Rebuild or Buy a 5VZ-FE engine?

I have a 98 Toyota Tacoma with roughly 321k miles on the engine. It has some very minor oil leakage issues. I am in the process of rebuilding the truck and have come to the engine and i am stuck as to rebuilding the engine or just bitting the bullet and purchasing another one. Any advice is appreciated. The engine was rebuilt once before when it had 125k miles on it.

 

Does it need to be rebuilt?

How can a 3.4 need to be rebuilt at 125k? That doesn’t make sense. It should run 300-500k easily

 

I have no idea. The owner before me had it done right before i bought it.

 

Rebuilding an Engine can mean so many different things .

I had one seller tell me just what was done to him changing the valve cover gaskets because the intake and goodies come off was rebuilding .

You want to rebuild or go used Engine for a few oil leaks ??

Maybe by oil leak you mean a hole in the oil pan from the broken rod ??

Might be compression is so good you can spin the engine over with one hand on the Crank Pulley with the sparkle plugs in

 

details on the po's rebuild will help.

 

A 3.4 shouldn't need a rebuild at 125k unless it was sorely neglected and abused. High mileage is nothing for these engines if they're taken care of and maintained! I'd just pull the engine and fix the leaks, then you can get a actual view of what's going on inside while you're there instead of speculating.

 

I had one tell me the engine was rebuilt When I asked when 90,000 miles ago .

So many use it to inflate the asking price.

 

this is so dependant on who the builder uses as a machine shop and the parts put in. As stated earlier, the 3.4 is a long lasting motor if maintained for one reason, the parts that Toyota put in it are very high quality. There are aftermarket internal parts that are just as good as factory parts but your rebuilder may or may not want to use those.

Then there is the time involved in a rebuild. With a swap and if you have everything, you could be done in 2 easy days.

 

Thats funny, when I hear somene rebuilt a motor that should not have needed it, that raises my suspicions and I walk away.. Inflate the price? Hell no, does just the opposite. Same as it was just repainted... uh huh...

 

In my opinion, if you have the extra cash, you should go with a gently used motor from Japan. You can get these on ebay for 900 bucks and they have about 50,000 miles on them, which is basically just broken in for this motor