Consequences...

Here are some consequences:

Cause 1: Leave flywheel nut loosened a while back while changing oil seal. I think I went off for a cup of coffee and forgot to tighten the nut beyond finger tight. Drove it 40 miles..
Have crank and flywheel 8 dowelled as a fix for oval holes in crank and flywheel.

Cause 2: Buy Cheese Metal tappet screws accidentally sold by VWH over a year ago.
Get so fed up with repeated tappet adjustments and burred adjusters that I replaced the screws with swivel foot adjusters.
Not realising that these can bounce sideways and push stock rocker arm wavy springs to destruction.
Have rocker walk sideways off No2 exhaust at 60mph.
Engine backfires and kicks and loosens the flywheel which is precariously fixed follwing previous damage.
Replace rocker arms with HD rocker arms and back to stock screws. but ..
Vibration from flywheel causes gearbox input shaft seal to fail as it has hardened over time.
Gearbox oil gets on clutch and clutch slips. RPM goes very high suddenly ..
Oil coming through oval dowel holes helps .
Engine goes rattly as the new dowel holes go oval too and the flywheel moves around.

Cause 3: Somebody since 2005 manages to drop engine and crack the block under the oil cooler stand.
Managed to jam copper pipe in oil way and JB weld it in place reducing oil leak.

End result -
need to replace engine block flywheel and crank.

Currently about 60% of the way through a rebuild based on my old engine heads, tinware, ancilliaries, P&C's and an engine got for £51 on eBay providing block, con rods, flywheel and crank. Replacing camshaft and cam followers and all bearings.
Just as well its sunny most of the time as this rebuild is outdoors.

 

That sounds like a bad run

On the way back though by the sounds of it!

 

What was the question?

 

Should I finish something before going for a coffee...?

I used to leave the phone off when working on other peoples vans..

 

Weigh it in.

 

I think it's more of a case of heed from my mistakes!!

 

You should of had a cup of tea instead of coffee.

 

There is no question.

Just tracing the causes of destruction.

 

And you know how you can drop the distributor drive down the hole and lift it up to turn it.
Not this one there is a ridge in the hole. So I tried to get it back up and it stuck. I tried turning the crank and the dissy drive tilted over slightly and something went spoink inside the engine.
So I took the engine apart again.
It turned out to be the dissy drive gear on the crank losing metal.
This time I fitted the OG gears on the crank as I had some spares from the eBay engine. And then put it all back together again.

 

Yep never turn the engine without a distributor pressing the shaft down.

 

Anti-clockwise is ok... Cw will pop the shaft up and chew the drive gear

 

But that said, engines don't get rotated until a dizzy is installed