sparkytC

im looking for some advice if anyone has had this problem occur with them. im getting a tapping noise coming from the head/cam area and have ran the compression and leak down test and everything seems to be fine with that. im about to remove the ocv filter and see if its clogged but cant get the damn ocv sensor off because of everything blocking it and i hope i dont have to pull the motor up to get to it...im currently running through all the troubleshooting for the code that came up but just want to know if anyone has run into this problem before and how to fix it...gotta get my baby back on the road asap

vettereddie

Did some digging and found this TSB. It's for the error code P0011. it's for the 1NZ-FE but I doubt the 2AZ VVTi cam is much different.

http://scionlife.org/Scion_Docs/Scion_TSBs/eg00307.pdf

The VVT-i Cam may be locked, we never checked that. Look on the face of the lead cam and see if the dots are lined up like in the TSB picture. If they are, it's locked and probably bad. We can start by just swapping cams from Stu's old motor without pulling the head, we should be able to loosen the chain and not need to pull the timing cover.

However, since there is the tapping noise most likely coming from the valve, it may already be damaged. There is some hope though, since you caught it right when it started happening and the engine is more or less holding compression.

If anyone else sees this, the codes coming up are P0011 and P0420. The P0420 is from an aftermarket header with no O2 adapter yet. P0011 is that the cam is stuck in advanced. However, when we turned the crank to top dead center and the timing mark to 0 degrees, bot the lead and follower cams were also lined up on the timing marks, so maybe it's only getting stuck with oil pressure applied or the OCV is bad. We did put a meter on it and it's reading 8 Ohms, within the tolerance. It could not be removed to apply power to it and see if it still actuates.

We did compression first and got 190, 190, 170, 200. After that, we did a leak-down test on the cylinder with 170, and heard air coming from the dipstick hole but the gauge on the tester was still reading as holding pressure. I added some oil to the chamber and it brought compression up to 190, so there is definately a weak ring in there, but I don't think it's causing the code or tapping issue. I don't think a rod is gone or we wouldn't be getting compression at all.

Anyone else having this problem?