Originally Posted by civicdrivr
(Post 1471592)
Yes, the motor blew with about 33k on it. And yes, it did have coolant issues in the past, which I thought were behind me. I guess I'll post the story:
I noticed the car losing coolant since new. Around 19k miles, I noticed that the coolant loss accelerated and I had white/light gray smoke from the exhaust above ~4k miles. Queue dealer trip #1. They did a compression test and scoped the cylinders. The #3 cylinder was down compared to the others, but not "enough". There was coolant residue visible in the cylinder as well. Toyota requested that I monitor the coolant levels.
Dealer trip #2: About 3k miles later it was low again. They topped it off and told me to keep looking at it.
Dealer trip #3: At ~26k miles, while on the highway, the car started knocking and misfiring. I brought it to Toyota and they said that the valves on the #3 cylinder were bent (none of the others though) and the paperwork said "something in the valvetrain came apart". They replaced the cylinder head and sent me on my way.
From then on, the car ran fine. I still noticed some coolant loss, but chalked it up to evaporation. At 33k miles, that's when the fun stuff happened.
I had installed a wastegated Vortech kit along with a new fuel pump and injectors and had it on the dyno for live tuning by Visconti. We had the standard 9psi pulley on for initial tuning. At 5psi, it made ~250ish whp. At 9psi, it was consistently making 280-285whp. Earlier that day, prior to putting the kit on, the car put down 171whp, in line with other mostly stock twins that have run on that dyno.
On the 9th run, it put down 286/216 at the wheels. Then the oil volcano happened. The rod snapped about an inch below the wrist pin, spun around and punched a t shaped hole in the block. The cause? No idea. The logs from the run showed zero detonation, AFR was dead on (factory O2, so there's that...), there was no knocking, and it did not overboost (IIRC, the logs showed 9.4psi). I must also mention that I kept the stock rev limit as I saw no need to rev higher.
I have some pics of the carnage that I can post when I'm not on the work laptop. But yea, that was my experience with this motor.
Also, not that this matters anymore, but Visconti picked up the tab of the motor and the labor, and drove me 4hrs back home that night (then turned around and drove all the way back to CT), so lets not use my experience to disparage him - there are plenty of others that can easily accomplish that.
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