Weather is nice, so there's a little bit of delayed maintenance to catch up.
2 weekends ago it was the clutch. The release point was down low in the pedal travel, and felt funny. Pump it and the release point would rise up. I figured it was the rubber seal on the clutch fork forcing the slave cylinder more open than it needed to be. Plus the clutch would shudder and squeal occasionally. At 213K miles, it was probably due.
1" body lift makes this a bit easier than it would be otherwise. Only thing of note when taking it apart was that it really looked like the trans had been out before. I had assumed it still was on the original clutch when I bought it at 155K miles. But there was *LOTS* of loctite/thread locker on the flywheel bolts. Really gooped up with some sort of tan stuff. Nothing the factory would have done, so much that it was oozed out around the bolt heads as well.
Had the flywheel resurfaced, slapped it all back together with the Marlin Crawler 1200# clutch kit, kudos to the nice cheap Harbor Fright trans jack for making it pretty easy to slip the trans back into place. Truck drives great, clutch action is normal again, pedal feel is still pretty much the same weight, not heavier as I was expecting.
Yesterday's task: The valve covers. At about 180 - 185K miles they had started leaking badly, but all I did at that point was *gently* retighten all the accessible valve cover bolts. This reduced the oil leakage to a bare minimum and it's been fine for ~30K miles since. But they've started to ooze again, you get the occasional 'hot oil' smell, time to just take care of it. My awesome wife had done this task on her '96 last fall, and ordered two sets of all the gaskets, so it was just a matter of getting it done.
Intake, TB, upper and lower plenums came off, and got the passenger side VC done. Replaced the rubber rimmed steel plug on the back side, took those two half-moon plus out, cleaned, resealed them, replaced the 3 spark plug tube seals (those were absolutely brittle and cracked immediately), new gasket and 8 rubber bolt washers.
Then, it seems like we were two short on the sparkplug tube seals. Misplaced in the months since she did hers? Progress stopped until the local Toyota dealer can get us a few more parts. She also noted that the date code on the sparkplug wires was 2003, probably not a bad idea to replace those while they're out.
2 weekends ago it was the clutch. The release point was down low in the pedal travel, and felt funny. Pump it and the release point would rise up. I figured it was the rubber seal on the clutch fork forcing the slave cylinder more open than it needed to be. Plus the clutch would shudder and squeal occasionally. At 213K miles, it was probably due.
1" body lift makes this a bit easier than it would be otherwise. Only thing of note when taking it apart was that it really looked like the trans had been out before. I had assumed it still was on the original clutch when I bought it at 155K miles. But there was *LOTS* of loctite/thread locker on the flywheel bolts. Really gooped up with some sort of tan stuff. Nothing the factory would have done, so much that it was oozed out around the bolt heads as well.
Had the flywheel resurfaced, slapped it all back together with the Marlin Crawler 1200# clutch kit, kudos to the nice cheap Harbor Fright trans jack for making it pretty easy to slip the trans back into place. Truck drives great, clutch action is normal again, pedal feel is still pretty much the same weight, not heavier as I was expecting.
Yesterday's task: The valve covers. At about 180 - 185K miles they had started leaking badly, but all I did at that point was *gently* retighten all the accessible valve cover bolts. This reduced the oil leakage to a bare minimum and it's been fine for ~30K miles since. But they've started to ooze again, you get the occasional 'hot oil' smell, time to just take care of it. My awesome wife had done this task on her '96 last fall, and ordered two sets of all the gaskets, so it was just a matter of getting it done.
Intake, TB, upper and lower plenums came off, and got the passenger side VC done. Replaced the rubber rimmed steel plug on the back side, took those two half-moon plus out, cleaned, resealed them, replaced the 3 spark plug tube seals (those were absolutely brittle and cracked immediately), new gasket and 8 rubber bolt washers.
Then, it seems like we were two short on the sparkplug tube seals. Misplaced in the months since she did hers? Progress stopped until the local Toyota dealer can get us a few more parts. She also noted that the date code on the sparkplug wires was 2003, probably not a bad idea to replace those while they're out.
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