Stripdown of paneuropaul's engine

It's hard to always qualify but hopefully the adage that you get what you pay for holds up.
There's another one though about pleasing people..

 

Before Rob Parry built my engine I visited him many times and chatted and looked at what he was doing, discussed the many ways to achieve a big type-4...
Let me guess - I probably spent 40 hours in his company talking about everything engine related under the sun. There was never a price - I just said do it as you would wish and let me know the damage when you're done and I don't want any kind of warranty.
At the end, when he'd built it, though I had given him a pile of maybe useable engine parts too, I asked him how much labour he wanted and he said £200! He wouldn't take more than than the £400 I managed to press into his hand. We are still friends.

 

Some people you bond with, others not so...

 

Raby charges 30-40k usd i believe.

 

Bargain. I charge 100k minimum for a type 4! (Sterling)

 

So how much does it really cost to rebuild a type 4 engine properly

 

How much have you got?
or
If you have to ask you can't afford one.
or
If you'd gambled on this one, turnkey DIY for under £1K

 

'Slike anything really isn't it. If you can read you can put stuff together.
The skill you pay for is the tradesman, or builder in this case, knowing what the books don't tell you, selecting the right parts, and then standing by what she/he's done.
How much does that cost?
As Zedders said earlier, probably not enough!

 

I hope I'm building mine properly. The parts are not exactly cheap (if you can get hold of them) but I'd hate to think what the labour charges would be. Most of it is pondering, googling and asking inane questions on TLB

 

Ah sorry Steve you type faster than me.

 

If I had to do it all again I'd Subaru like you are. At least if it implodes a replacement is comparatively cheap.
In fact when I looked at DIYing a different cam, new B&P and big valve heads for my 2.4 PKRboos price for the whole Subaru job was about the same!!
AND I would still have had mine to sell.

 

Agreed, it's a no brainer if you're more more interested in longevity and usage rather than a 'purist' VW


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Threads often go off at a bit of a tangent but this one has lost me.

I thought the engine was being disassembled to find out what was wrong with it and why it failed. All that has been found is a dropped valve guide and a somewhat dubious assembly. Nothing that would cause the engine to overheat but we don’t know what was hot. And apparently it was also noisy, but all engines are hot and noisy.

It would have been nice to have learnt something but it looks like that isn’t going to happen now.

 

Pretty much the same as mine. No real answer afaik

If you want noisy

 

kicking the Marmite out of it at 90 mph would do that though eh?


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Exactly; something broke but we don’t know why. Just finding a fault doesn’t find the root cause of a problem.

 

We kind of know when heads get way too hot the valve guides fall out. CR is an appealing guess for a problem spanning 3 engines, but with dished pistons on this one can the CR get to that level?

 

I doubt it, but we don’t know what the combustion chamber volume is. Or the deck height.
EDIT. I couldn’t get the CR high enough on the engine I built with dished pistons, but that was with 1800 heads with bigger combustion chambers compared to 2.0l heads. Current 2.3l engine has flat top pistons and 9.0:1 CR – it doesn’t overheat but I do use 98 octane E5.

 

Hopping in from the back here.
What carbs was it running as a lean choke on duals can cause an overheating exhaust valve guide to slip out and have a party...I know and
usually ends in tears
Get them set up by a professional.