Another SUCCESS STORY here. Holy crap, Golden, can't thank you enough for taking the time to put this together. Here's the deets, as the kids say.
2001 HIGHLANDER (V-4) w/ 120k miles.
I have very little experience with "car stuff" but am somewhat handy.
Have had infrequent random problems over the past year or so:
Surging idle.
Won't idle at all.
Won't start. (wait 30 mins, try again)
Usually these issues would pop up and last for a few days and then disappear. Nuisance but I lived with it. However, for the past 2 weeks the two-foot-shuffle finally got to me and I finally dove into this project. The whole project took me about an hour...
Left the throttle body attached and only removed the IACV.
Almost stripped one of the bolts (Phillips) but was able to remove with vice grips.
Found that the "pencil" valve thing inside was indeed binding. (got excited at this point)
Cleaned the IACV as well as I could.
Re-used the old gaskets.
Reinstalled everything and...SUCCESS!!!!
Shop quoted $650 to replace the IACV. ("Suck it!")
One question, however. I was unable to remove the cylindrical internal "pencil" valve thing out of the housing. I pushed and pulled very hard and no dice. I saw pics elsewhere (HERE) of this part completely removed during this process. How do you get that thing out? I was able to clean it a bit but not as well as I would have liked.
Golden, again, I can't thank you enough for doing this for the community. You certainly paid-it-forward and I'm extremely grateful. And though you have 15 pages of others thanking you for the same I suspect that there are hundreds (thousands?) of other folks around the world that used your instructions successfully without posting results back here. I'm sincerely grateful. I saved a crapton of money and learned a lot in the process.
-Leddy
[so, how to remove the valve as shown in the pic below? (ignore magenta circle) BFH???]
