Banjo

Hey guys, it's Sunday morning, 9:45am and I'm in a spot of bother. Background: Best mate ! (wife) blew the head gasket in my KE55 coupe during the week. Thermostat jammed closed (Oh I hate those troublesome things) and she didn't notice the temperature guage climb into red area. (have you ever met a girl that drives & looks at the guages at the same time ) Picked me up from doctors & said the brake are making a funny smell. Lift bonnet. Smoke coming out between head & block. Ohhhh ! Tow car home, lock wife in broom cupboard as punishment, & remove head yesterday. Strip down & clean & get ready to take off the local engine recond. factory next week for valve faces, grind & head skim etc, (as you do after such an occurence) Drop one split collet on driveway (gravel) and after two hours on hands and knees looking like a Ben Landin devotee', give up. Gret Idea !!! I've got a donor 4k engine in back of garage, that came out of my first KE55 coupe, whose shell went to Toyota Heaven, after developing cancer. (I kept it's heart & soul) Oh. and I remembered I had overhauled head not long before it was taken off road, so should be in good nick. Off with head, clean up, (with that great $1.99 spray degreaser you get in SuperPro) and on with head last night, new gaskets, torqued everything OK. This morning, all I have to do is fit rocker gear, adjust tappets & throw the radiator etc back in. Easy ? No ! I decide to use the pushrods that came with the donor head because they are cleaner. Better check they are the same. Oh no. They are about 5mm shorter than the ones in my engine. Refer to good book but only difference Haynes Manual states with 4K was a slightly different compression ration for 4K fitted to manual & auto model, but no details. Quick check between my engine reveals the following. Donor 4K engine number 4K 588 series My 4K engine number 4K 902 series Donor 4K engine had dished piston tops with recess for valves (Ohhh!) My 4k engine has flat top pistons like the picture in manual. Donor 4K engine has overall thickness of about 76mm. My 4K engine has head overall thickness of about 81 mm. Rocker shalf supporting bosses are the same height. Donor engines pushrods are about 5mm shorter that those from my engine. My 4k engine is already assembled with donor head, so I adjust tappets and turn it over with small torch down spark plug hole. Flat piston head does not touch the valves during any part of the cycle travel. All this background is to ask the following questions. What variations were there in the Toyota 4K engine series. Can the heads I have described above be swapped. What the hell does my compression ratio finish up being, and will it degrade performance significatantly. Have done a quick thread search on 4K head swaps but can find nothing. Lots on putting the 3K head on the 4K engine, but nothing I can find for the situation I find myself in now. Can anyone help. PM me if you have some experience with my problem. (no, not about how to get wife out f broom cupboard) and I will be most grateful !!!

Hummm ! That's interesting. A couple of weeks ago I had to race down to Sydney in a hurry at short notice for a funeral. I left early in the morning and got there for the funeral at 11:00am. Went to the wake, got back in the car & was back in Brisbane before midnight. Now if I had the good Japanese Dr's 400 kph bullet I could be in Sydney in about 2.5 hours. Could have stayed at the wake a little longer. I'd love to see the face of that "police officer" who hides in the bushes just south of Macksville, when I go by at 400 kph. By the time he got his "Foulcan started", I would be in Port Macquarie. Hummm. Think I'll order one of them, for delivery 2040 !

Has anyone come across this site before & seen what this guy is doing to a Morris Minor ute ? http://members.iinet.net.au/~kustomb/lcv%2...top%20perry.htm It's a good read. I love the Toyota Coaster Bus floor heater. Also the 200 km/hr speedo in the middle of the dash. Fook; you thought you didn't have much room between back of your engine & firewall. This guys has had to cut the fire wall out, but the front of the 5K seems to be where the radiator should go. Don't know where the raditor will go. I guess at 200 km/hr he'll just get force cooling over the outside of the engine. Fill up the 5K blocks water chambers with Araldite. :thumbsup: I once saw a Morris Minor sedan with a Holden straight six in it. Drivers seat was where the back seat would normally be.

If your mate had to "bash" the dashboard to make the fuel guage work it is probably not the sender unit that is faulty, which is in the tank. More than likely it is the connections at the back of the console. If your mates temp guage also is playing up, it will be the connections to the little regulator that are intermittent. The 10V regulator supplies power to both the fuel guage & temp guage. It is very easy to test the fuel guage circuit. Pull the single/spade terminal lead off the top of tank & ground. If the fuel guage moves up to "full" then the guage is OK, and the fault will be in the sender unit itself. The tank is not very hard to remove. Just make sure it ain't got too much juice left in it.

Not long fixed my non working fuel & temperature guage. It was that little 10 volt regulator on the back of the console. Now the fuel guage has gone again. Temp still working. The float had a crack in it and sunk ! Replaced that with a spare I had but it only worked for a week. Now it's reading constantly low. I have had it out last week, and time has taken it's toll on the simple slide resistor arrangement. As I had this problem in a previous KE55 I guess it is quite common at age 25 yrs. As new sender units are as rare as dinosaurs, and even if you could get one would probably cost a kings ransome, I was wondering if others have had this problem and how they have solved it (don't say a long stick) Is there any later model Toyota fuel tank sender unit that is commonly available that anyone has adapted to the KE55 tank arrangement ? Most interested in any comments re above. Thanks !