Opinions about a Project 94 4runner with bad head gasket

You may have a slightly tired harmonic balancer that has shifted the pully's hub with relation to the pulley that has the timing mark on it. It is rubber isolated and if original is almost 30 years old. So put the pully on 0° BTDC and check cylinder ones piston to be sure its cresting the top of its stroke. With a long screw driver and a wrench on the motors crank shaft with plugs removed you can turn it back and forth to get a feel to see if this correct. Failing that you will need a dial indicator with a rather long extension!

For what it is worth I run my static timing with the jumper inplace at 14° and the engine fairly like that setting much better than 10°. I noticed also that when I replaced my OEM distributor that the rotation for the new O'Reily unit was different in how it matched up on the boss that is part of the head were the distributor drops into the engine. The gear on the shaft has tolerance as do the sensor/s cams for the coils under the rotor. All of these will alter things to some degree.

 

The timing issue is mostly solved:
The timing mark had slipped on the harmonic balancer, so timing has been done by ear/feel. I doubt it will ever be perfect, but good enuf for this truck.

Observations now that I have a couple hundred miles on the truck with the re-ringed power plant:
UBER STUPID under-powered. I should have put in a 5vz. Live and learn.
Crappy gas mileage so far, like 14 combined. Mind you I live at 6500 and drive to work at 7500' above sea level, mountainous hills and only 1 fill up with the timing close, so it might go up a bit.
The manual tranny is still hard to shift at times, I flushed the master/slave and changed the gear oil, no help.
I have one badly ticking valve, I probably (ok surely) ground the tip too far and then it seated better when I put in the new valves.
I should have paid for a new thermostat, I think the one I used is stuck open, or I am still to far advanced.

Otherwise the truck is good, but the power deficiency makes me not want to drive it much, I hate having to floor vehicles all the time.

 

I got the best results at 12 BTDC when engine is warm and e1/te1 jumpered. This was on a 20over long block. My gas mileage has also slowly improved in the near 5k miles since rebuild. Hopefully it will settle out about 18mpg with 5.29’s and 35” tires.

 

If you use plain vanilla 90 weight gear oil the R150F 5 speed is quite notchy to shift when cold. So I replaced the crap the PO had used and replaced it with 85W-140 Royal Purple gear oil. Thing shifts like butter now and is the same when dead cold or warmed up. The brass syncromesh collars really need the additives that are provided in the Royal Purple, Amzoil would work too as does the Redline brand.

 

Redline works like a champ for me.