Does anyone know of a good write-up on pulling the head and replacing/re-building it. I have a substantial amount of oil pooling in the intake port of one of my cylinders because of a bunk valve seat and would like to replace it myself. Thanks in advance.

 

The older 4-banger Camry's were notorious for this. The way to do this is with a good leak down tester.

Take the plugs and cams out. Use the leak down tester to fill the cylinder with air. Just make sure that it's holding pressure. If not, you either have a valve pushed down a bit, bad valve seats, or worse yet, bad rings.

Once you're comfy, you can pop off the retainers and replace the valve stem seals. The valve will stay up since there's compressed air underneath it.

One word of caution though, I've seen many people screw up and drop the valve into the cylinder. At this point, you have no choice but to remove the head.

Good luck!

 

The "air hold" is a classic, but there's another trick you can do to keep the valves up that won't allow a valve to drop.

Get yourself some cotton clothesline, take out all the plugs so the engine will turn over by hand easily, and bring the cylinder you want to work on up to within a few degrees of TDC on the compression stroke (both valves closed). Feed in the clothesline through the spark plug hole and fill the combustion chamber with as much of it as you can. Then, turn the engine over by hand to bring the piston up to TDC and compress the clothesline. It will hold the valves in place, with no chance of them dropping. When you're done, back the crank off and pull the clothesline out.