Toy Update

Since the last post I hit a deer on the way home from work. It smashed the drivers fender back into the door (again) so I had to fix that (again). And no, the deer didn't survive. Another car hit her before I did. I drug her out of the roadway and put her down for good with 165 gr. through the heart.

Another day, the clutch linkage quit. It's a hydraulic linkage and was out of fluid. The way they route the line is awful; it's got a spot that is actually higher than the reservoir so it's not self-bleeding.

I've been chasing that damned miss in the engine since I got it. I took the intake plenum off several times to work on the injectors, which takes a couple hours by itself. I rechecked the injectors several times, cleaned the fuel rails, replaced the vacuum lines, plug wires, did another leak-down test, monkeyed with the fuel pressure, etc. It did seem that the miss moved from #6 to #1 to #5 when I was working on it. This was determined by pulling plug wires and by looking at the plugs.

The injector wires were in bad shape; the insulation was hard, had cracked, and was missing in some places. So I ordered 6 off eBay. I pulled it apart again last weekend and replaced the connectors and wiring on 4 of the 6 cylinders. I had enough connectors for all 6 but 2 were fine. I also rechecked every injector. I made a point to swap the injectors on the left and right bank.

On restarting it, it wasn't missing but after warming up the miss reoccurred. Before I took it apart the last time the miss was on cylinder #5; now it was on #6. I had swapped the injectors on those two cylinders so I was pretty sure it was the injector. I couldn't probe it with my stethoscope when it was in #5 because the plenum was in the way #6 is accessible. However it sounded like it was firing with the stethoscope.

So I grabbed one of the used injectors I had bought and re-checked that it seemed good. Then I pulled it apart again and put this other injector in, and reassembled everything. It seems to have fixed it - yeah!!!

My best guess that injector was plugging up when it got hot. This problem would probably have taken a seasoned Toyota technician a good while to diagnose correctly and fix, so i don't feel too bad. Out of the 6 original injectors, only one is still in the truck and working. Wish I'd have known that from the start; I'd have just replaced them and been done with it.