well I've had the top and bottom of the engine off, and solved a problem with the heads too. Not a lot left really. (but don't want to jinx my bearings and lifters)
Speaking of that I also ran a quart of Gunk engine flush at idle about 2x as long as recommended and it does indeed seemed to have alleviated my startup lifter noise, same as it did for our Tahoe. I do however still have a slight leak at the oil cooler attachment point / plate, right above the oil filter. It was really crudded up in that area, should have been a tipoff. I cleaned it up real good and utterly failed to do anything about it while I had the pan off. So sometime next week I'm going to have to crawl under there, remove the plate, clean it all off and slather it with black RTV and bolt it back up to cure. And I'm getting some oil seemingly from my starter bolts or above them. Going to have to track that down too.
That said, I certainly seemed to have stopped the rain from the oil pan gasket.
But most of my Sub leaks seemed to spawn when I inadvertantly did an oil change with synthetic. Leaks sprouted in several places. But too, seeing the amount of varnish and crud in my engine, it really seemed to be driven hard and not had sufficient oil changes. I'm not going to try and correct it at this late date by using a higher detergent oil. Happy enough to see no other signs of extreme wear. My hope is to finish this 'tune up' work and the (re-)lift and the electrical upgrades and finally really get this show on the road.
I'm right now in the middle of a bit of paid work for a neighbor, changing the timing belt on his '03 Tundra 4.7L DOHC. Going slow, first time handling this motor, finding lots of new and exciting ways to mash my knuckles. Bought a Haynes manual, bought the full replacement kit, did some googling and watched some YouTube vids and dove right in. I've done timing chains on GM engines many times. Been 20yrs+ since I did a chain on a Toyota 22R engine. This isn't that different, but I'm diving right in on a belt on a DOHC on an interference-design engine. A little nervous / cautious.
The neighbor had talked to someone else and got real nervous. He bought it used, hasn't done much if any maintenance on it, learned the timing belt interval was 80k mi and he's clocking around 140k and pretty much parked it. So first thing I did was warm it up, made sure it runs and then pulled the plugs - also original and with very worn electrodes - AND hard to turn out of the aluminum head with a lot of carbon on their exposed ends, lot of penetrating oil down the tubes and turning plugs in both directions to break the crud loose and limit the galling - and did a compression check just to make sure it wasn't already damaged. Everything was within 5psi of 180, good enough. Hope to finish it up tomorrow, taking pics. Maybe I'll start / add to a topic for the Toyota guys. But 'Hey 2UZ-FE Guys!' doesn't have the same ring to it.
