I took a road trip to Colorado to do some camping and hiking with my girlfriend. ~1000 miles away and it was absolutely beautiful, of course. I took my rusty but trusty 97 LS400. It had no major complaints about 13 hours of straight hauling ass with cruise control at 90mph.
I do have a failing primary O2 sensor on Bank 2 so the car occasionally ran in closed-loop mode. Didnt get very good gas mileage either at about 20mpg but I had easily 700lbs of cargo/people and nothing about my driving is economical.
I drove up Pikes Peak, and at elevation the old 1uz was truly gutless. But it did it!
I saw a wild bear cub and a mama bear while hiking near my campsite, which was terrifying and amazing. Some offroading and trails not made for a Lexus were required to find our campsite;
It was nice to get away for a bit. Now im diving into engine swapping my 98 LS400. I started stripping the 99 parts car I bought from michigan; drained coolant, removed the radiator, all the intake plastics, and got the catalytic converters disconnected from the manifolds.
Tomorrow i’ll disconnect the drive shaft, trans cross member, pull the main wiring harness out of the cabin/firewall, disconnect a few odds and ends and the fuel line, motor mount bolts, and this ol thing will be coming out! Ill be refreshing it with new timing components, water pump, spark plugs, starter, p/s pump, crankshaft seal, valve cover gaskets, basically every damn thing. Oh and im gonna paint the valve covers and maybe intake manifold cuz I want it to be pretty. Color thoughts?
