1UZ into my Off-Road Long Travel Tacoma

[Smitherz]

Engine mounts done:


Checking out my options for the exhaust:

 

[Smitherz]

Painted the rest of the engine compartment and other stuff:


Fitted the hydraulic throwout bearing:

 

[Smitherz]

Buttoned up the steering shaft:


Pilot bearing is the bearing that came from my 3RZ, what a coincidence :cool2:


Finished modifications to one of the headers:


Tomorrow I'll finish modding the other one, won't take me half an hour. Then it's time to move on to the shimming and adjusting hydraulic throwout bearing.

 

[Jay351]

Great progress!!! I wish sombody in NA would start pumpin out swap bellhousings!!!

 

[Smitherz]

It's a lot of work my man. I promised myself I would lock up the keys to my motorcycle and not let myself go off and ride it until my truck was done! I have been working on this every single day no matter how crappy I felt. Must finish!

 

[Smitherz]

And on with the show!

I had to get up early so that I could make sure to finish some work by noon. Then another half day worth of exhaust fab, crossmember creating and and stressful tig welding. I'm pretty tired. Nothing like doing some metal work and then taking the engine in and out of a truck in the middle of it all. We are insane for doing such things and calling it fun. I'm going to skip the X pipe altogether and just run the exhaust back another 2ft to a muffler on each side. I have a very strong feeling that I'll be lengthening the exhaust once I change the cab supports in the near future. I don't even want to spend the time right now if I'm just going to change things later on. I swear I'm not getting lazy.

 

[Jay351]

Those headers look great!

 

[Smitherz]

I had all sorts of fun today!! :la: Here is what I got done:


:06: A shiny quarter to anyone who can tell us what I cut the bellhousing with! :06:

 

[Smitherz]

Cutting it straight is the hard part. Then once that was done I could slap the parts on my vertical mill and do anything I wanted to 'em. I'm so glad to have all that out of the way! It was a miserable morning thinking about how to cut that sucker and actually have to do it.

Life is good.

 

[Smitherz]

Yesterday I finished up the milling of the housing and I acid washed the whole thing down to get down to the pure aluminum castings. There will be no question of accuracy on this when it goes back together. My cutters went dull and I had to go grab a roughing endmill which ended up going faster anyhow since I could really go deep with one of those = less passes to get the stock removed.



Making more progress. My new modded bellhousing is looking very very strong with the welding we've been doing on it. The water cooling line in the Miller got punctured so we couldn't hold onto the torch anymore. Tomorrow we'll get a new line and finish it up on the inside and around the outside. I did a few tack welds and installed it on the engine/trans just to check the pilot bearing clearance and it is RIGHT on. I measured enough times so I expected it!

Making the Magic happen:


It's pretty fun using all these tools I've been collecting as well as my friends welders. As long as I'm not on some production line! It get's old once you do it for the 3rd time. It's going to be hard to sleep tonight. I will be making some major progress this weekend now that this will be all done. :drillsergeant:

 

[Smitherz]

Kinda bummed the welding didn't go down today. I would love to be able to fire this thing up by next weekend since a friend of mine is visiting from out of the area. Oh well, I brought my spirits up a little by doing some unboxing of parts I've been saving to use. I dreamt up some good ideas today. :scratchchin: Here's my wideband components. These better work Lex! It's time to drag out all this stuff and do some planning/homework.



And some gauges I've had from my RX-7 turbo II rotary days. Ahh I miss that speed demon. I had to buy the more expensive tach because I had a race engine at one point that would rip to 9300rpm before the power would drop off. Gotta love putting the premix in the fuel tank while you fuel up at the gas station!


A good friend of mine suggested using a GPS unit in front of me for it's speed function. That would be nice to find a smaller unit just for that as well as a GPS unit of course. I use a laptop usually or a GPS unit that I can take from vehicle to vehicle but that dumb thing doesn't have the MPH feature! So I need to find a better one for my dash. Good thing they have dropped so much in price. And with my tires being bigger the speed has never been accurate anyhow. A GPS display would take care of this.

The brains of the operation:

 

[Smitherz]

The work has been slow but steady. I don't recommend going this route to anyone thinking of using this engine and transmission combo. It was much more work than would have been needed for building a steel bellhousing.

 

[Smitherz]

I never thought it would take so long to get the power steering line made. I actually dropped it off to have lengthened at a local shop in town but the bums sat on it for 4 days so I went in and picked it up. Then I searched high and low for anyone willing to do it within a half hour of here. Nothin. The local shops even badmouthed a business that was an hour away saying, "Oh no they can't do that either. I don't know how you're going to get that done.". What a bunch of crap!

So I drove to Santa Maria and went to pay a visit to American Hose. The owner Jim was very nice and after looking at it for 10 seconds said he would do it right there for $50. No problem! He even took me back and basically taught me how to do it. He can make any hydro or fuel or whatever line you would ever need. Very nice people! No messing around either. It took him less than 30 minutes from start to finish. =]

And the other local company held onto it for days acting like it was some huge deal! I was expecting to pay way too much as they were making a big deal of it. :rant:

The end result was even better than I expected. If the line is punctured for any reason I can just use a standard high pressure hose to repair it. I can't wait to hook things up tomorrow, finally.

 

[Smitherz]

Nothing like some coffee and some Sawzall action in the morning.



Everything is connecting up nicely (with a lot of work of course).

 

[Smitherz]

Spark plug wires like spaghetti.


Cleaning up those ignitors like new. Mainly for corrosion resistance since they won't be seen.

 

[Smitherz]

Here is something kinda funny. I bought a idler from a 2UZ Tundra that bolted right on but the plastic timing belt covers didn't want to seat correctly on top of it. So I went through my spare engine and parts and to my surprise I found a idler that fit perfectly in place of the stock hydraulic pump. Did they make an LS400 or SC400 with a different configuration that comes with this idler? Or are there a couple different sizes of them that were for the 2UZ? Weird!

5020 one on the left was the 2UZ one I bought. The one on the right is the one that came with my extra engine that I bought. It's out of an LS as far as Carfax is concerned.


Here you can see a slight difference in the width of the edges in which the plastic cover fits in. The one that is more narrow (the top one) is the correct width for the 1UZ-FE timing belt cover compatibility.

 

[Jay351]

Awsume! Lookin fantastic, great job.

 

[Smitherz]

Thanks Jay. It's fun to do things right the way I want to on something I'll keep forever. No way I would do all this for someone else unless they really want to pay! haha.

So the saga continues...

Been making some decent progress although I did get sidetracked with motorcycles the last couple of days. The weather is too nice. 8)

Injector and other wiring is the easy part... connecting the dots:


Today I just about finished routing the wires. I'll be splicing the connections into the Adaptronic tomorrow morning. I spent a couple hours today tracing all my info on Lexus wiring. I have a final diagram I drafted up of exactly what to connect - which stock wiring colors to which exact connector wire for the Adaptronic harness. So tomorrow I'll be cleaning the wiring up. Then I'll be connecting the coolant line from the rear water bridge to the ISCV and then to the waterneck. I tapped and blocked off the rear right water bridge water line that would go to the throttle body and also up to the ISCV.

Things are looking good I'm just making sure everything will be tight and ready to run. I don't want to rig anything... it all has to be tight the first time. I want to drive this sucker out of the garage and not have to mess with it for a while.

 

[Smitherz]

The wiring is looking pretty clean now. I'm almost done with the spaghetti incident (G&R of course). The coolant TB and ISC lines were all blocked off as well.

 

[Jay351]

Getting closer!!! Im jelous, I wish my engine bay looked like that..