Drivers Side Camshaft Snapped

If you want to spend more time on this engine, next step is to drop the oil pan and look at the pickup screen, and see what pieces are floating around in the oil pan. When you have the oil pan off, you can do some checks on the bottom end, and you need to figure out what caused the oil light to come on. You risk putting it all back together and being greeted with rod knock upon startup- or spinning a crank bearing 2000 miles down the road. Without a teardown and inspection of the bottom end bearings there's just a lot of dice rolling.

And of course, that head is a boat anchor.

 

That's odd looking. Give you that. Not sludge. Actually clean and clear of that. I'd venture to guess oil pump failure and lower end is dicey.

I'd just find an engine. Was this one up on maint. or was it just waiting for something to take it out?

 

Maybe someone in here can help you locate a good motor at a decent price . Sounds like you guys need some help . Good luck .

 

I guess what we're trying to say is, barring some weird scenario where you can/will do all the work yourself, and your time is worth $0.0, your better/cheaper-in-the-long-run peace-of-mind bet is to source a good used engine.

IF you are rock-and-hard-place, no pot to piss in stuck, you can slap 1 used head on that side, put back together and cross your fingers. I've known mechanics do that kind of thing and get away with it. I've also spent a fair amount of time with new-to-me-customers fixing said mechanics dice-rolling.

 

So more than likely the bottom end obtained some damage..... darn. I was against swapping another jdm motor in because it got one 2 years ago and this happened to this particular motor and wanted to try to rebuild it myself at least top end to prevent this from happening again . I’ve called around SoCal and it looks like prices are 950-1200 for a jdm motor and 2k installed. I don’t have a garage, just a carport and I don’t think I would be able to do a motor swap there

 

Thread revival, I just bought a 97 4runner that had the exact same breakage on the ds intake cam. Got some heads from a 118k mile 5vz and tossed them on with some cleaning and new gaskets/wp/tb. Got a hundred miles out of it before the other head seized. The bottom end is most likely out of tolerances and lots of oil pressure is being lost before it reaches the heads. I would not go down the repair road, find a jdm or do a full rebuild!

 

I will never know why someone would take a chance on spending 1000 for a JDM motor and 2000 to have it installed and know NOTHING about the motor besides saying it’s low miles with no proof.

A JDM motor you can’t hear it running, has no history, no vin number to see maintenance,
No idea what year it is. Most have no compression checks, no history of miles.

Find a motor in a truck that’s running and that you can run a car fax on and know the miles.
There are plenty of trucks that have been hit in the rear or sides with the engines still able to run in the truck.

A JDM motor is as big as a gamble you can take, no shortage of bad reviews on them and a warranty doesn’t cover the Labor to replace it

 

up north there are lots of good running low mile rusted out toyotas for dirt cheap. if you dont mind the corrosion outside the internals are solid.