As seen in Toyota Trails!
Various articles written here have been published in TLCA's Toyota Trails magazine and on their website. After roaming around our site, click on the magazines to visit TLCA.
Lilly’s diesel conversion
Lilly Re-powered Part 6: Gauge swap
Spent the night swapping the diesel gauges over to my 62 dash. The important one I needed was the tachometer due to how the diesel reads RPM. On the 62, the tachometer gets the RPM signal from the ignition coil. Since the diesel engine doesn’t have an ignition coil, you have to get the RPM’s from either the alternator, fuel injector lines, or by the factory setup, the flywheel. It uses a Hall effect sensor which is a type of transducer that varies its output voltage to the tachometer in response to a magnetic field. Basically it detects the teeth on the flywheel as they pass the sensor and converts that signal to the dial you see on your dash.
Lilly Re-powered Part 3: Making things fit
As with all conversions you will eventually have to fit something somewhere or adapt something to suit your liking. No different here. Took the afternoon to address some location issues for a few components. One was fitting the battery switch and isolator I am wanting to move into the engine bay from the glove compartment inside. One of the things that I removed that will no longer need is the bracket for some of the vacuum/EGR emission components mounted to the fender. It looked like the perfect place to mount both switch and isolator. With a few modifications it was good to go.
Lilly Re-powered Part 2: 3FE comes out
In preparation for pulling pulling the engine, I started removing what I could until the hoist could be picked up. The fun part about this was not worrying about labeling vacuum lines or wiring in fear of not knowing where they went upon reinstallation, it all wasn’t getting reinstalled. I basically made two piles, the reuse pile and the discard pile. The discard pile was winning in size.
Lilly Re-powered Part 1
By Eric B
Well the time has arrived, although not do to my planning. Due to multiple times overheating, ending up finding coolant in the oil, as well as going through quart of oil a week, the 3FE gave up. With roughly 275K miles, she was for the most part trouble free till now. Time to pull the plugs… literally.