Adventures in 4Runner'ing

[ToyodaTocco]

WOHOO! Next up... change diff fluid and find some bolts of the right size for the skid plate.

How far in the future do you think I have until I'll be due for an engine rebuild?

Hard to say. I would put it on the list of things to keep checking and when it fails, I would put the plan in motion.

 

[DaveInDenver]

My Toyota factory service manual says the lower limit is 142PSI and the between cylinder max limit is 14PSI. It looks like my engine squeaks by.

The book numbers are at sea level and at probably some baseline temperature. The altitude adjustment for Denver is ~0.8617, so the low side of the range of acceptable is 123 psi. Mine runs ~130 psi since I didn't lower the deck height from stock to compensate for the Engnbldr head and cam. That's part of the reason I struggle for power. This is with about 100,000 on the engine.

 

[DouglasVB]

The book numbers are at sea level and at probably some baseline temperature. The altitude adjustment for Denver is ~0.8617, so the low side of the range of acceptable is 123 psi.

Even better!

I just got the parts and fluid to replace the leaking backup light sensor and diff fluid. Also I tracked more bolts down for the skid plate, etc. After dinner, I'll do all of that. Maybe I'll get ambitious and put in some breather hoses while I'm at it.

 

[Squishy!]

Good work! And Bill, The IFS makes pulling the oil pan a PITA...

When its time to rebuild your engine will start too tell you. You'll notice hints when it's getting weaker or noisier.

There is a lot of torque calibrated hands in the club and you'll learn quickly as you do more maintenance and mods on your truck. I'm excited to see your truck develop.

I too have lots of tools and if I'm not in the garage Shotshell probably is. Feel free to ask

 

[DouglasVB]

I'm excited to see your truck develop.

My poor truck. It has no idea what I have in store for it

I finished the transmission and differential fluid changes, replaced the backup light switch, and got a total of three bolts into the skid plate. The fourth bolt (lower passenger side bolt) is probably not going to go back on anytime soon. The blind nut in the IFS frame member (whatever it's called) popped off the weld and is floating around somewhere deep inside that member. There aren't any big enough access holes to get a bolt in from the top or side and have a nut from the bottom. Three bolts is way better than one and a half though so I'll count it as a win.

When I got to trying to do the diff breather mod, I discovered that the fittings I have in the bottom of my toolbox are the right thread and diameter but don't have enough of the pipe thread-style taper. Tonight after work I'll see about going down to Meyer Hardware and search for appropriate fittings. My plan is to get little aftermarket air filters from the friendly neighborhood chain autoparts store to attach to the other end of the rubber hoses that I'll use (also from the parts store). I'll put the front air filter somewhere high in the back of the engine bay and the rear air filter either in the fuel filler area or maybe behind one of the tail lights.

Also on the to-do list for tonight is to add another cigarette plug/aux plug outlet and a dual USB plug outlet. Both are from Blue Sea Systems. The wiring is already in place (I did that a few weeks ago) but it took a little time for me to find the correct hole saws to cut into my beautiful virgin plastic. My plan is to put both in the rear of the center armrest. The one holdup will be my soldering iron situation. My good soldering iron with adjustable temperature and separate base station suddenly stopped working recently and I haven't had time to dissect it to look for the fault. I have a couple crappy hand-held soldering irons that I'll have to deal with. I prefer to solder my wires rather than use butt splices. I also both crimp and solder the end connections. Yeah, I'm strange. This is why mechanical engineers shouldn't be allowed to touch electrical things.

If I'm REALLY motivated, I might go down to HRO or the Denver Radio Shack to pick up a 102" steel whip and a couple mounting brackets so I can get my 10m radio setup installed and do a temp mount for both the 10m antenna and the CB antenna for the upcoming trip to California. Maybe I'll do a temp mount for my external 2m antenna, too... Once the front bumper comes, two of my three antennas will go up on the bumper and I think the VHF will probably go on a to-be-designed-and-built baby roof rack that will mount only on the solid metal portion of the cab. I need a place for some sweet old school round off road lights with the smiley face covers after all Also I'm thinking of eventually running some brush guard wires from the front bumper up to the future roof rack although I haven't done enough research to see how much trouble that will give me with my front bumper antenna farm... Probably with a ground strap to each wire, it will act as an extension of the ground plane of the truck. Probably...

Oh yeah, first thing is to rotate tires front to rear to see if that solves my 50MPH+ vibration problems. Fingers crossed!

 

[DaveInDenver]

I broke off those captured nuts in a cross member, too. If memory serves you can run a long bolt all the way through the cross member and add a nut at the top (I have since replaced the cross member). I think the bolts are M8x1.25 (stock are 25mm long I think) and most good hardware stores will have something (I know A&A Trading Post did). If not, AAA Metric downtown will have it.

Diff breathers. Meh. I had them for a while and I'm not sure they are better. They solve one problem but create another since there's more tubing and fittings to clog. I've never had that much trouble with water intrusion in my diffs except actually when I had extended breathers and there was a hole in one of the tubes. When you take out the stock breathers you take out the one-way flap that prevent the pressure differential that happens when a hot diff is dunked in cold water. If you have a leak where the tube had abraded and started to split just above the hose clamp, well, having extensions to the roof wouldn't have made one bit of difference...

I soak the breathers in brake fluid whenever I'm doing a fluid change and since I just use standard issue Castrol Hypoy I can afford to do it often. I find in particular the front diff fluid just needs to be changed periodically since the fluid tends to collection condensation and dirt from lack of use.

But for extensions, you can use the closest brass fine national pipe pitch from the hardware store and just force it to rethread (ONLY use brass!) or you can pull the caps off the stock breathers and clamp to the stub that remains. All there is under there is a spring and rubber flapper, they're not complex.

I used fuel filters from a VW Beetle. They look like this:

Snap off the nipple from one side (I used the left in the photo so the filter cone collected dust on the 'outside', so to speak) and slightly increase the hole and you're done. They're like $2 from Autozone.

 

[DouglasVB]

I broke off those captured nuts in a cross member, too. If memory serves you can run a long bolt all the way through the cross member and add a nut at the time (I have since replaced the cross member). I think the bolts are 10x1.25 and most good hardware stores will have something (I know A&A Trading Post did). If not, AAA Metric downtown will have it.

I grabbed some 10x1.25 bolts for the holes where I could access easily from the top (with a big enough top hole for the bolt head to pass through) or that still had a nut inside. But they aren't long enough to go all the way through the cross member. I'll have to run down to the hardware store in Golden (they have a surprisingly good selection for being a small semi-independent hardware store) after work to grab a long enough bolt.

Diff breathers. Meh. I had them for a while and I'm not sure they are better. They solve one problem but create another since there's more tubing and fittings to clog. I've never had that much trouble with water intrusion in my diffs. I soak the breathers in brake fluid whenever I'm doing a fluid change and since I just use standard issue Castrol Hypoy I can afford to do it often. I find in particular the front diff fluid just needs to be changed periodically since the fluid tends to collection condensation and dirt from lack of use.

You can use the closest brass fine pitch from the hardware store and just force it to rethread (ONLY use brass!) or you can pull the caps off the stock breathers. All there is under there is a spring, they're not complex.

That means you need to use your 4x4 more

I read on 4crawler about his diff breather tube problems and solutions. It seems like if the line doesn't have any dips in it, then it'll be fine but if there are any dips, then fluid collects and clogs the line, and you end up pushing out fluid when the diff is hot. Maybe I'll throw on some quick disconnects or something similar to make it easy to switch between a shorty diff breather and a long diff breather. Ehhh who am I kidding... I'd probably never actually plug in the long diff breather on the trail. Who wants to get down in the mud at every creek crossing? Now if I could just flip the truck upside down (intentionally), then I wouldn't have to crawl in the mud.

I used fuel filters from a VW Beetle. They look like this:

Snap off the top (right side in this photo) nipple and slightly increase the hole and you're done. They're like $2 from Autozone.

Yup, something like that is what I'm planning on.

 

[DaveInDenver]

That means you need to use your 4x4 more

I'm about as diligent as anyone about it, but there can be weeks where I forget to lock the hubs in the winter (maybe not lately, we're thankfully getting more snow it seems). That's when it happens, it's not in the summer but our winter temps tend to swing enough that condensation forms. You need to drive around with the hubs locked (just 2WD) to warm up the gear lube to evaporate it off. I also had an ARB Air Locker at the time and my seals in those would leak a little and pressurize the housing. That made them clog more than an open diff would, too. In the grand scheme I just found them more work than useful, so I just run the caps and in 17 years of driving around Toyotas I've only ever had problems that one time and that was ironically when I tried to fix a 'problem'. YMMV.

 

[DouglasVB]

I'm about as diligent as anyone about it, but there can be weeks where I forget to lock the hubs in the winter. I also had an ARB Air Locker at the time and my seals in those would leak a little and pressurize the housing. That made them clog more than an open diff would, too. In the grand scheme I just found them more work than useful, so I just run the caps and in 17 years of driving around Toyotas I've only ever had problems that one time and that was ironically when I tried to fix a 'problem'. YMMV.

Haha it always works that way.

I bet some clever engineer has already devised this or should... A little pressure chamber that screws into the cap fitting port with a sensitive valve tucked away somewhere protected... The extra volume in the chamber could keep the diff happy when it sucks in air when it gets cold. The magical valve on the top would keep the diff from sucking in water. Hmm... I'd need to run a few calcs to see how big of a chamber I'd need but I'm guessing probably the size of a normal Gatoraide bottle (like 32 oz?). That magical valve would have to be pretty sensitive, too, but I don't think it's insurmountable. If the pressure chamber were made out of metal with a bunch of cooling fins, that might help things along too. Hmm...

 

[DaveInDenver]

There are systems like in the HMMWV that have a very slight positive differential pressurization instead of atmospheric pressure breathers. This is actually how the stock breathers work, they hold just a slight positive pressure with the spring so that water is not forced in but prevents too much pressure that fluid is pushed past the seals. The stock system works just fine as long as you don't let the breathers get full of crap. The reason the military uses something more complex is that they might let their axles be immersed for long periods where everything reaches equilibrium, thus relying on positive pressure just from temperature might not work.

 

[DouglasVB]

There are systems like in the HMMWV that have a very slight positive differential pressurization instead of atmospheric pressure breathers. This is actually how the stock breathers work, they hold just a slight positive pressure with the spring so that water is not forced in but prevents too much pressure that fluid is pushed past the seals. The stock system works just fine as long as you don't let the breathers get full of crap. The reason the military uses something more complex is that they might let their axles be immersed for long periods where everything reaches equilibrium, thus relying on positive pressure just from temperature might not work.

After looking at my diff breather caps last night, I have to say that they don't look too great. Lots of crap on them and whatnot. And the rubber caps (I think they're rubber?) are pretty cracked. Maybe some replacement caps are in order if I don't go with the extended breather tubes?

Didn't get to doing any work on the truck tonight. Tomorrow I'll get the tires rotated. Countdown to California is on!

 

[DaveInDenver]

Probably 6 of one, half dozen of the other. They're just differential breathers.

 

[DouglasVB]

I rotated the tires front-to-rear today and put the pressure at 34PSI (rating is 35PSI max). I also installed a dual USB power port and an auxiliary port in the rear of the center console. Testing the truck out tonight, I had NO vibrations at speeds up to 62 MPH. I'll get on a section of freeway tomorrow where I can go faster but it looks like the vibration problem must have been related to the front tires. Maybe one is a little out of balance. I don't notice any skipping on the rear wheels so I think it's good for now.

I also picked up parts to do a diff breather extension at some point. Oh, and a long bolt for the one missing nut on the lower crossmember mounting point for the skid plate. I'll get that bolt on the skid plate tomorrow.

Hopefully tomorrow I can get out to grab an antenna bracket to temporarily mount the CB antenna to the stock front bumper. The new tube bumper won't arrive until after the 4th of July. If I'm taking this truck out to California this weekend, I want to have the CB to listen to truckers on the long drive.

 

[DouglasVB]

Starter problems and a hot stick

I made it to California without major incident! The truck ran great aside from one "minor" problem. Also I have a question on one other thing.

After driving from Denver out to Thompson, UT for my first gas stop, the starter was "lackadaisical." Rather than the normal quick turnover and start, the starter sounded like when the batter is running low. I watched my voltmeter that I installed in the dash a while back and it showed 14.8V just idling and stayed steady driving down the highway. I thought maybe my battery had lost charge running headlights and the CB radio over the pass so I turned all of that off just in case.

My next stop was in St. George, UT. I rolled into an AutoZone to get the battery tested. The battery was good and strong. This time, the truck would barely turn over and wouldn't fire with just the clutch pressed in. When I used the clutch start switch (the thing on the dash to the lower left of the steering wheel), the starter turned over a little faster and the engine fired up. I drove across the street to a gas station, filled up, used the same procedure, and was back on the road. One thing I noticed was that the light in that clutch start switch stayed on after the truck was running. Is that normal?

At this point in St. George, it was 112F. The whole run from Thompson to St George I averaged about 60 MPH with long stretches of 70-75MPH cruising and some stretches of 45-50MPH crawling up steep grades. I wasn't using AC yet at this point.

Heading south on I-15, I finally broke down and used AC after going through the canyon on the Virgin River when the temperature hit 120F. The steering wheel started burning my hands and the shift knob was so scorching hot that I had to use a bandanna to touch it.

My next stop was in Barstow, CA. I used the AC judiciously across the desert, watching the temp gauge (never went above the middle point) and the incline of the road. As soon as the road started going up, I turned off the AC and fan, and used the wing vents and sweated it out. In Barstow, I found a gas station with a slope at one end and filled up. This time, the truck wouldn't start on its own. The starter barely was turning the engine. I got the truck rolling at about 5mph, cranked the starter as much as I could, and feathered the clutch in. The truck started right up and away I went. (Note that I turned off all possible electrical loads in the truck doing this)

My final stop before reaching my final destination last night was outside Fresno before heading up the grade to Shaver Lake. Luckily the gas station had a good size hill at the one end. This time I got maybe one crank out of the starter and then nothing. The outside temperature was about 85F (cool weather!). I rolled it down the hill, put it in gear, and it fired right up no problem.

I drove up into the mountains to my parents' mountain hideaway and parked for the night on a good slope in case I needed to roll start it again.

This morning, after the truck had sat and cooled off in the mountain air for about nine hours overnight, I went out, jumped in, and the truck fired right up. The starter was good and strong with no problems.

So... what could the problem be? Can the starter get heat soaked (this is a replacement starter. I didn't know about being able to repair a starter before I replaced it last month)? Is there some other part inside that might get heat soaked? What can I do to prevent having to roll start it on the way back to Colorado in two weeks? Heather will be joining me for the return voyage and I'd rather not have to push the truck everywhere



The other question I had is about the transmission and transfer case. Both sticks got extremely hot. The transfer case was noticeably hotter than the transmission. I could only touch the transfer case stick for about three seconds before it got too hot.

Is that normal or should I be concerned or??? There isn't any evidence of fluid loss. I just changed the fluid with recommended weights of oil for the entire drivetrain.

One way or another, I'm in California, the softopper is stowed for the next two weeks, and life is good!

 

[DaveInDenver]

Yes, clutch defeat light stays lit until the next time you turn off the key.

Your starter needs replaced. It's possible replacing the contacts would help but my guess is the bearings or motor winds are swelling with the heat and the motor isn't turning fast enough. I've personally just removed and replaced the whole start with a Toyota rebuild whenever it starts acting up. Cheap insurance. They're like $125 or something.

My transmission and t-case sticks don't get that hot. What gear oil did you use?

 

[DouglasVB]

Yes, clutch defeat light stays lit until the next time you turn off the key.

Your starter needs replaced. It's possible replacing the contacts would help but my guess is the bearings or motor winds are swelling with the heat and the motor isn't turning fast enough. I've personally just removed and replaced the whole start with a Toyota rebuild whenever it starts acting up. Cheap insurance. They're like $125 or something.

Hmm okay. The last one was from O'Reilly. I think it has a year warranty but all of that paperwork is back in Colorado I think. Down in Fresno the Toyota dealership should have a remanufactured genuine Toyota starter.

I'm really not looking forward to replacing it. My hands are too big for the space, even with the wheel off. Oh well.

 

[DaveInDenver]

Oh, so you did replace it? Hmmm, that makes me less dubious of it. Although a bad rebuild is possible (and I'm not sure what you get at the parts store doesn't come from the same places as Toyota anyway).

 

[DouglasVB]

Oh, so you did replace it? Hmmm, that makes me less dubious of it. Although a bad rebuild is possible (and I'm not sure what you get at the parts store doesn't come from the same places as Toyota anyway).

Yup I replaced it with a remanufactured unit in the middle of May. The unit itself looked slightly physically different although everything lined up just fine.

It's worked fine up until yesterday although I did have a little trouble using the start clutch cancel switch when in 1st low trying to crawl-start the truck up a hill once. I think probably operator error was to blame for that.

If the starter still wasn't working this morning, then it would be easy to diagnose following Roger Brown's instructions. http://www.4crawler.com/4x4/CheapTricks/Starter.shtml But since it's working well, I don't know what I could actually test. I would have done the test yesterday, but with temps over 100F and my tools buried in the back, I didn't feel like trying to get into the starter area and jumper around all of the truck wiring to the solenoid. I was too hot and the sun was too bright.

 

[DouglasVB]

Any thoughts about the hot transfer case stick?

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

 

[DaveInDenver]

Any thoughts about the hot transfer case stick?

If it shifts fine, doesn't pop out of gear and you changed the fluid, I wouldn't worry too much. I just use Castrol Hypoy-C.