Hey folks, It looks like the TURD just may ride again. When I got home tonight I finally was able to drop the motor enough to pull the right head off. As some may remember, TURD lost compression in the #4 cylinder on the way up to Turtle Springs last year. I drove it once since then (new years at the wildlife.. that should earn me an award for something.. stupidity maybe?) but it's been parked ever since. A bore scope seemed to show a huge hole in the piston. But since it's a god-damned-type-4, as Connie puts it, it turned out that the huge hole was just the normal dish in the piston top.

Ben showed up after he got off work to help and attack away we went. The tin around the oil cooler put up a noble fight, but it shall forever rue the day it decided to attempt to thwart our efforts. After much cursing the day Dr. Porsche was born we finally decided that VW intended for the tin to simply be bent away (to be hammered back later ( if you don't involve a hammer nothing can be repaired correctly)). Then it was a simple matter of finding the energy to curse some more because the Fu*king morons at GEX seem to believe that the more glue you can jam into a rebuild the better. Of course this meant all the pushrod tubes were holding back any attempt at progress we could put forth. I truly belive that GEX is a major partner with permatex. Why else would there be a pound of red goo on each tube? Once the head was off a quick glance showed nothing wrong. At least not enough wrong to show no compression at all. The pistons looked great (they must not have been GEX brand) and there were no scratches on the cyl walls. Hmmm... A closer look at the head showed that the offending side's intake valve was seated much lower in the head than the other side. An even closer look revealed that the entire seat was missing. There was almost no evidence that it ever existed. A quick shake of the heater box revealed most of the missing valve seat though. The truly amazing part of the saga to date was that TURD sucked a valve seat, and did absolutely no other damage.

It looks like an overnight order for a new head and a day in the hot sun will get it back on the road in time for the family cruise "up nort dere".

I'll post more as it happens since I now have a life for the next 3 weeks.

See you all at Fungus Fest. Chris Smith Slave to a TURD