Brice's NA V6 Build

Man these cam sprockets were really heavy for some reason...


Oh wait

Nvm, found em

Yeah so I've decided to r150 swap the truck. I've been reading about it and it seems it can take pretty good abuse for its price point. I paid $999 for the above unit from eBay. 188k miles and it came from a 99 prerunner. For that price I got the trans, bell housing, slave, master, throw out bearing, clutch fork and shifter. I'll probably rebuild it but I'm happy. I still need about $500 in additional parts plus or minus a couple hundred depending on the clutch I go with. Kinda bummed lce doesn't sell the ultralight flywheel anymore though.

The stuff I had been searching on old forum posts had supra guys putting 450-500 wheel down with these (or one of its variants) and a guy with a turbo 2j 4Runner (iirc) was putting down like 670 wheel on drag slicks, launching it trying to break it.

 

Yeah you're pretty unlikely to break the R150 unless you make a ton of smoke with the 5VZ. I'm putting down 405hp and 482lb of torque at the wheels so I know it is more at the crank and I've even launched the truck in 4WD and it holds like a champ.

 

Excellent to hear.

 

Very curious how you went about changing the cam timing. When you moved the cam gears 1 tooth on the belt, did you then realign the exhaust cam with the intake? Or did you just move 1 tooth on the intake side? I would think that would serve as retarding the intake cam and advancing the exhaust(I could be backwards....). If I remember my counting correctly, 1 tooth on the helical gear in the head translates to 9°.

 

Well I didn't mess with the internal timing between the two cams. I would think the exhaust cam would be ground in reverse of a normal exhaust cam since it's slave driven. And 7.5 degrees was way too much both in practice and after doing some research. I have thought about messing with the timing between the two cams but if I understand correctly that would change the lobe separation angle on a setup like this no? I really don't know what I'm doing yet lol.

 

I don't think 7.5° is too much pending what your goal with it is. Ultimate goal, at least in our case, is to retard the intake a bit and open the lsa of the cams to shift rpm up a bit and help it hold boost better with higher lsa. We have talked about having some gears modded with slots to allow much smaller changes in the cam timing. Won't know if we need to go that far until we see where the engine makes torque, where it falls off with a lot of boost, and if we need to shift it any more with the Camry cams.

 

Well I should have specified too much total on both the intake and exhaust atleast on a stock ECU. I hadn't done any math on moving the exhaust cam around. I did hop on twitter (X) and feed the AI there all the specs on the 5vz and 3vzfe and told it the sprocket tooth count and tooth count of the internal gears and it seemed to think advancing the intake and retarding the exhaust would be good for higher rpm power. No clue of it knows what it's talking though.

 

I'm reading this again while I'm not in the middle of working and yeah I believe you're correct, the truck feels really good till 3000-3500 then it just dies lol

 

I also read what i wrote again, and it would seem you did just retard both, or maybe advanced? Advancing cam timing is good for low down power, and retarding shifts power higher in the powerband. Thats why vvt is so good. Gives the best of both worlds. I would think... Not completely sure, but i would think you'd want to retard the intake cam, then also move the exhaust cam one tooth as well, so the exhaust cam stays fairly neutral but the intake cam is retarded. That would in effect increase LSA of the cams, and retard the intake. From my research, exhaust cams tend to do a lot less for the powerband than intake cams, but i don't know enough to say with confidence.

 

I retarded the intake cam one tooth which was worth 7.5 degrees I think. But I think you're right about the exhaust cam having been advanced. If I understand correctly, since the exhaust cam spins the opposite direction it would've been advanced and I think that's why the truck won't rev very high at all. If I were to advance the intake cam I believe that would retard to exhaust an equal amount. If having advanced the intake I then moved the internal exhaust gear one tooth away from the intake cam that would move it 9 degrees back towards stock alignment. Basically Intake 7.5 degrees advanced, exhaust 7.5 degrees retarded, moving the exhaust cam one tooth away from intake would give intake 7.5 advanced, exhaust 1.5 degrees advanced. Assuming one tooth on the sprocket is 7.5 degrees and one tooth on the internal gears is 9 degrees (I counted last night and they do have 40 teeth).

Some possible combos with all stock parts could be:
Intake 7.5 advanced, exhaust 7.5 retarded
Intake 7.5 retarded, exhaust 7.5 advanced (what I currently suspect I've done)
Intake 7.5 advanced, exhaust 1.5 advanced
Intake 7.5 advanced, exhaust 16.5 advanced
Intake 7.5 retarded, exhaust 1.5 retarded
Intake 7.5 retarded, exhaust 16.5 retarded
Intake 0, exhaust retarded 9 degrees
Intake 0, exhaust advanced 9 degrees

I'd wager intake 7.5 retarded, exhaust 1.5 retarded would be the sweet spot. And when I say "exhaust advanced/retarded" I mean relative to the intake cam gear.

I currently have the truck apart so I think I'll retard the intake a tooth and move the exhaust cam back one gear tooth the get the 7.5/1.5 retarded hypothetical.

Also I could just fundamentally not understand something here which invalidates all this

 

This is what I was going to aim for I believe, except for 7.5° retarded intake and 1.5° advanced exhaust for powerband shift and more effective lsa on the camshaft, which realistically is only better on boosted applications. And easentially by only retarding the intake cam 7.5°, and in turn retarding the exhaust 7.5°, the result would be the same as taking 7.5° of timing out of the whole map, and really just losing power overall.

 

Alright so I played around with the cam timing some more.

So far I have tried these combos:

stock timing: engine runs and revs fine but falls off up top

Intake 7.5 retarded, exhaust 7.5 advanced (call this one an oversight): engine ran fine but wouldn't rev past 3500rpm. Power was weird too.

Intake 7.5 retarded, exhaust 1.5 retarded: this is the best combo so far. Engine keeps pulling to at least 6200rpm but the gearing is suboptimal I think. 2nd gear will get you to 85mph with 4.10 rear gears and 3rd will go faster than you reasonably should in something brick shaped.

I'm sticking with the 7.5/1.5 retarded setup. Custom cam gears would make this far more tunable but for all stock components it's pretty good I'd say. The intake is quieter than stock, and much much quieter that the 7.5 retarded intake, 7.5 advanced exhaust thing I did.

 

Where would you say you feel the power comes on compared to stock timing, and fall off compared? Curious how much it shifted the powerband with the 7.5/1.5

 

It's hard to tell up top honestly since the a340's gears are sorta far apart. Down low it has lost some torque for sure. I'd say from a dead stop at idle you'll feel lost power until 2800 ish rpm, then it starts to pull and keeps pulling until the trans shifts. I let it shift for the runs I did tonight. 1st seems to shift at 6k and 2nd seems to shift at 6200. I didn't have room to rev much in 3rd, but third definitely feels good and still puts you back in the seat a little. Tomorrow I'll see how it pulls to 6800.

The low rpm power loss isn't crazy and doesn't make it feel bad to drive at all but it doesn't feel like a truck motor anymore either

I'd also think the super long stock runners may be influencing the higher rpm power feel

 

I'm definitely excited to hear your thoughts. This was the exact same combo that I was theorizing with Zane about a few months ago when trying to figure out how to shift the powerband for drag racing, so I'm super stoked to get some feedback on it! We will likely be cramming 25psi through it if all goes well, but should make some crazy power numbers with a higher powerband

 

Ive been wondering if 2j cam gears have the right offset to work on a 5vz. They're the same tooth count at least.

Y'all will probably want a way to get a better split than 7.5/1.5

 

If we could adjust the intake gear, I'd think something closer to 5-6° retarded intake and 2.5-3.5° advanced exhaust would be more ideal. There will always be 9° between them no matter what, which is excellent for boost, but shifting the split a little closer to 70/30 would be perfect I bet

 

If you find something that works to achieve that let me know, it would help my end goal. In the mean time I'm working on adjustable intake cam sprockets. Now that I've experimented with how this engine physically works I could see a adjustable exhaust internal cam gears being a huge benefit. I have a set of stock cams I can mess with. It would be cool, yet labourous, to be able to adjust the exhaust independently.

 

Me: looks at the spare 5vz in pieces currently on the parts shelf wondering how heavily it'll be abused while I continue to learn from the great collective knowledge around here.

Damn I need an engine stand

 

Not likely nearly as much as our poor 5vz going in the t100