Some New Pics..., some great, some horrible Options

[Coomer]

Hey guys,
Yesterday I finally got to see my 20 valve silver top 4A-GE engine which arrived wednesday, and I took some pictures of it. The engine is actually very clean, and looks like it'll be great once it's in the car. I got it from Storm Performance for $870 shipped, with the transmission, axles, ecu, harness, AFM, and ignitor. Before they sell you anything, customer service is great, but once they get your money, they kinda slack off. My engine was supposed to arrive a week ago on friday, but on monday I found out that it was just shipping that day, and when it arrived, it didn't come with the ECU, third plug for the harness, or axles. It didn't have the AFM or ignitor either, but that was expected because they told me ahead of time that they'd ship later. So on monday I'm going to have to call and see what's up.

So tomorrow we're going to take apart the engine and tranny and check on the condition of the clutch and some other stuff. I may buy a new Exedy clutch, and today I ordered a new timing belt and water pump. I still need to find the idler pulley for the timing belt, and a couple of gaskets and seals, but I cannot find part numbers anywhere, and I posted on Club 4AG but didn't get any help.

Anyway, here are the pics of the engine:








I'm not doing the swap by the way, because I know I'd screw something up. A local shop is doing it for me, but I'm gonna hang out as much as possible and help out and try to learn. They've never worked with this engine before, but the owner of the shop who I talk with a lot does some incredible work. His '96 Neon puts out 432 horsepower to the wheels through a sequential transmission at twenty PSI of boost, and he said that sometimes he takes it up to 30 at the track. I rode in the car, and it's incredibly fast! Also, I've seen plenty of other cars who have had work done by this place, and they're all very nice and the owners are very pleased, so I'm completely confident that my swap will turn out to be very nicely done.

On another note, here are pics of what I found when I walked down to my car in the garage this morning:





Apparently when I was working on my car's remote start, I grounded out a wire for my safety switch, so when I started my car from my bedroom this morning, it was in first, the safety switch wasn't working because of the wiring, and so it went into the cement wall of my garage, even though the parking brake was on.

I don't think that any damage was done besides the front bumper, but I think I may need a new front bumper, and I definitely need new paint. The entire bumper has wavy cracks in the paint, along with a nice hole that's shown in the second pic, and the Toyota logo is completely destroyed. So tomorrow I'll take it down to the guy who painted my car and see what he thinks, and then I may be in need of another front bumper for my car.

[Coomer]

I realize that the axle is cut, but I think I'll be able to use my factory ones, and different, uncut axles are on their way to me now, along with the AFM and ignitor. I took a couple more pics of the engine yesterday, and those are below.



As you can see, the outside of the engine is very clean.



Unfortunately, you can't say the same for the inside of the engine. We were working on the engine yesterday, and first we took off the tranny. We found that the clutch in there has about 40% left, so we decided to order a new one from Exedy in a couple days. We also took off the accessory belts and then took off the timing belt cover so that we can change the timing belt when it comes in from Champion Toyota from Houston, where they actually stock some 20 valve 4A-GE parts. At this point, everything had been going good(except for the fact that my finger was just about purple from being smashed. ), and then we took off the spark plug cover to take a look at the plugs, and to make it easier to change the plugs when my new NGK Iridiums come in.

We found out that there were no plugs, which made my mechanic really suspicious. He said that he's swapped in about 50 engines straight from Japan, and he'd never seen one that didn't come with spark plugs. So we took off the valve cover, and then we saw how incredibly dirty everything was. Sludge everywhere, very dirty oil...it was bad. We ran a leakdown test on each cylinder, and cylinders 2, 3, and 4 are great, but cylinder one is just completely dead. We think that the intake valve or valve spring on cylinder 1 is messed up, because at TDC, we could hear air being sucked in through the intake manifold if we put our ears to it and pulled on the throttle cable. Also, the mechanic thought that the piston ring might be screwed up to.

He told me that I should just call Storm Performance and tell them to send me a new engine and we'll send this one back, because the car would run horribly if we put this engine in, and it's a lot of money and work to fix what's wrong with it. So on Monday I'm going to call them and get them to send me a new engine and have this one shipped back at their cost. So it looks like it's going to be a while longer before the engine is in.

And to CurrenZS, I would go 4A-GZE, but unfortunately, my parents pay for my insurance, so they would only let me get a forced induction engine if insurance was ok with me having a car with forced induction. Their thinking is that as long as I get an engine that would be covered by insurance if it was in its native car, then I don't have to tell them, and if I get in a wreck and they look at my engine, I can tell them that mine died and this was the most convenient engine to swap and was cheaper than buying a 7a-fe from Toyota.

And I'd go 3S-GE, but that would require a lot more work and a lot more money(because I'm not doing the swap myself), which I simply don't have right now.