0:00 hey guys we have a special guest today this is my mom I taught him everything he knows everything and she has been driving manual transmission Vehicles as long as I can remember she had an old Ford Bronco then you had the Wrangler and then a Nissan Xterra and then most recently a s XB all manual transmissions yes and she recently drove up here to Eastern Washington all the way from Phoenix in that s XB because I was going to replace the clutch which of course you could have done yourself right oh in in a half a day it's just easier with lift right it ended up having more problems than we thought there were a lot of just Little janky things on it and the transmission wasn't quite going into gear properly so we decided to get her a new vehicle so I picked out one of my favorite cars which is the third generation Toyota Prius because they are
0:45 safe they are incredibly efficient and nothing else that's it they're just safe and efficient but they're great cars this one has 126,000 Mi I just did a 130,000 Mi service on my Prius and it was based off of years of reading the Prius Forums to determine exactly what would be the most likely component to fail and then replacing that so I'll show you guys that now and I would love your help but I think You' probably rather spend some time with the grandkids uh yes please okay I'll I'll grab you if I run into any problems along the way oh yeah you do that all right all right here are all the components that we will be installing on her Prius starting off with left to right here we will be doing an oil change I am going with Valvoline high mileage full synthetic 0 w20 oil I have run almost 100,000 Mi of oil sampling
1:32 reports on my Prius and I have found that this is the best oil at least for my climate and driving conditions it seems to offer more or less the same protection as the mobile one full synthetic Z w20 in warm climates but a little bit better in cold climates not a huge deal for Phoenix but I love this oil that's what we will be going with I'm going with the Wix XP oil filter we will be replacing the cabin air filter this is again a Wix XP this one is a charcoal filter so get some of that organic material out of the Interior we're going with a new air filter again Wix you'll see a little pattern there I absolutely love their filters these are the sway bar links for the front end one end attaches to the suspension the other end attaches to our sway bar hers are fine on her Prius but ours went out around 120 pretty common on the Prius to
2:18 have these go out between 100 and 150,000 mil the factory ones are not greaseable so when they go out they go out these ones from moo are greaseable you see we've got our little xer on both the top and the bottom so I will be swapping those out just so that we don't have an issue later on next up we've got our water pump again hers is fine but these are prone to failure between 100 and 150,000 Mi what's kind of cool on these they are not belt driven they are fully electric and they do have a processor inside with a whole bunch of electronic components so they can often times tell you before they fully fail so when they start to go out the most common failure is right here this impeller doesn't pop out properly you see how this one retracts all the way back on mine at about 128 8,000 Mi it finally went out and it didn't fully retract so we went ahead and replaced
3:04 that on ours I will be replacing it on hers next up we will be replacing the transmission fluid this is genuine Toyota atfw fluid this is what came from the factory in that transmission the only other acceptable alternative I believe is the as WS automatic transmission fluid I don't use any of those generic ones for this because it is a rather specific transmission now Toyota calls their Transmissions a filled for Life transmission that is an absolute CR you definitely should change the fluid I have the oil analysis to prove that we'll talk about that more later and lastly we will be replacing her pads and rotors now I am going with Brembo which is a bit unusual I would normally not go with such high performance brakes on such an economy car however they were about the same price as the bosches which I usually go with and this is the exact same setup
3:49 that I just put on my car and I absolutely love them they are ceramic pads however I haven't had any issues with squealing that's normally the problem with Ceramics they're very hard material now her brakes are in pretty good condition her rear rotors and pads both look to be original and she's got about 30% life on her pads left on the front the rotors are pretty heavily worn and the pads are not she has about 70% life on those so what I think happened is she had one brake replacement on the front but they only did the pads not the rotors we will be replacing all of that just because this is relatively cheap insurance I believe these rotors were around $30 each for the front and a little bit less than that for the rear and then both sets of pads were around $30 to $35 each so incredibly cheap compared to the brakes that you've got on most vehicles and in this case very
4:34 high quality the only thing that you don't see up here are a set of spark plugs that I will be replacing those are in the mail they should be here tomorrow morning and then the only thing that's not on this table that is going to be done is I will be removing our EGR cooler and completely cleaning that out however that doesn't require any parts unless I end up needing to replace a gasket which I am not expecting so let's go ahead and get the car up on the lift and then we'll start off with our fluid changes our oil and our transmission once I get the prus on the lift the first thing I do is remove the plastic underbody there's a small portion that you can remove in order to do an oil change but since we're going to be doing more service I figure I'll take the whole thing off and then you'll notice I take a sample right here I will be sending that out to Blackstone labs for analysis I'll talk about that a little bit more later and then when I removed the oil filter housing it was just a little bit warped these are
5:20 polycarbonate and I don't love them to begin with so I went ahead and ordered an aluminum one I'll put a link to that in the description I'll swap that out during the next Oil Change now we're on to the transmission where I remove the fill plug first so that when I remove the drain plug it doesn't Splash quite as much I learned that on mine when I removed the drain plug first and it glugged all over the place and then I fill it up with a syringe I have a little pump that I use normally to fill up uh transmissions and differentials but it has a little bit of 80 w90 residue in it so I just use a syringe to keep everything clean and then I'm pulling off the tires here uh not only so I can do the brakes a little bit later but also so that I can get to this plastic cover on the passenger side it will make the water pump a little bit easier later next up is draining the
6:05 coolant and I forgot to open up the reservoir so I use my ladder here to open that up so that it can drain a little bit faster and then while that's draining I go ahead and knock out the sway bar [Music] links now that we're back up on the top side I can start removing everything that we need so that we can continue our service unfortunately I do need to remove the entire windshield wiper component system in order to get to the spark plugs I don't love that design but it is what it is and it's not actually that difficult it's just a little timec consuming and you do have to remove more parts than I would like all right so we've got most of the ancillary stuff removed so that we can get easier access to the meat and potatoes here this is our water pump we only have one electrical connector right
6:50 there and then we do have five bolts of course I remove that bottom panel to get easier access to those bottom ones if I remember right I think three of them are long and two of them are short or maybe the other way around but there's only five bolts very simple right there next up we've got our EGR cooler over here and this is the cooler itself down there we've got our EGR valve right here and then that is attached to our solenoid right here we've got this electrical connector we have this coolant hose right here and then there's one more that's a little bit hard to see kind of tucked down in there the cooler itself is bolted to the Block in three places you've got one bracket up at the top you've got another one that's on the bottom side and then you've got this one right right here after I take off these nuts I do take off the stud that way it's a lot easier to just slide it out and I do take it out in one piece and
7:37 then later on you can take off the EGR valve itself from the cooler because the bolts come in this way you do have a crossover tube right here with two 10 mm bolts one there and one down there and then that tube goes over here where you have another two that hold it in and then I think there's a third one that actually holds this little black plastic piece on the EGR cooler itself bolts to the exhaust manifold on the back it does have a couple of studs there again I take off the nuts and then I remove the studs to make it a little bit easier to pull it out those are easiest to access from the bottom especially if you've got a lift I'm not going to film too much of the removal up close because it's really hard to get the camera into some of those spots so I'll just set it up a little bit farther away and then once it's actually removed you'll be able to see where all of the nuts and bolts go after that EGR cooler we do have our
8:22 spark plugs to replace you simply unbolt the ignition coil with this 10 mm bolt and then they pop right out of course you've got that electrical connect that you've got to unhook that is why we had to remove the windshield wiper housing without that housing removed the ignition coil will not come all the way out very annoying I think that's why a lot of people neglect doing those spark plugs and then once the spark plugs are removed we will be able to send our inspection camera down in there and then we can simply turn the crank down there on the bottom so that we can move the cylinders to their bottom position we can inspect the cylinder walls make sure we've got good cross-hatching no scoring going on there we'll then flip the camera around and we will inspect the top of the cylinder wall where we will then see how our head gasket is looking and see if there's any carbon buildup on the [Music]
9:14 valves now I don't normally wear flip-flops in the shop especially when I've got a vehicle on the lift I do have steel toed boots of course but uh I had some pretty terrible blisters at the moment so cut me some slack there all right we've got our entire EGR system on the table here we've got our crossover tube it does not look too dirty then we have the EGR valve again doesn't look too bad that Center portion there pops out and lets the exhaust gases around it and then we have the cooler itself now I have seen these vary from dirty like this one is all the way up to completely clogged where you can't get any gases through this one is really not that bad I will fire up the inspection camera to show you guys this is the hot side so this is where the
9:59 exhaust gases come in very hot and very dry the coolant runs through the center here condenses all of that so this side usually ends up more gunky which of course it is but this thing should clean up very nicely through the Ultrasonic Cleaner like I said this is one of the cleaner coolers that I've seen usually you can't even see the light coming through on the other side but it's still good to get this thing cleaned up installing this water pump like I said before super easy you've got five bolts one electrical connector once I pulled mine off I did have a little bit of the gasket material left on the engine block so I went ahead and cleaned that with a razor blade just try to keep it close to
10:44 90° so that you're cleaning the gasket off without potentially scraping the aluminum and then when I installed the new one the long bolts were torqued to 19 lb feet and then the short bolts were torqued to 15 lb feet hook the electrical connector back up and we're good to go next up we're going to be swapping out those spark plugs so I get the old ones removed so that I can then send our inspection camera down and see what our cylinders are looking like we are going to go ahead and take a look at cylinder number one first once we get inside it looks overall pretty good I take a look at the side to see if we've still got some decent cross-hatching we do looks fine there so go ahead and flip the camera around and take a look at the valves everything's looking fantastic now I was able to see just a little bit of polishing you see right here on the wall it's a little bit
11:32 smooth in that area that's just normal that happens we're taking a look at cylinder number two uh same thing pretty much overall the Piston looks good if it had a head gasket issue we should be able to see it right now because we would see what looks like basically a steam cleaned interior and because we don't see that doesn't look like we've got any coolant in here valves are all looking good cylinder number three we've got more of the same no indication of any head gasket issues take a look at the cross-hatching on the wall that looks f fantastic there go ahead and flip the camera upside down take a look at the valves valves look fantastic the intake valve is cracked open on this cylinder just a little bit so it gives us a nice opportunity to take a look inside the intake side of our head and it looks great no oil no buildup nothing and here is our last cylinder number four again no indication of any head
12:18 gasket issues fantastic cross-hatching on the side everything is looking so far so good here's our valves you can see exactly where the Piston stops because the polishing on the cylinder wall stops right there just beautiful inside overall very happy while I had the inspection camera out I decided to send it into the valve covers so I could take a look at our valves our Springs our rockers our cam shaft everything looks fantastic there isn't the slightest amount of varnish on this if I had to guess I would say this engine had oil changes done every 5,000 Mi with full synthetic next up we're testing our spark plugs here obviously the new one is on the left and the old one is on the right not seeing a tremendous difference between the two but still not a bad idea to swap them out I did apply a small amount of antics to the threads on these spark plugs before I installed them and
13:05 I installed them with the good old German torque spec of Gooden tight all right we've got the entire EGR system cleaned including our little crossover tube here I cleaned out the valve separately I just used a wire brush on that and then we've got our other little tube here you can see how clean that is and then finally our cooler is it looks fanf frantastic I'll go ahead and send down the inspection camera now so that you guys can compare it to how it looked before so to clean out this cooler I sent it through my Ultrasonic Cleaner I had it set at 80° C so it was quite hot and then for the solution I used water along with crud cutter Degreaser and two dishwasher detergent pods now I am going to be reusing these gaskets and let me tell
13:50 you why this is the aftermarket version of the exhaust manifold gasket made by felpro and I normally love the felpro gaskets but you can see there's a huge differ in style and I think these are actually much better gaskets even if we are reusing them so I sent them through the Ultrasonic Cleaner as well they're good to go the only one that I will be replacing here is the rubber one that is from the EGR to the intake manifold [Music]
14:48 all right next up we are going to be tackling the brakes and they really couldn't be simpler on this Prius you've got single piston calipers both front and rear that means we have one piston pushing from the inside and then a floating caliper that squeezes together on this rotor if we were just replacing the pads it would be just this bolt on the top and then this bolt on the bottom we'd pull the entire caliper off swap out the pads while they're on this little bracket and then put it all back together because we are doing the rotors as well it gets just a little bit more complicated we have two bolts holding on this bracket once this bracket and the caliper come off then we use these two little holes right here that are already pre-threaded I believe those are m8x 1.25 thread you find some junk bolts that you can throw in there tighten those up and then what it does is it actually pops the rotor off very simple put the new rotor on put the new bracket
15:34 on load up this caliper with those pads and then tighten everything up and we are good to go let me show you the rear because it is just a little bit more complicated on the rear the design is more or less the same you've got a single piston on a floating caliper and again you've got these two little holes to screw the bolts in and pop this rotor off again you've got two bolts that are holding this bracket on the difference this piston does not just simply push out as it comes out it actually twists so you have to use a special tool to twist that piston in so that you can get it slid all the way in so that you can get some new pads on it the other issue there is a parking brake on the rear so you just have to make sure that your parking brake is not engaged and then you're good to go so let's get to it knock these brakes out [Music]
17:01 all right so our Prius is all finished and ready for its next 150,000 mil since I finished filming that my mom has since driven it back to Phoenix with no issues she absolutely loves her new car but if you remember about 17 minutes ago I took an oil sample of our oil and our transmission fluid and I sent those into Blackstone labs and I've got the documents right here so let's go ahead and go over the oil sample first so we can see what kind of condition that engine is in they say you're new to U Prius is starting Trends with a nice report you suspect this oil was in use 6 to 7,000 Mi and we think that is a good guess based on the data metals are in great shape next to Universal averages and those averages show typical wear for this type of engine after about 8,300 mil on the oil no mechanical issues or poor wear is evident so it looks like
17:47 you chose a Prius with a nice wearing engine the viscosity is in the 0 w20 range or so with no excess fuel water or coolant contamination try 8,000 Mi next nice way to start trends so that is a absolutely fantastic report now the first thing I usually look at when I get these oil sample reports back is the iron and aluminum if you notice our iron we are at five parts per million while the universal averages are at 14 and then aluminum we are at four while the universal averages are at five that is fantastic and then going down the list here if you look at potassium we're at zero Universal averages are one and then sodium uh we are at five Universal averages are 67 those are indicators of a coolant contamination these Priuses prei Priuses I don't know what it is but the Prius does have a tendency to have
18:32 head gasket failure not so much more than other vehicles it's a little bit blown out of proportion because generally the Prius can go for extremely high mileage so if you have a bunch of vehicles with 250 to 300,000 miles and a decent number of them have head gaskets people are like oh well the head gaskets go out often in those yeah kind of but how many other vehicles do you have with 300,000 miles on the road so that was something that I was looking at here fantastic that we don't have any coolant contamination and then if if you look down at the bottom here uh you'll see in solubles we are at 3% uh it should be less than 6% that is usually an indicator of poor air filtration so we had a good air filter on that we replaced it anyways but it's good to know that we don't have a lot of dirt getting into the engine now let's move on to the Transmissions I told you that it was a filled for Life transmission I
19:18 also told you that that was a load of Croc the transmission didn't come out as well let me go ahead and read this to you uh which one is here it is it says there's quite a bit of metal in this transmission sample from your 14 Prius compared to Universal averages for a Prius transmission which are based on 53,000 Mi of oil use let's stop right there if their Universal averages are 53,000 mil that's kind of crazy that Toyota would say that it can go forever or filled for life so obviously the kind of people that send in oil samples are people like me who are crazy about monitoring the maintenance of the vehicle and if those types of people are replacing it at 53,000 Mi that should tell you right there that that is a good time to do it uh it says a good deal of this is likely due to accumulation over long oil change interval and Breakin so
20:05 if there no shifting issues if no shifting issues are noted let's just see how things look next time before assuming poor wear is taking place silicone is likely from sealant and that should clear out with the oil change too ins solubles Show Excess oil oxidation so it was a good time for an oil change checkback in 50,000 Mi now I will be doing it at 40,000 Mi but just going down the list you see the universal average for aluminum are 48 uh we are at 413 not good there uh let's look at iron here 111 Universal averages we are at 439 again not good we're at four times the amount of iron inside there uh copper should be at 22 we are at 75 not good now let's compare this to the Prius that I changed the fluid out at 77,000 Mi so if you look at 77,000 Mi
20:54 on my Prius the aluminum was at 100 compared to 400 for the new Prius and then the iron is at 253 compared to 439 so you see a a huge difference but let me take it one step further that same Prius of mine the 2012 I changed it again after 40,000 Mi and if you look at aluminum we are now at 42 parts per million compared to the 100 at 77,000 Mi and compared to the 413 at 126,000 Miles and then let's go to iron again we are at 56 parts now compared to 253 for its first change compared to 439 so if you look at my Prius now even though it has 130,000 Mi same as my mom's I am at what is that uh 1 nth of the iron inside my
21:40 transmission floating around and 1/10th of the aluminum floating around now those are just two wear Metals it's basically the same going down the board but that just goes to show you how important it is to change this fluid uh one other thing to look at here uh silicone on my mom's 183 that's a lot of course on mine at 77,000 Mi was at 97 and then its most recent one was at 20 so they say that that silicone is an indicator of when transmissions are put together there's silicone used as the sealant of course some of that silicone makes it onto the inside it kind of floats around in the fluid until you eventually change it and that number goes down so seeing how high my moms is that's just another indicator on top of the the fact that it was jet black and that these are not often changed that tells us that that fluid was never changed now everything seems to be fine on my mom's transmission I fully expect
22:26 changing it in another 40,000 Mi and having those numbers drop way down I don't think that there's going to be any long-term damage from this amount of metal that was in there but if it were to go another 20 30 40,000 Mi you know you start to get up to what would that be 170,000 Mi between changes I think that's when you would start to see some issues with this so hopefully this video was informative to you especially if you have a third gen Prius if you don't have one I'm not sure why you would make it this far but thanks for watching anyways if you guys have any questions go ahead and write those in the comments section below otherwise take care see you guys later thanks for watching everybody bye-bye
