MR2 SC engine rebuild chronicles: the teardown

"MR2_FTW - Group J's resident Stig" (MR2_FTW) 04/24/2014 at 23:43 • Filed to: builds, toyota, mr2, supercharged, engine, rebuild

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So as some of you know, my 88 MR2 Supercharged was having blown head gasket symptoms last week, after only 3 years on a new head gasket. So I dropped the motor and I'm going a full teardown/rebuild on this 215k-ish motor.

Here's where I stopped last night. Motor and trans out of the car, engine on the stand.

Let me tell you how much fun that wasn't. I'd really like to never have to drop the motor on this thing again. Basically, I dropped the engine and transaxle as one piece onto a tire that was on a furniture dolly. I then used the engine hoist to lift the back of the car up and rolled the drivetrain out from under the car.

Today I started the engine teardown. The following is copied from my build thread

New TRD 0.8mm metal head gasket came in today. This will give me a slight bump in compression ratio as well as durability.

Tonight's progress tearing down the motor. Started by removing the SC, so I could remove the intake manifold, so I could get the fuel rail off, so I could remove the wiring harness.

After that it was just a matter of unbolting the exhaust, alternator, all the bracketry, timing belt, and water pump

Then came the valve covers, cams, lifter buckets, and eventually the head (all placed neatly in order)

Which left the block

ARP studs came out and were kept matched with the same nuts and washers in the same order just for OCD's sake.Then the oil pan, oil pickup, windage tray, timing gear, and oil pump all came out to leave just the shortblock

This weekend I hope to have everything fully disassembled, bagged, tagged, and ready to take to the machine shop next week.

Satoshi "Zipang" Katsura > MR2_FTW - Group J's resident Stig 04/25/2014 at 01:31

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Ah, buckets. Coupled with shims - OH GOD NO.

MR2_FTW - Group J's resident Stig > Satoshi "Zipang" Katsura 04/25/2014 at 08:17

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Better than hydraulic lifters in terms of coping with high RPM's. Remember, these engines revved to 7,500 rpm starting in like 1983. The upsides of having the shims on top of the buckets is, given the proper tools, you can swap them out to adjust valve clearance without removing the cams. Downside is that if you want to build a motor that revs over 9k rpm, they could become dislodged with extremely aggressive cam profiles. The few people who have that extreme of a build usually do a conversion.

BrianNutter > MR2_FTW - Group J's resident Stig 04/25/2014 at 10:41

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need forged pistons?

MR2_FTW - Group J's resident Stig > BrianNutter 04/25/2014 at 11:10

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GZE pistons are forged and ceramic coated from the factory, and the stock rods are good for well beyond factory power levels. It really is a great motor, which is why the guys that run turbo AE86's try and find the bottom end from one of these. They are off the shelf boost-ready.

unpredictable_swerve > MR2_FTW - Group J's resident Stig 04/25/2014 at 14:31

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Love it! Hopefully this one lasts a bit longer.