Today I went ahead and took the truck to the referee. It did not pass. I'm not really surprised but I have a better idea of what needs to be done. Of course the cat monitor was not ready but I also did not have the brake light switch wired to the ECU. So even if the cat monitor was set I would have failed anyway because I didn't know the ECU needed a signal from the brake switch. Go thing is that just those 2 items were the only thing that failed me. The refs said that a couple things could be wrong considering I've driven the truck a couple hundred miles already.
1. The cat could be old and losing efficiency since it is the OEM cat with 160k miles on it.
2. The truck is running borderline too cold on the highway. It usually runs about 185-188* when it below 90* outside. It has the OEM 180* thermostat so I may try putting in a 192* thermostat and see what happens.
3. The ECU might be losing power when the key is off so it resets some of the monitors every time I shut it off.
They also told me I got lucky. There are 2 versions of the 5vz. One with the EGR and one without. The documents they had weren't clear on how to tell which one is which so they looked up the past smog test history from the VIN on the donor truck.
Other note, the truck tends to very slowly over heat while it's not moving and given any throttle even with the cooling fan on. It boiled over once when they forgot to turn the fan on despite me telling them about it and the instructions I taped to the steering wheel. I'm not sure if I need to do something like get a 2nd fan or a bigger fan. Also I dont know what the were checking but it was getting up to about 230* when they were revving it to 2500rpm. They even had a 2nd larger fan blowing at it from the grill.
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