARP bolts and Manley bearings. The main caps are also using ARP studs and Manley bearings.



Didn't grab any photos from today. Painted the block, got the rear main seal in, and waiting on the front main seal to show up. Mostly spent the day cleaning parts.

I should have the head back tomorrow hopefully, though there's still plenty to do before that's slowing me down. With any luck the engine build will be done by the end of the week!

 

Oh yeah! That's awesome!

 

Got the head back, as mentioned the valves and combustion chamber are cerakoted.



Painted the block with the only orange-ish paint that Ace had. But I like it, the truck ideally someday will get painted the TRD Pro inferno red/orange so this seemed fitting.



Upper oil pan, baffle, pickup, oil pump, lower oil pan all installed. This took a day or two of waiting since I needed the front main seal which installs into the oil pump and it had to get shipped from out of state. The 2JZ is very cool, there are only a handful of normal seals, the majority of interfaces use RTV or O-rings. All the oil connections use O-rings. I'm slightly nervous I may of missed one since I didn't double check it was in position on the block, but I had already laid all the O-rings in position so I'm 90% sure it was there when I installed the upper oil pan, time will tell if I have oil pressure!



Head installed. Reusing the ARP studs for the head, and then a factory turbo thickness head gasket which will put me around 8.5:1 compression ratio.



Cams in. The heads and cams are from the second 2JZ I had, the cams got polished but otherwise were in good shape compared to the metal shaving eating cams from the previous setup. I'm using Brian Tooley valve springs and retainers. Stock valves and keepers, though I think all the valve seats were re-cut.



I was debating just sending it, but good call I didn't since a number of the valve clearances were off. I measured all of them, identified the ones out of spec, and was able to grab some shims from the previous head to swap in.



I was debating just sending it since these are the shims, buckets, and valves that came with this head. But as stated, I think all the valve seats were gone through which explains why some are off. On the intake side, 1/2/3 were off by .002-.003", and exhaust side 2/3/5/8/9/10 were off anywhere up to .006". All the valves were tight, which would make sense if the seats were cut and moved up slightly. All of them had clearance, but not to the stock spec of .006" for intake and .010" for exhaust. After swapping the shims on the ones that were off, we rechecked those valves and they were on the money!



Another thing that took a bit of extra time was the VVTI timing gear. I took it apart since the spare one seemed pretty gross, and this one was clean but had the metal shaving salad from before. I took it apart, and what a cool little mechanism. But I'm pretty sure I put it back together wrong and the little center interior gear in the top right I think I put in upside down. When I torqued the gear on it felt weird and squishy, and then I heard the pop and that little gear had gotten cracked. Luckily I have an entire spare 2JZ of parts, so I grabbed the spare VVTI gear, and said fuck it and just installed it without risking pulling it apart. There's also a big O-ring on the inside that I don't have a replacement for, so I was worried the one I broke might leak anyway (though it's easy to pull off relatively since it's at the front of the engine). To avoid any leakage---with the gear I've never run---I just installed it and said fuck it. Once it was installed it did rotate freely which is the real test if the VVTI internals are alright, so I think it will be fine.



With the valve lash set, the new timing gear on it was just a matter of bolting the front parts on. I also put the valve covers, spark plugs, and the coil packs in.





Not too shabby, I probably spent less than 16 hours building it. The 2JZ feels really simple compared to the "simple pushrod" of the LS stuff I've messed with prior, or even any V engine. Granted there's two cams, but they're just chilling on top, one head, no lifters or pushrods, no weird seals or funky things to make stuff line up, 80% of the sealing surfaces use RTV or off the shelf O-rings, nearly everything has alignment pins. The main caps only have two bolts, everything being in a line and stacked vertically just felt really simple. I browsed through a manual, but really someone could easily fake their way through the entire build since there's just not that many parts and it's very intuitive. I really liked it!

That about wraps up today. I pulled the engine off the stand, tomorrow I should get the clutch and transmission bolted up. I should be installing everything into the truck Sunday I think!

 

AWESOME !

 

Looks wicked! Loving the 2jz updates. Is that 8.5:1 compression ratio calculated or just based on the twin turbo gasket?

 

Calculated with the tt gasket, -15cc pistons, and the GE head.

 

Didn't make any progress yesterday, but got the engine in today!

Yesterday I was able to scan the engine and transmission, and today scanned the engine bay. I'd like to convert the truck to AWD eventually so got the scans of things I can't easily access down the line.







If anyone wants these files, they can be downloaded from GrabCAD.

Today I started with machining a new pilot(?) bushing. The one I had originally machined never fit right and I sometimes get a rattle from the transmission which I think is the sloppy fit. The new one is much nicer with a .0015" radial clearance of the input shaft and a .0005" radial press fit on the crank.





Then it was bolting up the flywheel and clutch and adapter plate:



And finally mated to the 350Z CD009 transmission!



No photos after that, but it dropped in pretty easy doing it by myself. Cutting the core support out when I pulled it definitely helped a ton!



I then spent hours and lots of swearing messing with the exhaust, which in classic fashion barely fits. At the end, I cut off one of the exhaust hangers since it was a bitch to work around, and then beat the exhaust with a hammer in a number of locations and also took the grinder to the transmission and sanded down every support rib or excess feature in the vicinity, oh I also hit the floor with a hammer a few times. The exhaust now actually slides into place pretty easily, but the V band off the downpipe I can't seem to get to line up well enough, so the next step will be to cut one of the V bands off and then weld things until it actually fits.



On the plus side, after this work it should be smooth sailing to get the exhaust in and out---which considering it's 3.5" the whole way will be quite the accomplishment on this little truck!

What else do I have left? The core support needs some fabrication so it can bolt back in. The intercooler needs to get installed. The engine needs oil and a filter, and the wiring harness needs to be hooked up. Need the battery installed... I think that's about it. I'm also thinking of finding someone who specializes in 2JZ tuning and have them at least check out the tune and see if they have any recommendations or tweaks they'd implement, the truck was running great before but my big concern is timing and the knock sensors aren't exactly easy to read and figure out. I did a similar thing on my LS build, got it running and driving fine and then had someone come in to tweak the tune and iron out what I had done.

Once I get those couple things done, she should be ready to fire up! I doubt all of that will happen tomorrow, mainly since the exhaust is gonna take some time to get fit correctly.

 

My three favorite phrases from the above post:
1. I'd like to convert the truck to AWD
2. I also hit the floor with a hammer a few times
3. then weld things until it actually fits

 

That is a tight fit

 

The jokes just write themselves don’t they.

 

I was looking at the pressure plate, clutch and everything bolted to the rear of that motor. I cannot get over how beefy everything looks! Things just look like POWER!!! like it could produce enough to melt the tires! Then you add the trans and it looks very nice, it looks like it is fast sitting on the floor with plenty of torque! HA!!
Looking forward to hearing that run.

 

Sweet! Custom pistons? Usually the TT gasket nets around 9.0:1. I went with a cometic 1.8mm gasket on my GE to lower it to around 8.6:1

 

The clutch is rated for 600ft-lbs, which should be right around what 91 octane can handle. The engine itself should be able to handle a lot more power, but there's nowhere nearby I can get better gas or E85, and I didn't want to get a twin disk clutch since I hear those can be annoying to drive and really grabby, so it works out that both the fuel and clutch capability line up about the same.

Yea, they're 0.5mm oversized dished Wiesco pistons. I used a Cometic head gasket, I forget if it was the 1.8mm but it matched whatever the TT gasket thickness was. I figured that'd be the easiest size to find and I could always adjust the compression ratio a bit then if I wanted, so I based the piston selection on the target compression ratio and standard head gasket thickness.

 

HA!!!

 

She runs!!!

Yesterday got the exhaust fixed. I slit one side to bend the V band into the right spot then overlaid a tube to seal it up and tacked it then pulled it and welded it.



Not the prettiest thing, but she lines up great now and I actually have a little bit of wiggle room in the exhaust everywhere after all the work and beating on it!



Today I grabbed oil and filter and coolant and got the engine ready to start. A parts store opened not too far away so my current commuting vehicle is the mini bike



I hooked up the harness and long story short, it wouldn't get oil pressure at first or start in general. I cranked it a lot and figured I should've had pressure by then, so ran over to the machine shop and borrowed their oil primer and pumped some oil through it. I also told the ECU to cycle the injectors and nothing happened, so pulled up my fuse diagram and saw there was no fuel injector fuse! Fixed that and cranked it and it fired right up! I started and stopped it a couple times before it got oil pressure. On my previous LS build it took probably a minute to get oil pressure, so I was prepped this time that it might be a second, but still hard to let the engine run very long with no pressure!

Once it got oil pressure though, it got ALL THE OIL PRESSURE. The gauge maxed out at 100psi, so I let it run a couple minutes then turned off. The oil regulator on the new pump is probably stuck, which is both ironic and kind of expected. The oil pump is supposed to be this fancy customized stock unit WITH AN IMPROVED REGULATOR. The stock oil pump has really high pressure, and apparently isn't consistent so this pump claimed to fix that. Can't say I ever had issues with the stock pump, but if I'm buying a new one and these morons claim to make it better then sure. I suspect whatever shit they did made the regulator get stuck. The regulator isn't that bad to reach, but I do have to pull the crank pulley and shit off the front. I think I can access it without pulling the timing belt or cam pulleys which is all that really matters.



I also forgot to tighten the nuts on the turbo drain so that was squanching everywhere, and forgot to tighten the turbo flange bolts which one of them in classic fashion is inherently stripped out so I pulled the turbo to probably just weld the stud into the flange and call it good.

And that wraps up today! Big success having it fire up and getting oil pressure! Now to make it have less oil pressure and get the remaining things fixed up!

 

So.... While I was reading this, I had only scrolled down this far:



...and was totally expecting you to say that the commuter vehicle was the JD!

 

Great to hear!

 

Sounds perfect man. Like you, I wanted to drop my comp ration into the 8s as well since there isn't e85 or anything anywhere close to me. The twin turbo gasket is 1.3mm so I needed the 1.8mm to drop me to around 8.6:1 since I'm on stock GE pistons. Sounds like a rock solid build! Ready for 500whp on 91oct!

 

Past two days have been an absolute pain in the ass. First go to bleed the clutch and nothing comes out, have to pull the master and spill brake fluid all over the place just to conclude that the clutch pedal wasn't set right so the master couldn't fully extend and draw in fluid. Maybe this explains the weird clutch wear if the clutch wasn't able to fully release. Also the brake and clutch fluid have a common reservoir, and holy shit is the brake fluid nasty. Need to flush the lines since the fluid is like brown red from presumably all the rust on the original brake lines.

The next absolute pain in the ass was bleeding the cooling system, which I have down pretty well now. The rear axle needs to get jacked up like 2ft so the engine becomes level and then the bleed port at the rear of the head will collect all the bubbles. I was an absolute retard and fully pulled the cap on the bleed port which is an AN4 fitting. Normally I loosen it but it was taking so long for the air to slowly bleed out I went full impatient retard and pulled the cap, and since AN fittings are the absolute worst fittings when it comes to aligning and cross threading, once the coolant flushed through the head I couldn't get the cap back on. So there goes like two gallons of coolant on the shop floor. And that fitting is absolutely fucked. Today go to weld another fitting on after unsuccessfully trying to untuck it, and the aluminum is so nasty from sitting in coolant for years that it's just disgusting shit bubbling up everywhere. So I went back to my original janky NPT concoction from a long time ago, somehow still had that. But at least that uses a Schrader valve so is easy and no worry about unscrewing and stripping stuff.

Oh and then the oil pressure "issue". Apparently that's somewhat common on 2JZs, so that is a plus is I didn't have to take the oil pressure regulator apart. Once the engine got warmed up the warm idle oil pressure was ONLY 60psi. It still hits 100psi before 2000rpm.



All of this shit to "fix" stuff that's not actually wrong and spending two days spilling shit all over the place. But at least today I finally got to actually drive it! That's all I wanted was to know it's functional!

I just drove around the block a few times. Nothing exciting whatsoever, which is good. She absolutely purrs. The header is soaked in oil so it looks like it's about to catch fire constantly, but otherwise no issues! Running at 172deg like before, going down a slight hill and coolant was at 154, so all acting the same as before. I had a 500psi sensor laying around so plugged that in and recalibrated the tune and did another drive, I didn't rev it out a lot but oil pressure was around 130psi at 3000 or 4000rpm. So I think oil pressure is fine, and is inline with other 2JZs ive read about. One guy in particular was at 130psi at cold idle, swapped in another brand new stock oil pump on his new engine, and the oil pressure was the exact same proving the oil pump was fine. And even with the old used engine oil pressure was routinely over 60psi and that had 200k on it, so I was freaking out over nothing. Still weird to me, my LS cold idle is like 45psi.


Anyway, no other photos, no cool news, but she got her first drive for 2025 in! Now I can focus on wrapping up the front end and dialing in the tune and then start seeing how the boost responds and get some videos!

 

Ah yes that's what I'm remembering, I had the 1.8mm gasket on after I blew the ringlands. That head gasket got two drives out of it new setup is the 1.3mm you said, then I can bump to the 1.8 or go to a thin one if I ever wanted.

 

This is my favourite thread. I love seeing the updates and your write up’s. You kill it.

 

After reading your latest post I was wondering, did you put in a new GE or GTE oil pump? And what clutch master are you running? I had similar issues with a 1uz swap I did. The slave cylinder for the swap was bigger than the stock master, put a bigger master in and had perfect clutch.

 

It's a PHP modified GTE pump, though not sure if there's actually a difference from the GE?

Master and slave are both wilwood units. I just had to adjust the pushrod on the master and everything was fine. Just weird since I had bled it before and seemingly thought I had set it right, but must not have and since it was full of fluid and didn't leak it didn't make any difference. The pedal throw to actually disengage the clutch was always really low, so maybe that was getting messed up from the pushrod being off but it's hard to say. My FJ40 has maybe an inch of motion for the whole clutch stroke and the Hilux was similar so never thought anything about it.

 

Oh ok nice that you got the clutch sorted. So here's why I ask about the pump. Everyone says or used to say, when rebuilding GE to switch to a GTE pump because it flows more volume or makes me more pressure. Maybe both I'm not sure. Then there's others who say that the GTE pump is designed to work with the piston oil squirters, so on a GE it's not necessary and can cause extra pressure due to no squirters. Can't conform or deny either theory. Just sharing random thoughts and theories I've read over the years lol

 

Lots of updates. First is I called 2JZ Motorsports in Salt Lake City to ask about tuning, and they directed me to a guy named JR Crosby who does all of their tuning, and they are a well known shop (and in the same state) so I figured that was a good place to start. I had done a lot of reading about tuning features I didn't fully understand, primarily getting the knock sensors calibrated and working right, and decided it'd be better to have someone who knows the 2JZ to at a minimum look over my tune and get it dialed in. My main concern was getting the timing correct, and since it's a huge adventure just to get the knock sensors working let alone the questionable results they may be giving, it seemed like it'd be money well spent to at least get a timing table from someone. JR said it'd be $650 and he could remotely tune it as long as I can hotspot off my phone. The cool thing about aftermarket ECMs is you plug into them and can see everything on the laptop in real time and change it in real time, so if I can hotspot off my phone I can just drive around and someone can remotely tune it on the spot which is awesome. JR said remote tuning it wouldn't be an issue, though I told him I could come up if he wanted to put it on a dyno but he said that wouldn't be needed, and keep in mind I'm not shooting for a lot of power (relative to what the engine can make). If I can have a good tune and beat on it and it's happy, whatever power level that ends up being will be more than what the truck can handle anyway. JR also said he could set up stuff like launch control and boost limits (I didn't even know that was a thing, apparently the ECM can be set so when it hits a boost threshold it will just pull fuel to prevent overboosting and hurting itself), so dude seemed to know his stuff and he said it's a one time fee so if things change over time he'll help dial it in. Awesome!

I'm TENATIVELY getting it remote tuned on Tuesday or Wednesday depending on his schedule, though there's a short window of him being available and me being available until the following week so we'll see when it happens. Knowing the truck can drive, and now with a plan in mind to get it tuned, I didn't plan to drive it any more until the tuning session so JR can look the tune over before I risk hurting the engine. That kind of forced me to step back and just look at the remaining detail work since I couldn't rush into messing with the engine side until JR was ready.

To start things off I fixed the core support. I made some brackets that indexed into the core support and some stock holes on the body side, and then also added some more holes with nut certs. I also had a relief that I remembered how to weld and indeed the nasty aluminum for the engine bleed port was just that, nasty!



The brackets are welded to the core support, and then two bolts on each side bolt into the body and there's a bent section to increase the stiffness so it's not just a flimsy flat plate since this has to hold the hood down and the intercooler.



The wife helped me align the front end with the string method too. The steering wheel has always been off center, but both tires were toed in by an inch or more! This should help the handling a bit, maybe help with the no power steering too! The underside is pretty clean actually, one of the tie rods I took the wire brush to but everything else was great and a pipe wrench made easy painless work of adjusting the tiny tie rods. I also greased a bunch of stuff and flushed the brake and clutch lines of all the nasty brake fluid while I was under it.



Another thing to fix or at least inspect was the wastegate. JR said I should hook it up since the ECM has the boost failsafes even though I was worried of overboosting based on last times experience. I first took all the wastegates I had laying around and pressurized them and measured the stroke, effectively getting a spring rate, and then used the softest wastegate. I then actuated it with the compressor with it installed to see if the stroke matched, and it did not! The wastegate valve was really sticky, so after some screwing with it I figured out where it was actually happy and fixed some things sticking. It still doesn't move far, but this is probably a lot better than before! You can also see I took the TIG and blobbed some weld on one side to help it seal up better in its new position, though I'm not particularly worried about how much it seals at the moment.



Oh, and a stud had stripped the holes in the adapter plate for the turbo to the manifold, and I had tried drilling it out and tapping it and using a bolt, that didn't really work though so while I had the turbo moved around I welded the stud directly into the adapter. If that has issues and needs to get pulled, I will cross that bridge when I get there!






The next thing I wanted to do was install the carpet if possible, but first was to get the sound deadening in. And before that I took some random paint and hit all the bare metal spots. Everywhere black is places I had welded and/or added metal to the floor.



I also cleaned up the nasty residue from the roof liner, and then cleaned everything with alcohol, and finally put some 2mm dense sound deadener in. Initially I used the remaining Dynamat I had laying around, and luckily Amazon was able to next day some random equivalent sound deadener that showed up today which I finished most of the truck with. I should've bought more, but essentially everything besides the bottom of the A pillar and behind the door cards has the 2mm dense stuff on it.



I also grabbed some 4mm sound deadener, not sure which is better for what, but I figured stacking them can't hurt anything! I think just the floor will get the 4mm stuff which is really just some sticky foam. The carpet doesn't go up the back and I don't think the foam would last or look as good as the Dynamat so debating just leaving the back as it is. The roof won't get the 4mm either since it will get overlaid with some boat decking/hydroturf to act as headliner.



And then lastly for the interior (kind of) is the carpet. Which absolutely does not fit at all.



This carpet supposedly was for this truck, but none of the dimensions were remotely correct but there's an integrated little plastic traction mat on the driver's side that seems to match some photos of other trucks... Nothing else though seems correct, and the trans tunnel hump in the carpet is fucking huge! We kind of trimmed it into shape and then ended up cutting it in half along the driver's side trans tunnel fold to overlap the two sides and try to get the trans tunnel hump to sit lower. In retrospect I think we should've cut the carpet into left right and center while it was still oversized, and then the center portion could be cut down to sit where it needs to. Regardless, I'm not entirely sure what the next step is. We're leaving it like this overnight to see if the carpet will flatten out and help fit the body better.

I saw a video a couple days ago of a similar generation truck with some cool headlights that had a LED ring around each light, and it turned out one of the headlights had gone out on the Hilux and the entire headlight has to be replaced since it's a sealed assembly. Keeping in the spirit of anything that needs to be touched will be upgraded, I started looking around for the style of headlight I had seen on the other truck. My first thought was a headlight off a Challenger or something, and it turns out the 5.75" round headlight is pretty universal and I was able to order a four pack for like $150 on Amazon. I had these brand new headlight surrounds from Thailand that I got a long time ago, and when I went to start pulling the stock headlights off most of the bolts were seized, so it was time to throw these on!



And then today got the headlights which bolted right up!



They are HIDs and have the same 3-wire plug as the original headlights, so were literally directly plug and play which is kind of wild. I then had to wire up the running lights if I wanted to use those, which I tapped into an ignition powered wire. The LED halo also flashes orange with the blinkers, and I had already run the blinker wire to the front but never hooked it into anything.



In stock form the outer lights on the Hilux are low beam, and then all four switch to high beam, which is how I'm leaving it for the moment.



I think they're cool, only thing I'm not a fan of is the weird red center glow when the halo is on. We'll see if I keep the running light white halo on, mainly I wanted the halo as a blinker and don't want to push it too far into the ricer territory. In the shop they seemed super bright and were pumping out some heat, I'm excited to see what it's like at night and finally have blinkers. And since there's four headlights, I can have the outer two angled down for low beams and then they'll switch to high beams which is a lot of light, but then I have the middle two high beams which can be separately angled too so I think high beams will have a crazy amount of light output since high beam isn't really slaved to the low beam location which is cool.

Oh I also got a new battery, the Optima had issues since day 1 and I finally got around to warrantying it today. If anyone forgot, here is how the 3.5" exhaust is routed and the bedside dump.



And I think that wraps up everything I've done in the past three days. She's really starting to come together!