That reminds me of an old '84 Nissan/Datsun pickup I had. It was a 2wd, 2.4L 4cyl 5spd that I bought for $50 with a bad engine. I picked up a used engine for $200 that had been in a truck that burned and swapped it in with only a few dollars in gaskets. I drove that truck daily for a year or two, always shifting first and second gear past the redline. Often I would take that truck out in the country, get it going as fast as I could in reverse, push in the clutch, rev it up to redline, jam it in first, and dump the clutch leaving some real black 'J' hook black marks. That poor truck would also get jumped, drifted around corners, and pretty much beat hard every day.
One day I was driving to work and I hit a small wooden crate on the interstate. I didn't think anything about it at the time. Three days and about 250 miles later, I was on the interstate again and suddenly the engine started knocking. Shortly after, the engine seized. I pushed in the clutch and coasted it off an exit into a restaurant parking lot. I took a look under the truck and there was a large hole ripped in the oil pan from the wooden crate. It seems that when I changed the engine, the clip on the wire to the oil pressure sending unit had loosened up and at some point it fell off. The sending unit would connect that wire to ground when the oil pressure dropped so since it wasn't hooked up, it was never grounded when all of the oil had drained. I had no idea I had been driving for three days, shifting 1st and 2nd gear at redline, with zero oil. It just goes to show, it wasn't just the Toyotas built in the '80s that were tougher than nails.