One of the choices I had to make was whether to leave the AC compressor bolted to the engine or unbolt it and leave it hanging in the engine bay. Here is a shot of everything disconnected on the driver’s side. Make sure the fuel system is not pressurized (let the van sit for a day or two and the pressure will drop on its own). Last thing is to disconnect the fuel line. Remove the nut at the end of the cable, the cable bracket, and set the cable aside. Couple of things still left over – one is the the transmission shift cable and bracket. Don’t forget to also disconnect the large wire going to the fuse box and the ground wire connected to the body. Check out the video of their exact location. There is a valve on the bottom of the radiator and two drain valves on the block. Obviously you need to drain the coolant before disconnecting any of the coolant hoses. So that includes the brake booster, fuel vapor, heater, and radiator hoses. With the air intake out of the way you then want to disconnect any hoses or wire harnesses that are connected to the body of the van. I also removed the cowl to get better access to some of the vacuum hoses in the back and to get access to the strut. There are a lot of vacuum hoses here so I recommend taking a photo of where everything goes. Then proceeded to remove the air intake system along with the battery. I started off by placing the van on the jack stands (at their lowest setting and on both sides of the subframe). For a more detailed look, you can watch the video at the bottom of the page

Note: The following steps are an overview of what needs to be done. Anything that is in the way of the subframe needs to be removed. Basically anything that is connected between the engine and the body needs to be disconnected. Having said that, with the Sienna I still recommend dropping the subframe – it’s just an overall faster and simpler process than taking everything out from the top. Because I don’t have a proper lift, dropping the subframe involves using multiple jacks and jack stands. When possible I prefer to lift the engine using an engine hoist – to me its a safer, more controlled method of taking an engine out. Let me start off by saying that I hate working with the subframe. Some needle nose pliers and a vice grip for the hoses and clamps. To go with those sockets you will need a couple different length extensions. As far as hand tools go, you will need your standard 10mm – 19mm regular and deep sockets (along with a 22mm for rotating the crankshaft). At a minimum you will need a pair of 6-ton jack stands and a pair of 3 ton jacks. The preferred method is to drop the subframe along with the engine and transmission. Because of limited room inside the engine bay, the engine and the transmission have to be removed as one unit. The issue is that we didn’t have access to a proper lift so everything had to be done in the garage with jacks and jack stands. Now it was time to actually remove the engine and do the swap. For more details, see page 2 of the article. They had totally different wiring harnesses, front mount brackets, and fuel tube sub-assemblies (short tube that connects fuel rail to the fuel line). In the case of the Sienna and RAV4 engines, there were three main differences between them, though nothing that some simple part swapping couldn’t fix. This thing looked mint in the photos and looked brand new in person. Engine was purchased on eBay for a grand total of around $2,800. We were able to source a relatively fresh engine from a 2012 Toyota RAV4 with only 19k miles on it. The great thing about this engine is that Toyota uses it on many of their vehicles, even those manufactured at the time of this article. To fix the leak, the engine has to be dropped and combined with the knocking problem it was decided to just replace the whole engine. However, its now gotten so loud that the owner would have a hard time selling the van. Now the knocking was not a huge concern since there have been many reports of piston slap on this engine and this van had the knocking sound since day one. Mainly it had a pretty big leak around the timing cover and it was knocking very loudly, especially when cold. With around 80k miles on the van, the engine started to develop some problems. A little background on the van itself – a 2009 Toyota Sienna powered by the 3.5L 2GR-FE V6. Recently had the opportunity to work on this project and since this was the first time that I have ever dropped the engine out of a minivan I thought it would be a good idea to write about some of the issues that I ran into. 2009 Toyota Sienna 3.5L V6 / 80,000 miles Introduction

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