And the dead-beat goes on...

Last week I bought a motor for the GTI. It has 75K miles on it, and hopefully it should be good for a few thousand more. The timing belt, tensioner, water pump, thermostat, etc, etc showed up and so I'm ready to that bit of work. Picked the motor up from Jeff, seemed like one really nice guy, and the boys at Hoods Motorsports (www.hoodsmotorsports.com) really helped with some good advise on making the swap. Appreciate it guys! Maybe sometime when I'm back up your way I can buy you a beer.

The GTI saga continues...

Flash and I worked on the GTI some this weekend. We pulled off a lot of pieces to inspect the timing belt and we found that the timing belt was fine. The timing belt tensioner on the other hand wasn't fine. The stud mounting it to the block had broken and caused the failure. The motor will have to be pulled so that we can drill the offending stud and use an E-Z Out to hopefully get that sucker out of there. We followed directions exactly - so the stud was installed with a thread-locking agent (AKA: We're so screwed!).

On the other hand the Beetle project moved forward - the body is all back together and primered. The engine isn't running very well right now - hope that we can get that fixed and I can start driving it this week.