How long until Toyota releases and TSB for this?

 

I’m not sure at all on that. This has been going on for a while in Japan but I only heard about it when it was posted here a week or two ago. This is more about being prudent and starting to keep track of these failures to help those folks that have engines dying due to gasket in the oil strainer.

 

Interesting, how long has this been an issue? Haven't really heard of this issue specifically on the 22's.

Any idea how many cars have been affected so far?

 

From what I’ve gathered there’s 5 decently documented examples of maintained 86s that they screenshot off Facebook. I don’t use any social media so 100% unable to look to see if there’s others. They had documentation from dealer confirming the claim was denied because of a track event. There’s also what appears to be another 5-6 Japanese Twitter examples in another thread here that visibly show RTV sucked into the oil strainer. I wouldn’t go ‘pants on fire’ right now but it is something that should be on the radar in case it does go there.

My hope is that enough people will document their cases there that if/when someone else encounters this they can print this off and show it to the service manager so they know this is a legitimate problem. I just saw enough popping up that I figured a spreadsheet would be a good start to keep track. It’s hard telling if this is tied to a specific day, specific build time etc. until more data is accumulated.

My fear is what happens if someone has their family with them and the engine fails on the highway, fails during wintertime in the snow, or it fails on the track where it could cause an accident and people could get hurt. Engine failure is a big deal and 100% manufacturers fault in this case. It may turn out to not be very many but there’s definitely some. Really hoping not many folks have to use this

Normally I’d gone on, made Facebook and Twitter accounts and put them in to start off but only one of my hands is working until it gets fixed in a few weeks 😅 Speech to text is really crappy 🤣 I believe someone that’s on the Facebook groups is going to go on there and ask the people affected to document their case.

 

It's probably a good idea to include Date of Assembly as one of the columns on the spreadsheet.

I just saw a short vid with a build date of 1/22 and there was debris in the pickup tube with the oil pan removed.

 

Just chucked it on there thanks!

 

Another guy in the comments in the FB group showed his having sealant in the strainer as well, but his engine is still going strong.

Build date: 12/2021

 

I've had some people asking me if they think it's worthwhile taking the oil pan off, removing RTV sealant and my thought process was something along the lines of

If we take the oil pan off, Toyota might deny because you've cracked the engine open

If RTV gets in the strainer and you've taken a car wash pic in the same state where a track resides you might get denied

I don't know what the right answer is on that. My concern is that by the time you see RTV in the strainer there's bound to have already been some oil starvation, which will undoubtedly have an impact on bearing life. How much I'm not sure. It would be interesting to hear everyone's thoughts on that. Boroscope, pull out 'if' there's any present and hope for the best?

So I have a thought. I’m supposed to have my car going in tomorrow to get the zits fixed on the front. After it comes back I’m going to ask my local tune shop if he wants to use his boroscope to check my strainer. With this going on he’s bound to be as curious as I am.

 

If we take the oil pan off, Toyota might deny because you've cracked the engine open

Agreed. On a street driven car, I'd personally choose to leave it unaddressed, allow the engine to grenade itself, and have a replacement covered by the warranty instead of dropping the oil pan to clean it up myself - specifically to avoid giving the manufacturer a plausible reason to deny a claim or replacement if/when an engine failure is experienced. Even if you drop your pan and clean it up, there is no good way to definitively tell how much RTV has yet to break off in the future or if there are other areas besides the oil pan that have excess RTV, nor is there a way to tell how much your bearings have or have not been impacted thus far by some degree of oil starvation (besides knowing that it wasn't enough to have them spin yet).

Obviously, dropping the pan and doing your best to get ahead of the issue is a good idea if you feel that you already do not have a reasonable chance at getting an engine failure warranty claim approved because you know your black-box data would lead to a claim denial when the manufacturer's FSM pulls it (over-revs, top speed data, acceleration data, G-load data, GPS location data that indicates a known track or racing course). Or, ironically, if you attended the free track day courtesy of Toyota... lmfao.

So I have a thought. I’m supposed to have my car going in tomorrow to get the zits fixed on the front. After it comes back I’m going to ask my local tune shop if he wants to use his boroscope to check my strainer. With this going on he’s bound to be as curious as I am.

I had the same thought, but it appears user "Aon" from the FT86 forum stated that "Unfortunately the oil pickup is located in such a way that it not able to be accessed unless the pan is removed. You can however look at the surrounding seal and check for excessive sealant or signs of some breaking off".

 

I 100% agree with not taking the pan off unless Toyota does it either under warranty or you pay them to do it.

It has also been put forth by some that this issue might be why cars were under a QA hold earlier this year... but who knows.

 

Same here, I do not want bad advice to negatively impact anyone so my default answer is ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Think of the warranty implications’. Glad this is getting eyeballs! Was not prepared to answer questions like that Best thing really is just to be aware this is a thing, nobody knows if you’re impacted unless they take a boroscope in there and look, and concern for already present bearing wear from plugged strainer.

 

yeah, unfortunately you cant access or clean the pickup tube without the pan coming off.

 

Shoot that is unfortunate. Think your plan of action is best: if you have a reason to believe you are no longer under warranty track etc. might be worthwhile otherwise advisable not to touch. 100% agree with bearing concern, it would be better purely from a warranty perspective to leave well enough alone. Few years ago someone bombed AT&T’s network station here on Christmas and I had zero cell phone coverage for two hours driving home. Could not imagine having my car die in that situation with zero cell coverage

 

I got a kick out of seeing this:

 

Im curious as to what all the red and green crap is in there. The gray is oil pan sealer for sure. No idea what the rest is.

 

Christmas edition?

 

Festive RTV! xD

Thinking back over the years I've seen blue for some applications, red for other uses, then the gray you mentioned for oil pans. I don't know if it corresponds similar to fastener adherence paste red sleeve retainer, blue locktite etc. I prefer cork oil pan gaskets, but know many manus don't use that anymore and use RTV in most applications. People do seem to 'lather it on' without concern for using too much. This is exactly '13 all over again. I got some entries to toss in here

 

Toyota uses a red/orange fipg on transmissions but I have not seen red used in engines.

Is that meme pic even from a twin?

All the pics / vids I've seen of the twins and plugged oil pickups have been just grey sealant stuck up in them.

 

I'm at about 700 miles on mine. At the first oil change,prob about 1500 miles,I'm going to take a look with the bore scope.

 

So I see a lot of gray, but there's a few blue ones in here. Here's one, this one could be gunk in addition to oil pan RTV:

Then blue, but lighting could have affected that so could be gray


This right here is the interesting one:

『いま日本で最もオイルパン外されてるクルマ』

こういっても過言では無いだろう。何処かの誰かが投下した爆弾。GR86/BRZはオイルパン内のストレーナーにシーリング剤(液体パッキン)の余りカスが大量に落ちて…

ameblo.jp

He was able to use a TIG wire piece and slowly dig out all the gunk. It was very laboursome but it looks like in the end it all came out. Edit: nevermind... oil pan came off, think that was just a suggestion
This might be the ticket right here... Pretty sure the shop that does my work would club me over the head if I asked him to do this

Sorry another edit: just got hit up, might be good on warranty front since 0 mods to drivetrain. Will get sleep and talk with guy on Monday.

 

One more comment before I hang this up for the night: there are lot of Japanese examples I've read through, but I worry about the lack of some of the data. I don't want to post a lot of examples of just twitter handles, mileage and links, but at the same time they are examples none the less. I'd like to get some opinions on whether or not we should concentrate on very specific examples with granular data, focus on US specific examples, or include everyone? 100% transparency, I made the thing but encourage everyone to run with it, this is more just to kick-start it. One of these has a confirmation this was RTV from a timing cover, btw...

 

Whatever happened to using purpose-shaped gaskets to seal covers on engines? Applying a ribbon of RTV seems far more imprecise and prone to errors…

 

Cost savings.

 

Well I guess with all that extra money Subaru/Toyota saved on gaskets they can go ahead and replace everyone's blown engine.

 

You would hope so. But so far the trend has been "oh look you revved the car to redline that one time" WARRANTY VOID. "Oh, you drove your sports car like a sports car" WARRANTY VOID.

 

Maybe they should rename "track mode" to "warranty voided mode" Instead of getting a bar tach, you just get a frowny face.

 

That button does definitely feel like ‘#WarrantyVoid’ at this point. It’s infuriating really. I ran into someone when the GT-R’s first came out and he used launch control a few times. Transmission grenaded using their built in feature and they said sorry, that voids the warranty. I have a video of him somewhere at NCM, wanting to say they were $15-20k to replace? Hard to find too, if I recall. One big tick I will give to GM is there are at least 2 cases I personally know of where they had the 1LE package and they replaced the thing no questions asked.

 

It's sad that we even have to go to lengths of assuming we shouldn't remove an oil pan and inspect ourselves. Toyota should be stepping up to the plate and addressing this issue first and foremost. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume we're in the early stages of this issue and they are going to do their due diligence to gather information and issue a properly structured TSB, but I really don't want to be proved wrong.

All in all they have some bad visibility in this situation given they've done everything to paint this vehicle as a purpose built track / sports toy: Track bRed, Track Mode button, 1 year NASA membership, Gazoo Racing 86 nomenclature... I'm sure I'm missing some more here but you all get the point. Hopefully that's a focal point if customers need to give pushback via a CA suit, but I'm really hoping this gets solved prior to that. How hard would it be to issue a TSB to remove the oil pan and timing cover and reseal properly? Pennies on the dollar vs replacing motors left and right.

 

Would the Tomei Oil Pan Baffle help in this kind of situation?

 

It would, if engine is prone to an oil surge problem. From my experience, the buffling is very useful in any engine if the car is to be tracked.