Oil Pan removal to access Piston rod bearings

[tmontague]

Hey guys,

I was looking into a visual write up of replacing piston rings on a Camry engine and noticed that you could easily remove the pistons by removing the piston rod bearing through the oil pan. All 4 were right there.

I just researched an image of a Yaris oil pan removed and there are no piston rods above it. There is the oil pickup screen and then a bunch of metal in the way.

My Q is, has anyone successfully removed the pistons in the 1NZ-FE engine by just pulling the head and removing the oil pan? I want to know if it is possible to do this without pulling the whole engine?

If so I may delve into this in the summer on my fiancee's echo

[ex-x-fire]

You might have trouble getting them past the crank, & if you did get them out I'd say you'll never get them back into the bore.

[tmontague]

My plan was to remove the piston out through the top of the engine (with the head removed) but I would need to remove/undo the rod bearing which I was hoping to do from the oil pan so I can freely pull out the piston (which you can do in most cars). Is it not possible to this in the Yaris? I am basically asking if you can access all of the rod piston bearings from the oil pan like you can in the majority of cars out there.

And if it is not possible then how would one go about removing the pistons?

[ex-x-fire]

Ok I miss read the head removal part, you are gonna need to remove the upper section of the oil pan to get to the rod bolts. You can use a cross engine support to hold the engine up when you remove the front mount. A floor jack & blocks of wood helps it the time between the upper engine support.

[tmontague]

I just looked through he manual and found what you just stated about removing the upper oil pan assembly. Do all of the mounts mount only to this sub assembly and not the main block? I want to do this by keeping the block in the engine bay and just removing the oil pan sub assembly from the main block.

If the main block has no mounts to hold it then I will likely just have to pull the engine as there would be no point in keeping the main block in the engine bay suspended from a cross engine support.

I;m starting to think the easiest way to do this is just removing the engine from the transmission, pulling the head and then lifting out the block and oil pan sub assembly together. This way I can separate the two and replace the rings, seal and then re install. It seems that it would be fairly straight forward as long as you have all of the tools and time.