Rod knocking after pulling trailer up steep hill

Oil pressure has less to do with your compression rings/ oil control rings and more to do with bearing tolerance, specifically main and rod bearing. If we had an active oil pressure gauge we could point to something to gauge engine health from an oil distribution standpoint.

Regardless, maintained engines do exhibit wear (this is not a controversial statement)

 

Please let us know how this turns out.

 

Okay, here is the patient, hopefully we'll have it out on the engine stand tomorrow:

 

How fast were you going when you were throwing into 3rd, and at what RPM?

 

45 mph, probably 3-4K rpm

 

You can safely downshift to 3rd up to 90 mph

 

Love to see a video of you in your truck towing a trailer down a hill doing ~90 and shifting into 3rd

 

We are very conservative with this truck, never rodded the engine or truck. It spends a lot of it's life offroad, but that's just because of where it lives and what it does for work. We take it easy to parts don't spray down the highway. I really don't know why the engine did this. Will find out what exactly happened (or the results) in a day or two.

 

You're going to do this stuff yourself, yet you don't do your own oil changes????

 

Ops downshifting habits have nothing to do with his issue.

 

We have enough vehicles we have sort of a dedicated mechanic (more or less). I try to help less and less, but have pulled hundreds of engines in my life of wrenching. Toyota is on the way in town, so it's really convenient.

 

Never said they were after he responded. Was just curious.

 

I had CDL. Just in case

 

Okay, got the motor out and looking at crank, but first I'll post the sequence, in case anyone else tries to pull this motor, which takes a long time.

After you pull the plastic covers off, there's more plastic.


Plastic intake manifold:



You have to make a bracket to actually pull the motor later, or buy from Toyota, this is a wire feed welder special, but it worked:

 

Skipping lots of steps, but here's the motor actually coming out. It's sort of wide but not very deep, and has a million wires and hoses. More to come.

 

Here's where the exhaust manifold bolts on, never seen one like this before, it's just one hole coming out of the block:



This is the manifold after it comes out of the motor, it's really tight in there.





You pull off the fender cover to get to this:

 

If in fact a rod was knocking the CEL was likely a knock sensor code. The rod big end should be measured for out of round and likely resized by a machine shop. Also the crank rod journal should be measured for diameter and out of roundness. With that kind of mileage a band aid fix is probably not the way to go. Rebuild the entire engine or source another low mileage engine.

 

Actually the bottom end looks decent, the big issue is the oil looks pretty horrible, even though it was always Mobil 1 changed by Toyota lube place regularly (along with filters). I'll post some pix soon.

That said, we plan on looking at the main bearings, replacing the oil pump and sending the crank out to be checked.

 

Ya, it’s been discussed previously on the forum that the 2gr-fks “headers” are integrated into the head and then you have a “down tube”.

Here is one discussion of the topic. There might be better ones.

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/why-aren’t-headers-a-thing-for-3rd-gens.771756/

 

so 10k oil change intervals? not too surprised if thats the case.