Engine Sorted and Serviced

After a short hibernation period were about to head back out on the road. Bee-bee’s cracked cylinder head has been replaced and she is raring to go (we hope).

Here’s a quick outline of the work she’s had done...

New Cylinder Head

Having the car in Cyprus meant we were a little limited in choice of spare parts. We could either opt for an original Toyota cylinder head at some ridiculous price tag or a cheap Chinese replacement. Being a bit fussy about the replacement parts that go into Bee-bee having made the mistake of buying cheap Chinese parts in the past we decided to see what was available back home. With a little research on the Toyota Hilux Surf forum we managed to source a replacement AMC cylinder head from the über helpful Barry at RoughTrax and got it shipped out to Cyprus. The AMC cylinder head was a proven choice being tried and tested by many of the forum members.

Water Pump

3 years ago when we removed the air conditioning unit I checked for movement in the water pump bearing, it had the tiniest amount. We decided to leave it but carry a replacement with us in case it went whilst on our travels. Replacing the cracked cylinder head was the perfect opportunity to switch it out and put the new one in.

Radiator

Way back in 2012 in a state of paranoia after reading many horror stories of cracked heads I decided to swap out the old radiator and replaced it with a new one. In my naivety the replacement was not an OEM part but a substandard spare from the Far East. Ironically my paranoia probably did more damage than good. I suspect this radiator was the root of the overheating problems that eventually cracked the head. It has now been scrapped and with a little bit of butchering has been replaced with a radiator with a much larger core from another newer 4x4.

Cam Belt, Glow Plugs and Fuel Injectors

Having just had the cam belt replaced it seemed a bit over-kill to replace the idler pulley and the tensioner. Instead we just replaced the belt. Whilst the head was being rebuilt we decided to put in some new glow plugs to make sure Bee-bee is fit for those cold high altitude starts in the Caucasus’. When we popped back to the UK at Christmas we took the fuel injectors with us and had them checked on a test bed by Brian the Dorset Diesel Doctor. He concluded they were knackered and so we promptly replaced them too.

Having racked up over 150 test kilometres I’m pretty convinced she’s running sweeter that she ever has. She starts on the button, no more black smoke and the temperature barely rises above 88°C. We took her (unloaded admittedly) on several long motorway climbs and up a steep 290 metre off-road climb without any problems at all. Fingers crossed.