2TR-FE Head Gasket, Water Pump, etc

I decided I couldn’t leave the valves alone so for $25 more I got a set of valve seal pliers and a spring compressor and I am now 6/16 for changing the stem seals, cleaning, and lapping. The head is still not going on yet lol.

 

Made more progress yesterday from 7/16 valves to 13/16. Boy are the exhaust valves a pain. So satisfying to see the ports and the valves and everything clean though. Just when I developed a good rhythm I switched to the exhaust valves and had to change everything completely. In case it’s useful:

Intake: Remove cap, compress and remove spring and holders, remove valve, remove old seal, clean port and valve, run brakleen and a small soaked piece of shop towel through the guide, apply oil to valve, insert, lap, check, repeat if necessary, otherwise add valve stem seal (I have decided I like using the stem of the valve to help align it), and reassemble. With the exhaust valves and ports I have been using tougher grades of scotchbrite and oven cleaner to make it work. In fact, I find the port side of the exhaust valve guide to be dirty, so I have been using less aggressive tiny scotch brite pads and oven cleaner with tweezers to get down in the hold from the block side of the head.

I also recognize that the 220 grit the valve grinding compound gets down to is not fine enough for a really good seal. Good thing is I am not building a race car, I am simply trying to restore the condition of the engine to near stock.

 

And I really thought that I spent too much time cleaning mine. Looks like you might have me beat. Nice job!

Btw, I don't know if I would want to do this myself again. I spent a lot of time on this part of the job when I did my head gaskets. What about you?

 

I think I'm at about 90 hours or more now over 15 days if I had to guess. I am really, really, really hoping to never do this again. I think it might be better to just swap the entire engine. Thanks for the praise by the way, I am nothing if not anal.

 

Update time. Got the head back on and the timing together.

While the first couple of valves were a lot of fun, two days later I was pulling my hair out. I also have to say, the time stress of trying to get things on before the FIPG cures... not so fun. Getting the head on was super frustrating, especially considering I forgot to put on the exhaust manifold gasket and then had a hell of a time trying to get the exhaust manifold to back off the studs, and then also back on with the head in place. I highly suggest remembering to put gaskets in places that are important. I used a piece of cardboard between the hg and head while getting the dowels lined up. I think it took me 22 minutes to get the head bolts fully torqued compared to the recommended 15. No way in hell was I going to take it all apart for those 7 minutes, that seems ludicrous. For some reason, the timing went together very easily and that pleased me greatly. I am now prepping to put the timing cover back on and good lord is the FSM convoluted when it comes to that. My FSM also does not seem to mention using the special coolant sealant around the coolant ports but I will be doing that anyway. Time to go hunting for the TW posts about it again.

 

More images.
1. Camshaft oil delivery pipe and its’ o-ring and part number.

2. The top timing chain guide and its’ o-ring and part number.

3. A clean and lapped exhaust valve seat.

4. The head ready for installation after I put a tiny scratch in it going over it with the shop vac one more time. The plastic nozzle thing myst have had debris on it. I was really kicking myself. I sanded the scratch down with 5000 grit sandpaper and I couldn’t even feel it with my fingernail. I also found another tiny bit of debris that had become lodged in the aluminum, probably while flipping it over many times cleaning and lapping valves. I sanded that down with 5000 too and eventually decided I had lost enough of my mind about it and that it was either going to work or not and it needed to go back on the block. There comes a point where more deliberation doesn’t actually add anything.

5. The head after installation and the engine bay sporting some new fluid film lol. Figured I might as well. My family group chat made fun of the head being cleaner than everything else in the engine bay.

6. One of the dumb formed hoses from the air intake.

7. Reinstalling one of the timing chain guides which seems to have a bit of wear at the top. Whatever. I elected not to replace any of the timing components. They are expensive and the ones in there seem to work.

8. The chain tensioner and its’ gasket and part number. I note that the wings on this gasket are slightly different from the old one I pulled off during disassembly.

9. The timing back together and the rubber band and cotter pin I used. The cotter pin was perfect for the chain tensioner because you can secure it in place once you have it off. It took many tries for the plunger to depress on disassembly but patience prevailed. The camshafts were not jumping so much on assembly and so I was able to easily maneuver them into place and kind of coax the crankshaft gear onto the chain in the correct place. I took a reference picture before disassembly that matches the assembly photo perfectly and this made life so much easier. The painted chain links and previous paint marks also helped.

 

Oh yeah also does fluid film work on the block? Fairly likely to be a no. Does it make me feel better and the block look better for the moment? Absolutely.

 

Well. I should have heeded the advice of zguy1 and others. I installed the timing cover only to realize the lower oil o-ring shredded itself into two pieces upon installation. I have since cleaned up most of my mess and now need to find another o-ring.

 

Didn't realize the 4 cylinder had the same problem area during reassembly. Now you know what you're up against next time you try. Patience will win out. Time away sometimes helps as well.

 

I got it on successfully about half an hour ago. No way is it possible to get the rtv on in 3 minutes and torque everything in 15 unless you spent seriously significant time practicing or you are a robot. Using a dab of grease on the o-ring certainly helped. I was able to get a couple of good ones from a local hardware store since they are not specially shaped or anything. Aligning the oil pump driver is not only mislabeled on the FSM diagram but also quite difficult, that was the trickiest part of both installs for me. I understand why Toyota says to drop the sub pan but that was simply not happening. I ended up torquing the sub-pan bolts first which seemed smart. I also smeared rtv on the top of the mating surface on the sub-pan but avoided the area the o-ring slides over during install. The first time I went for the install I smeared it over the whole surface and I bet that did not help my case.

I think it took me 7 or 8 mins from starting to apply rtv to getting the cover on and then another 18 mins to torque everything. Hopefully it works out.

 

Found this handy in installing the water bypass pipe no 1 (not no 2 as I said earlier in the thread).

Also, this is cool.

To be clear though, the 2trfe timing cover installation does not call for the special SLLC sealant. I bought a tube after reading about the job for a 1GR and that was silly. I might just end up keeping it since I doubt the ebay seller will accept a return.

 

Useful things from yesterday:
I found the order of operations I used to be useful during reassembly: head, timing cover, valve cover, crank pulley, torque exhaust manifold, bypass pipe, air intake manifold, ac compressor, thermostat. Next I am thinking power steering, fuel rail, throttle body, and then it’s just random bits and pieces.

Turns out I had forgotten all about 1632575011 (iirc that is the part number for the thermostat housing gasket on the 2.7l). Picked it up this morning. Pic is of the engine bay as of last night after finishing for the day. Hoping to finish today. I didn’t have any perceptible mixing of fluids prior to this job so I wasn’t planning on changing the oil quite yet. I think I’ll change it after a couple hundred miles given I’ll be flying to Alaska soon for most of the summer and it will sit anyway. Maybe it should just sit with the old oil. I plan on adding a catch can soon too, because I would like to avoid cleaning my intake manifold of crap again.

 

Useful things from yesterday:
I found the order of operations I used to be useful during reassembly: head, timing cover, valve cover, crank pulley, torque exhaust manifold, bypass pipe, ac compressor, thermostat, Turns out I had forgotten all about 1632575011 (iirc that is the part number for the thermostat housing gasket on the 2.7l). Picked it up this morning. Pic is of the engine bay as of last night after finishing for the day. Hoping to finish today. I didn’t have any perceptible mixing of fluids prior to this job so I wasn’t planning on changing the oil quite yet. I think I’ll change it after a couple hundred miles given I’ll be flying to Alaska soon for most of the summer and it will sit anyway. Maybe it should just sit with the old oil. I plan on adding a catch can soon too, because I would like to avoid cleaning my intake manifold of crap again.

I guess I left this here as a draft, over the course of the rest of today I finished putting the truck together and started it. I haven’t checked what code the truck is throwing but despite the CEL it sounds quite good. The compression test results before I started it were a bit weird but it seems to run nicely.

Dry compression test results:
1 125
2 170
3 145
4 120

I am not going to pay it too much mind. In fact, I didn't even bother to do a wet test. Not like I'm going to tear in there anytime soon anyways.

 

As is probably obvious at this point, I was not interested in having to put together a massive write-up at the end of this job so I tried to eat the elephant one bite at a time, so to speak. That being said there are many things I omitted from my notes here. I'll attempt to remedy that now, including links to youtube videos I watched and other TW threads that helped me along. Let us keep in mind that I have done a number of things to this truck so far in my almost four years of owning it, but I had little understanding of how the engine worked until a few weeks ago. I had never changed the PCV valve or cleaned the throttle body.

First I had to go through the process of diagnosing a head gasket issue, and then decide what to do once I determined it was in fact a hg issue. Essentially, I found that it is impossible to have combustion gases in the coolant system without some sort of hg issue or a cracked head or block. The water pump does not have a high pressure/low pressure side. The entire coolant system (save the reservoir) is pressurized, probably to about 10-15 psi. Now, the oil system is not the same. From my understanding, it is pressurized much higher (let's say 90psi, though I'm sure others actually know these figures). I believe I posted my initial symptoms earlier in the thread, and it seemed to indicate a miniscule leak from a cylinder to a coolant port. Given that the symptoms have now resolved, it seems like it was the head gasket. Glad I did this and didn't pour any stop leak crap in there.

I think everyone should use the FSM to the degree it is helpful and supplement with other resources. For example, I was not able to find the torque value for the pulley x tensioner assembly. I used 32 ft/lbs because it is the value for other similar pulleys, as well as most 14mm bolts around the timing cover. Starting at EM-81 is the engine component list which basically goes through diagrams with torque values for nearly everything in the engine bay and related to the transmission. Super handy.

partsouq.com is very handy as well.

full replacement of a 2trfe by the carecarenut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOcA6Dp8ZJQ&ab_channel=TheCarCareNut great vid but not super procedurally detailed.

piston/cylinder cleaning:

I used a similar method of scotchbrite and oven cleaner for my exhaust valves, intakes were much cleaner as one would expect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV4pzS31irk
I literally did not measure a damn thing surrounding valves/springs/rockers/valve lash adjusters, unlike this guy. I figure a tiny bit of lapping and cleaning wouldn't change anything. I imagine many would disagree with this approach but it is what it is now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziPg0qUF4Lg

this video has some great tips and I used a similar strategy. Unfortunately, I was not able to find thin wax string that fit in between the cylinder walls and the pistons. However, I was able to use a couple of fibers of hemp string wound together to create the correct thickness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj7C9iUXuRs&t=774s

valve lapping thoughts by someone who knows way more about this than me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE74dtq96o4

gasket surface prep:

https://www.allhead.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/surface-preparation-for-mls-head-gaskets.pdf

teardown (3 parts) sometimes maybe a bit too much detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9SQ91gO68w&ab_channel=pv2smurf

threads of use:

2tr https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/2tr-fe-rebuild-refresh.540748/
1gr https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/4-0l-v6-with-bad-head-gasket-repair-or-replace.781269/
almost all the necessary part numbers (and much more, love this thread) https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/2tr-fe-performance-thread.636292/
https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/2tr-fe-2-7l-dirty-coils.627499/

trying to see how far in to press the front main seal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CRyaynj4YI&t=490s

Also, plenty of Chrisfix, ericthecarguy, and humblemechanic videos on compression and leak down testing and stuff like that.

Finally, I am curious if anyone has ever actually torqued the water pump/fan clutch nuts?

 

@Bocotacointhewild. Hey Connor. I had a quick question as am doing an overhaul right now on a 2trfe and when I remove the timing chain the intake vvt cam gear moved once I removed the timing chain. Is this an issue. If so how did you fix it? Thanks anyone

 

to me the cam gear seemed to be almost magnetic. In other words, once you take the timing chain off the cam gear it will revert back to a different position. The key is just to make sure that it is all aligned correctly when you reinstall it. Ideally you mark before disassembly and take photos. To be honest that is a good rule of thumb for most things.