Blown Head gasket rebuild....@297k

There are several reasons for a doing a rebuild and not replacing it with a used motor.
A. I have 95% of all the tools. Another car and time.
B. I see minimal wear in the engine, yes @ 297k. I see this kind of wear in a motor that has 100-180k (non hybrid)
C. I wanted to see what all the fuss is about in burning oil.
D. I wanted to drill the pistons to add more oil ports. More holes = less clogging of rings(as seen in toyotanation)

I felt like it would have been a waste to put another motor in. When my hybrid system failed in my 05 prius @ 195k, I ended up replacing just one battery for 30$ instead of putting another hybrid battery supplied by the dealer for 2500$. Mechanics will tell you all day long that you need another motor. Mechanics make money flipping/fixing cars. They will bill you 12-16 hours for labor to do a motor swap when a good mechanic will get it done in 8 hours. Then they go to work on another customers vehicle still billing you 16 hours. They do not want to rebuild anything because it takes to much time, cleaning, hunting down parts, machine work, car stuck on the lift etc. I know some mechanics that make over 100k a year. Profit margins on rebuilds are small. Quik lube shops make $$$ especially on the up sell. Changing the oil my self 30$ full synthetic with 10k filter, Jiifylube is 80$ for full synthetic and filter (probably a cheap 5k filter) The oil is probably 8-10$ and 2$ @ there cost in bulk. Sometimes you get billed and they forget to put the oil in or tighten your lug nuts on a tire rotation.
This picture shows you what my rod bearings look like @297k miles using sealed power plastigauge. Measurement .0015 within spec on cylinder #1 I will check the rest later. This is not a race car, it is an economy car. I bought this car to save money on total operational costs. If one was to buy engines and hv batteries on the moment of failure and go to jiffy lube every 5-10k oil change intervals, not much money would be saved.

 

Honed cylinders, cleaned up all the pistons, replaced bent rod, put new rings on. Had to torch/heat/lube to break dowel pins free and destroyed one of them. Waiting on the dealer to get new dowel pins. Oil squirters seemed clogged, possible problem to why oil control rings were gummed up. The new oil control rings are of a more conventional design and may provide cylinders with more lubrication. Was not able to drill pistons due to the design of the skirt on the piston. It would have not directed the flow of oil from the squirter to bottom of piston for proper circulation . I will get a second opinion tomorrow from a machinist/race engine builder I know. 150 grit sand paper on a flat block was used to get the head crisp and minty. Head was not warped just want to guarantee a great seal. Using a BeckArnley three layer steel head gasket made in japan and copper spray. The rest of the rod bearings are still in spec but are on the looser side of the tolerance. The rod bearings also look to have very minimal wear so crank was not disassembled for inspection. I figure since this motor is not hitting 5000rpm @ 100% of the time, full bearing rebuild is not necessary. Only time will tell. It would take to long to film and edit the build process, pics are better than nothing. I have not rebuilt a motor in a while and it has been really relaxing. Thanks for all your comments good or bad, I take it with a grain of salt. This kind of work is not for everybody.

 

I am willing to bet there will be more people hydrolocking motors on the prius due to blown head gaskets or taking the prius swimming on holiday. This hydrolocking will bend rods, break pistons, destroy heads/valves and even crack engine blocks. (not in any particular order, or maybe your a lucky bastard and cheated death)
Why you ask???
Electric motors make 100% torque instantly and the engine comes equipped with the heaviest flywheel I've ever seen. This momentum is pushing this small engine and it's small connecting rods past there limits when to much compression is introduced to the combustion chamber. If you have a hybrid and have a check engine light or white smoke (water/coolant)pouring out the tailpipe, stop the vehicle asap when you are safely off the road. This thread is the smoking gun and hard truth for these actions. I bought this prius knowing it had a blown head gasket and I am here with the full report.

 

1. Pull the crank pulley and motor mount, this will then give you enough room to pull the motor through the top. I do not understand why people pull a motor from the bottom.
2. transaxle is still in place. pics later.
3. compression will be much later. I put new rings and deglazed/honed the cylinders. It will have to seat to get a proper compression test.
4. brakes look/work great, suspension??, i drove it 80' (brand new kyb shocks are 200$) bridgestone ecopia tires are 10-20kmiles newish, windshield is clean/new, I already ripped the front seats out and shampooed all the carpet. interior is pretty mint now. Car looks dam good. Rock chips in front bumper and hood from mileage. My girlfriends 2010 prius is in worse cosmetic shape, she drives it into curbs (on second alignment) backed into a dodge charger, ran over a shovel and a rubber strap (flat tire pouring rain, guess who fixed in on the freeway getting wet) other than the mileage, you would look at mine and say its a lot nicer. New meguiars fast finish wax is the hotness. I have a honda ridgeline (17mpg avg This is probably going to be her donor car. She is a Hoonigan
5. engine looks solid. Ive taken a lot of things apart, nothing broke, I hate using helicoils on stripped threads.
6. 4 hours to pull the head. First time on this vehicle(new to me), no manual/being careful. Once i figured I had a bent rod, 1hr to pull the long block, cleaning egr cooler (took forever) 98% flow still soaking in degreaser. lapping valves, new valve seals and decking head 2 hours. mounted engine (m10x1.25x4 bolts lowes)on stand and disassembled half of block, cleaning 2hours. honed cylinder, cleaned pistons, replaced bent rod, new rings, decked block, checked rod bearings, 4hours. reading manual to make sure Im not missing any critical weird procedure things..... more to come.
The real time consuming part is going to be putting rtv grey on everything, head gasket, timing chain, timing tdc, timing chain cover, cam install all in torque specs. what is longer than hours?? years... jk
7. oil pump looks good, i have to put a feeler gauge on it too be sure. water pump, maybe ill check resistance and current draw (I has a dc amp probe). timing chain can be measured to see if it's speck, timing chain guide looks pretty good too. ac pump??? I have vacuum pump and that is also an easy fix. Call me crazy but I'm one of those guys who does not fix it till its broken. electric motors run forever(bearings, overload, contamination is the usual cause of failure) hv battery easy fix aswell. I am amazed to see how little wear the motor has on it and really just want to slap it back together to see how long she will run. Other than being dirty, deglazing cylinders, new rings, lapped valves/all (cylinder 1 and 2 intake valves not seating/carbon build up) new front/rear main seals and valve seals.
It would be easy to go crazy and replace every thing, but I'm looking at preserving what works.

 

I'm making time, but have way too many other projects going on as well. I just started 3d printing this year and learning 3d cad on fusion 360 software. I also bought a cnc lathe and need to build a water bed(eliminate dust) to cut carbon fiber for quadcopter frames. I just push other hobbies to the side while others take priority. Racing drones FPV is my newest hobby/addiction.

Here is a pic of the engine bay. This car was purchased from a courier(high mileage) not an uber taxi that had destroyed interior. Meguiars Ultimate Fast finish wax/sealer is awesome and suppose to last 100 wash's and last a year. Just used this for the first time, I did not buff or clay the paint, it's not a lamborghini huracan. I'll be happy with 6 months. The quik wax (old favorite)was left over and I like to put this on the glass. The ShinEtsu grease is bought from honda for the ridgeline weather stripping and has made a lot of the wind and door noise go away. This will be applied to the weather stripping on both prius'. The one thing I hated about the 2nd and 3rd gen prius is the loud interior. My girlfriends prius was quieter and has developed more rode noise with time. I test drove a 4th gen and noticed it was super quite(feels slower) inside but figured I'd rather keep my truck and then found this prius. I was hesitate on buying this because I did not think I would have time to do all this, but made some time.

 

I knew about priuschat for a while when I had my 2005 prius for 2 years and then sold it for my ridgeline. I actually registered because of two reasons.
1. My girlfriends prius had oil issues @ 80k miles. When I did the oil change @ 10k, I noticed oil seemed really low at dump. I replaced the egr immediately and noticed way too much oil in the throttle body. It was directly linked to the pcv. I then installed an oil catch can. The oil catch is working very well and catch's about 2-3 tablespoons of oil every 10k. This is the third oil change with the system installed. I need to clean her egr cooler, pipe, intake plenum and then do an coolant flush. I will post those pictures as well.
2. I bought another prius to rip apart and figured there are over 4million prius' sold since 97 and wanted this documented. The pcv valve an hose are way too close the intake plenum. This then sucks oil, oil mist, fuel and moisture straight into the engine. The oil control rings ports are really small were gummed up. I wanted to ceramic coat the piston heads to cool them down a bit to see if that would prevent the oil from baking/flashing into the rings. Toyota oil control rings have a super tight coil that gummed up and did not allow oil to flow out of the horizontal cut outs. The new oil control rings(conventional design) should have better flow. A bad oil control ring runs the cylinder dry and causes more blow-by. This causes increased crankcase pressure pushing everything back into the intake plenum through the pcv. Turbo charged cars, high compression race engine's have this problem and oil catch systems are in place.

The egr and pcv system are in place for emissions, removing these items would help increase the life of the engine 100% but it would be illegal. The oil catch can and new rings are an improvement for these cars burring oil. I know people come and go. Buying the prius has huge amount of rewards with a higher cost. Toyota reliability, 50+mpg, timing chain, low/cheap maintenance are the perks that everyone is here for. Now when the car starts to burn oil, hv battery pops, head gasket blows etc. These cars are extremely expensive to fix when paying someone to do it. Very intimidating for your home mechanic. I see many prius 2nd and third owners of these cars. I see people going back to conventional gas and don't want to deal with the hybrid mess because they got burned, know of someone or have read about a bad experience. Non-hybrid cars timing belt cost, 30-33mpg avg, starter (can go bad)lower initial cost are what some people are going back to. Between both car's engine design, I think it all equals out. In my opinion all cars are junk, and has been an interesting evolution.
Electric cars are the future but with current battery technology in place, severely limits its capability. They have the technology to make solid state batteries. Batteries that can be charged in minutes, half the weight and triple the range of current battery design. I actually am running graphene batteries in my quadcopter and was tempted to put them in the prius but I'm no electric engineer. The battery just can't be thrown in because it charges at a different frequency and voltage. There are temp sensors in the current system would have to be eliminated for them to run and charge. Graphene blow lithium ion, nickel metal hydride out of the water in faster charge, capacity, weight and release of amps. Graphene batteries are safe as well. Solid state batteries will make graphene's look like a potato battery powering a clock. Electric cars will destroy the automotive/oil industry because they will be too reliable less things to break.

toyota oil control ring(yellow coil)


conventional oil control ring

 

You cannot drop the oil pan in this car to get to all the pistons, the long block has a bell housing that has to come out. Engine pull was necessary. Hence why mechanics don't want to fix and just want to replace. Fixing a honda would have taken a lot less time.

 

Ford and chevy were the first to use hydraulic lifters I believe. The Prius' hydraulic lifters were seized @ 297k when I ripped it apart. A noisy/rough valve terrain would be an indicator of this. I soaked mine in penetrating oil to break them free. Honda's adjustable valve terrain is tedious and easy to adjust to tight/loose. Hydraulic lifters are nice when they work.