I finally got my Engine Builder heads w/ o/s valves this weekend, and started to tear into my rig to get the old heads off. I've got 140k on the stock mill and lost compression on cylinder 3 a few months back. Spent Friday evening and most of Saturday, and have one head off, and am ready to pull the second. At times I think the Toyota engineers did a pretty good job at laying out assemblies, at other times I curse them heavily. It looks like a small amount of coolant had been leaking out of the headgaskets in the valley under the intake manifold. Oil hasn't shown any indication of mixing with the coolant. I haven't had a chance to check the exhaust valve on cylinder 3, but I believe it's the culprit for the low compression. The cylinders all look good with the cross hatch visible.

Unless I'm missing something, you have to pull the cams to get the head bolts out of the inner portion of the head. So I'll have to pull the cams on the new heads to get the inner bolts in place. The heads look killer, EB does nice work!

So I'm wondering, since I have the engine torn down this far, is there anything I might want to replace while I'm in there? I'm thinking of swapping out the instrument that lies under the intake manifold, just because replacing it later would suck. I replaced the timing belt and water pump about 10k miles ago, so they are good to go. I've debated headers, but the downside doesn't seem worth it. I don't need the extra work of fabbing up the crossover either.

Can't wait to get my rig buttoned up and driving again.