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pug-ham · 2010-10-25T10:34:54Z

After my return from the Ring in May my car had developed a mysterious what I first thought to be a misfire possibly caused by picking up some dirty fuel on the drive back or the 20+ minutes sat at 6.5k+ on the autobahn with the oil & water temps on the higher end of the scales. One downside to running the oil & water remote heat exchanger. :( Strangely I didn't notice misfire when we first arrived back in England, in fact, I didn't notice its appearance until almost home but that might've been because when I stopped for fuel etc it wasn't sat idling long enough. Once I was home & with the MOT looming near I started swapping bits over hoping for a quick fix. New plugs, leads, coilpack, inlet air temp Sensor, TPS, crank sensor, ignition module & better fuel it improved slightly but it by much. I thought I'd try a compression test to see if it was something worse than expected. It was, #3 cylinder was showing low compression. :( I checked the valve clearences to find they were all pretty tight, #3 down to just a few thou so I removed the cam & took the shims down to a friends engineering firm to have them surface ground for me to get the exact figures required. Once they were refitted #3 still wasn't at the exact gap check (still to tight) but only by approx one thou so I put it all back together to see if it was right considering that shouldn't make much difference. It ran better at idle but still wasn't how it should be so I decided it was time to take the engine out & put another one in at least temporarily before cadwell in July. I picked up a 1.9 from ebay for £35 & took a drive down to Buckley to collect it one afternoon after work. Got it home & started to strip it down, everything seemed ok when it was all in pieces until I set about cleaning the block to find a nice crack running along the back on the water jacket side so that was scrap. I was lucky enough to find another engine from a mates celler / garage just a few miles away so I went down to check that out after work & it all seemed OK. All the head bolts loosened OK so I returned the following evening to collect it although I did notice one was missed the spacer but the rocker cover had a sticker on stating it had been skimmed & a thicker head gasket should be used. Hmm, yeah, OK. It turns out this bolt had a stripped thread in the block & a loose nut on the bottom so I ordered a helicoil kit hoping for an easy fix. This started the first of several trips to my mates engineering firm. Unfortunately the block thread was to far gone, highlighted by the fact the helicoil tap ran straight through without any need to drill it out to size first. :( I put in a helicoil insert anyway & took the bottom end back home to see what torque it was happy with taking. It took 50lbft fine but the helicoil insert pulled out before it got to 70lbft so I was back to my mates for it fixing. When I took the sump off to remove the oil pump etc to make it easier to stand I found the oil pump was missing one mounting bolt & the location for it on the block was exploded, I assume due to someone fitting the oil pump bolt when the hole had some oil in & this hydrauliced up until it cracked the corner killing the threads used by the bolt. he made a nice stainless insert to fit into the block from underneath the headbolt hole so its still there as a spare block should I ever need one that badly. I put a wanted ad in the meantime looking for just a block or scrap bottom end with good block. Pugpete1108 (from 205gtidrivers forum) pm'd me about a 1.6 engine he had given away for the head & the rest wasn't getting used so I got in touch with Dan (jemehan) to see if he still had it. Luckily he had so it was arranged for Pete to collect & then I'd get it off Pete at Pugfest. I'd decided to use the engine in my car as it was for a Cadwell day in July a few of us from here & drivers were booked on because once the revs were above 2k it made no difference & you don't spend much time on track at that rpm so I figured it would either be the death of the engine or survive with no further degradation. The later stayed true & it was still working until I started to strip the car down to remove it although there was a lot of Mayo in the breather pipes this time. :unsure: Intentions for the "temp" engine was just a quick swap of the 1.9 internals from the ebay engine into the block from Pete but after reading Tom Fentons XU5T build topic & having wanting to use some 1.6 pistons in a 1.9 for a while things started to change spec. I bought a head that had been skimmed slightly (0.007" or 0.175mm) during a very recently rebuild so even with the 1.6 pistons upping the c/r to approx 11:1 I figure the skim wouldn't matter much extra being such a light skim. I used a mates pressure washer to clean the block, only to find it had previously been painted silver when I started scrubbing with a wire brush. Nevermind, the in...

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