What kind of idiot swaps in an engine without doing some basic service on it first? Well this guy does. It was partly me being cheap, and partly not knowing the history of engine. The previous owner of the Celica claimed the engine had been swapped with one from a Japanese importer. I couldn’t verify this thing even ran before the swap. I figured if I spent the time to reseal everything before putting it in that it would end up having a dead cylinder, or knock or something. Either way this seal had dried up to the point that it had walked right out of the head.
I ran over to O’reilly’s who of course gave me the wrong part. After a bit of cross referencing, we found that the 3SGE and 4AGE share seals, and those I happened to have on hand.
This is something I eventually wanted to do anyway, but I was really hoping it would wait until I had time to paint the valve covers and generally make things prettier.
I did take the chance to change out the valve cover screws for new OEM Toyota parts. The center cover were mix matched crap, and the valve covers themselves were the typical stripped out look from people using the wrong screw drivers in the past. If you haven’t read about JIS Screwdrivers, this might be of interest to you.
Camry appears to again be leak free and ready to cruise once again.
