I'm working on a 1985 Vanagon with a stock 1.9L gas engine. It was "remanufactured" by VW about 50K miles ago. It began leaking a bit of coolant over the last couple of years and a few months ago it began leaving 4 to 5" puddles on the shop floor. I decided to remove the engine to R&R the heads because I was going to replace the exhaust system as well and I know it's much easier to access the head and bolts for both projects. I've got the engine on my bench, the heads removed and cleaned but I'm stumped regarding the condition of a couple of the intake valve tops. There are small areas of missing metal that looks like a coating of some sort. One valve (#4) has just a few 1/8" pieces missing and the other (#1) has perhaps 20% of the coating missing in various sizes but none larger than 1/8". The missing metal is on the outer, flat part of the valve. Can anyone shed some light on this condition? Is it fatal? I'd like to get at least another 50K out of this engine without pulling the heads again!
An hour of searching the Vanagon archives didn't reveal any insight to my situation. Perhaps I'm not using the correct search words. I scoured Benny Boy's site but didn't see what I was looking for. Perhaps it's in French! (Thanks for the help your site did give me, Ben) I've also posted this on the samba forum.
Thanks, Andrew
Ps. Is "found missing" an oxymoron or is it just my Maine accent creeping back? |
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