>>>*K...I just spotted this one, I was out chasing Coyotes and stuff. We have a few hundred head of Sheep to watch over.

Here is my advice:

*STOP!!!

Reset.

Roll the engine up to top dead center by hand using a suitable wrench, compression stroke, you can tell when the mark on the dampner lines up with the mark on the tab on the oil pump. On the compression stroke the top timing mark will also be up.

Remove the valve cover, look carefully at the top gear. The dowel pin that locates the top gear should be exactly straight up. The actual timing mark is on the tooth that is slightly left as you face it. If that timing mark is off, you will have overheat/driveability/glowing manifolds issues.

Glowing manifolds mean HOT, next is burnt valves, failed head gaskets, stuff melted and everyone is mad at me.

At this point, ignore the colored links, they no longer matter. They end up somewhere else every time the engine rolls over anyway, normal.

*Really! Ignore them.

IF when your top actual timing mark is at 11:45 position as you face it, and the engine's short block is on Top Dead Center, that is not the problem, it is elsewhere. (Look closely, that can be hard to even see for sure.) Usually we find the top gear's alignment pin is slightly RIGHT of straight up, this is wrong.

If it is off, correct it by taking the gear loose, pull it back from the cam, CAREFULLY move into the correct position and bolt her back together.

Then reset the ignition timing.

Go for a drive, maybe that is all there is to it.

If not that: Run a compression test. We see about one out of 100 that don't realize bolting the head on also opens some of the valves. If a piston happens to be up, or if the cam has to be rotated to align it, valves can get bent.

Often this is not enough to cause a dead miss, but enough to cause all sorts of issues, lack of power and localized over heat are some of them, if it happens to be an exhaust valve then guess what?

Yep, hot manifold.

Note that excessively late ignition timing will heat the manifolds and kill power, or if for some reason the system is not advancing properly. Rich combined with an air leak is a lack of power and hot manifolds, also. *Probably not it, though, but we do see it a couple of times per year.

I know it's hard to realize that a tech at Toyota might have trouble with something being off with the foundation, but those folks hire people too. And what you get is only as good as the one they hired.

Anyway, if you keep having probs, email me direct here at engnbldr@engnbldr.com and I will try and help, let's get you fixed and happy. One thing is for sure, it ain't the cam, all those do is open and close the valves some more and add airflow potential.

BTW: If you chatted with someone on the phone that wasn't me, that was my son Tod. He is only in his forties so he isn't dry behind the ears yet....*LOL**...*anyway, give those things a try, when the foundation is off, no amount of tuning or messing with cams and things will ever fix it..Note in the morning we are headed to the Portland shop but we will be back online by evening...*EB