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Death of my 93 5SFE; Need suggestions

2K views 9 replies 8 participants last post by  Phils Camry 
#1 ·
So, these forums have been great over the years. I've really enjoyed my Camry. I rebuilt the engine on it about 3 and a half years ago as you guys probably remember this infamous thread:

http://www.toyotanation.com/forum/1...ld-my-93-5sfe-camry-detailed-40-pictures.html

I am sad to say, she is dead... :eek::disappoin:facepalm:

There are a myriad of things that happened that complex the situation on actually knowing what is wrong. So I'll start from the beginning...

First off, I've had the infamous distributor leak for about 2-3 years now, so it's been leaking oil out the drain hole and gunking stuff up... I figured it would be on it's way out the door, but I've been having trouble finding the time to rebuild it, and I really did not enjoy the thought of buying some aftermarket distributor...

Secondly, I have coolant lines that like to get stiff and brittle in the Texas heat, and the clamps begin to lose their grip and I get leaks. I've replaced these lines time to time. Lately, though, it has been leaking coolant, and I've been steadily replenishing it. However, I let it get pretty low to the point where on one drive the temperature probe was becoming covered and uncovered by the coolant so it would creep up then come back down to the normal range, but never got close to redline. After that drive, I replenished it with quite a bit of coolant.

The very next day after the above story, I was shopping at the store, and I came back to my car to go drive over to a friend's house. Started up, and I started going and literally as I accelerated from 1st gear and dropped it into 2nd gear, my car hesitated and would not accelerate. :disappoin I was just turning onto a 55 MPH road with cars quickly coming up on my rear. I put on the caution lights and pulled off into the next parking lot to see what it was. I figured the distributor had gone bad, but it was running steady on 3 cylinders (or so I thought...). My house was only a few miles away, so I decided to limp it home (this may have been my hugest mistake :facepalm:). So I limped it home on 3 cylinders...

As I got it home, the exhaust manifold was hot. Probably from all that fuel dumping into it from the dead cylinder... There was a cloud of smoke under the hood when I popped the hood from burnt oil. :facepalm:

Later when I had time to deal with it, I tested to see if I could get spark out of the distributor. I went as far as to start pulling leads while it was running to see which cylinder was dead. I pulled cylinder #1, and no change in engine roughness or RPM. I pulled cylinder #2's lead, and no change again!! I pulled #1 and #2 out and no change!! I put those back then pulled #3 and it dropped to one cylinder. I pulled #4 and it again dropped to one cylinder! I could not believe that it had dropped two cylinders, and I had probably driven it home that way. :disappoin I was able to confirm that the leads were arching... I tried replacing the spark plugs to no avail.

Now at this point I'm thinking lost compression... This was my biggest fear. Given my Camry has an almost new fully rebuilt engine with just over 40,000 miles on it, I was going to be really upset if this was the case...

So I checked compression on the dead cylinders... NO compression. :disappoin I checked the good cylinders, and had excellent compression. My nightmare was confirmed...

So I'm thinking warped head, or blown head gasket?? :dunno: It doesn't make much sense, from what I'm hearing from all my friends who are mechanics, you can't warp a head from running with 2 cylinders cold, but then I'm thinking maybe it got warped from slightly overheating only the day prior??

Either way, I have another car now that is a Camry wannabe given to me by a friend as I really need a car to get to work. It has been a nice blessing, but I really miss driving stick and having my Camry.

So at this point I'm just looking to this forum for suggestions, and any advice.

If there is any other trouble shooting you guys have to suggest to further trouble shoot, I'm all ears.

If not, I don't have time, money, or a place to remove the head and check out the extent of the situation (blown head gasket, or warped head). So with this, I really have 2 options that I'm thinking of: sell as is on craigslist to someone looking into doing a top overhaul, OR part it out and sell all of the good parts (which are many as I've done a LOT of work on the car), and then whats left just sell to a junk yard or for scrap. Not to mention I have BRAND NEW tires with only about 6,000 miles on them. :facepalm:

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
 
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#5 ·
A little update on my Camry. I finally pulled the head, and I was able to confirm just as I thought. The head gasket blew between the #1 and #2 cylinder. I took the head to a machine shop to be resurfaced, and have all the clearances etc. checked as well as new valve seals. Hopefully after sitting for almost a year and a half she doesn't have too many issues, but I came to a realization a while ago that it was worth more to me to keep and fix than it was to have someone else buy it off me. These Camrys are great cars!
 
#9 ·
Head is fully rebuilt. New valves, valve guides, valve seals, polished cam lobes, resurfaced head. Got the head bolted on to the block at the moment. I'm out of town, but once I get back I should be able to finish it up and crank it over and hopefully get some solid compression. :nerd:



 
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