Hey Dudes,

@infamousRNR and I have another video for you. If you were looking for a tutorial on how to inspect and adjust the valve clearances on your 3.4L V6 5VZ-FE engine, here it is.

This job was quite the pain in the arse but my buddy Wei and I learned a lot in the process. We hope your job will be much smoother by learning from our experience and listening to our suggestions. Good luck and Happy Wrenching!

Math, patience, and the tools to compress the valves without removing the cams it the KEY. I’m sure I posted my Journey on my SR5 Project.

Make sure you put the bolt in the exhaust can if you remove it. If not you will have a valve clatter that will have a valve noise that will Annoy you.


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Well, if you had all 12 exhaust valves out of spec like we did, you might rethink not removing the exhaust cams like we did. Dealing with those valve tools for 12 valves is a serious pain in the butt.

Bucket+shims are never a fun job for sure, but someone has to do it!
Remarkably clean valvetrain too

I’ve done three 3.4’s. It’s not fun and you have to learn the feel and have a good magnet. It’s no different than a JAP motorcycle which I’ve done many of. Pulling the CAMS is no problem as long as you line up the dots correctly to relieve all the spring tension off the cams. If not, one may pull threads out of the head while removing the cam bearing caps.

It’s a personal preference. I bought the tools and it’s not too bad. My first 3.4 (96) there were cam bearing bolts that wouldn’t retorgue. The threads pulled out of the head and never got tight with the torque wrench when I did the timing belt and checked valve lash at 240,000 miles. After that I bought the tools.


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Bless your heart for doing a valve adjustment. My least favorite job, I've done it 4 times.

I understand where you're coming from now. I hope when I check the valve lash on my 2000 pretty soon I don't find too many valves out of spec. i did invest in a complete kit of shims for myself. I want to compress the buckets down once, get the correct shim in and be done with it.

I haven't done it on any of my engines yet. My 2000 has 215k and I'm going to check the clearances soon. The compression check I did on my 2000 did show very good numbers though.

I should have done it on my 98 that I did a valve cover gasket job on recently but I was lazy and didn't do it. My 98 only has 155k on it so it's probably ok.

Some Toyota dealerships will have a 'shim case' in their garage they will let you use. My local Roseville Toyota does so I just show up and buy what I need then they give it back to the mechanics. Even the mechanics there say it's an absolute pain of a job.

Chances are at 155K you're in the clear. The 3VZ-E engine in the 2nd Gen 4Runner was notorious for going out of spec very quickly and was a constant challenge. Another reason why the 22R-E was the superior engine.

Of note my local dealer got me my shims for the next day everytime. 7.95 each.

I draw the engine layout with the valves and write the clearance at each valve. The ones that need adjusted I remove and measure and write it down than do the math and write the correct shim down also.

When I’m done I put the paper in the glove box.

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Edit: the thing to get use too with the tool set is installing the wedge on the edge of the shim bucket and not the shim so you can use a tweaker screwdriver to pop the shim out.

Other than the rebuilt heads I put on the engine I had rebuilt for my 97 SR5 project I’ve only ever had to replace exhaust shims if I remember correctly. For that just line up the dots and remove the cam bearings and roll the exhaust cam out. Make sure you put a valve cover bolt in the service hole to lock the exhaust cam split gear in place first.

If you manage to have intake valves that need reshimmed that 30 dollar tool set with the wedge and compression tool keeps one from going through the deal of pulling the intake cam.

With the fresh heads I had to do it a second time. Fortunately (or not) my one spare cam I used didn’t have the service bolt in it so I rechecked all the valves after the engine got some miles on it because of the valve train noise which I was pretty sure wasn’t from lash adjustment.

Plug the oil drain back holes with rags to prevent anything from getting in them. I learned that the hard way. My feeler gauge jam nut came loose and fell down one of the holes. Another time the darn wedge popped out as I was putting the shim in and it went flying also.


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It sucked. My Mag probe found it. A picture is posted on my build and repair thread.


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All the precautions you mentioned we covered in the video. We actually dropped a shim into one the head black holes and I was able to fish if out with my magnet tool. After that we plugged up all the areas a shim or whatever else could drop into. No way would I pull an intake cam to replace a valve shim because that's way too much work. Pulling the exhaust cam is very easy and worth it if you have lots of valves out of spec like we did.

My buddy Wei made a nice valve lash log people can use. We link it in the video description. There's a worksheet version you could fill out on your computer, a print version that you can print out and fill out by hand and there's also a shim list that provides the list of all 17 shim sizes and their corresponding part numbers. The shim list also lists all the other Toyota vehicles that use the same shim if you wanted to go to a PicknPull yard and harvest a bunch of shims from wrecked vehicles.

Toyota 5vz-fe valve adjustment guide - Google Sheets