Build Thread 1978 Mercury Cyclone. The pig is in the pen.

Let this serve as a testimonial to how a 2jz isn’t as common as some here would have you believe.

I started last night trying to get stuff prepped so that I could begin assembly of the engine. This morning I got back at it, hoping that I could get the bottom end assembled. I had perfect weather, the wife is out of town ( nobody to drag me out of the garage because they’re hungry). I attached the block to the engine stand, and got to work.
2jzs are no different than any other engine, the casting process still leaves behind parting lines, and casting slag that should be removed if you care about any of that breaking free and getting sucked up into the oiling system. There is a big difference in the metallurgy though.
Ordinarily, grinding that crap is tedious work, and a Ford cast iron block is one tough sonofabitch when trying to grind that off with a little carbide burr on a die grinder. A 2jz on the other hand,......must be made out of sand. Every time that burr hit a parting line, or a blob of casting slag,..it disappeared in seconds. After only about 10-15 minutes, I had every offensive area smoothed out to my satisfaction. The down side was that there were grinding shavings in every hole and passage that engine had.

Let this serve as my point of reference

So here you are,..filling up the sealed up oil galley with grinding debris, and all kinds of engine killing sht. Ordinarily, you’d remove the oil galley plugs so that you could clean this crap out before even thinking of going forward, but this engine is different. Evidently, the geniuses from the land of the rising sun must’ve been short on freeze plugs, or out of 3/8 NPT pipe plugs when they were faced with the dilemma, so they chose to press in hardened steel ball bearings to seal up the oil galleys.

Now, since these things are second only to the LS as a common everyday swap engine, you’d think that somebody who has put this engine into their Mustang, or their Camaro would have came across this.

So I did some research.

The only forum the search query popped up on however was the Club Lexus forum. Some member asking about how to remove them from the engine,.....that was in his car,.....that had come that way,....from the factory.

Turns out that the only way to get this things out was to weld a bolt onto the front ball bearing, and pry that bitch out. After that was done, you simply slide a bar in the oil galley hole, and beat the one in the rear out.

After that was done, I shallow tapped the holes with a 3/8” npt tap, ground the part that hung out of the front of the block flush, and will never have to weld anything to anything to remove an oil galley plug.

*To tell the truth, I don’t even know why I bothered going online, I probably coulda just jumped in my car and asked the guy at Auto Zone to look up the process on his computer,
I mean after all....Freakin 2jzs are everywhere in everything. You can’t even turn on the TV now without watching some Chevy boy in some Chevy boy show where he has removed the LS from his car because it wasn’t common enough and is now swapping a 2jz in it instead.

And furthermore..
So....I finally have a clean block,...it’s tapped for the new galley plugs, I can finally start putting the thing together. First I mask the thing off, and give it a fresh coat Of Gila Monster Copper. After that dried, I install the oil squirters that help keep the cast pistons cool, and lay my new coated “ race“ bearings in the main saddles. I open the box that the main studs are in, and my eye gets drawn to the big, red “ATTENTION“ warning written on the instructions. It warns me that main studs could potentially distort the main journal, and that I should have had the main journal line honed just to make sure that there were no issues with the fasteners clamping force on the main cap.

Fcking great...Now I gotta worry about this?

It is what it is. I figure I’ll torque the crank and see if the force required to spin the crank changes as I torque it. I start installing the studs. There is only 10 studs. I need 14. I look at the box, this is a stud kit for a freakin 4 banger...and I don’t have a clue where I got this kit from, or whether It was ordered wrong by me, or incorrectly picked shipped by the vendor.

I say screw it. I’ll just go downtown to the engine parts warehouse, and buy a set of TTY main cap bolts for the engine, and eliminate the worry about main bore distortion.

I call em up. They don’t have them.
I get online,..nobody out there is selling them.

When you watch the YouTube goobers assembling 2jzs, they are using TTY bolts on the main caps. Nonetheless,...nobody sells them.
* And these engines are so freakin overdone...how can this be?
All I can do if I want to go forward is to use the existing TTY main cap bolts for today, just to hold the crank in place. I thread those dudes in but don’t tighten them, I intend to replace them.

I check the rings,...they are in spec. A little loose, but within spec.
I install all six piston/rods into their respective holes..I bought a taper bore ring compressor specifically for a 86 mm std bore. The pistons slide in flawlessly.
But,..things take a decided WTF, when I spin the engine over and bring #1piston up to TDC.

it’s supposed to be above deck, but the pistons are down in the holes a tremendous amount.


They are at least .025-.030” in the hole. The stock spec only has the piston down .010” How in the hell is this piston down so low???
When the guy resized the rods, did he shorten the rod so much that these freakin things are now too short? And now I’m gonna have to take all of this sht back apart, and have the block decked another .025-.030”?

Naaahhh....I just had to remember that I only hand tightened the main cap bolts..the above pic shows the piston .005 out of the hole.....exactly like I was expecting.