The thought of "building" a turbo engine with a worn out cylinder was keeping me up at night, and I'm not really in a position to rack up a huge machine shop bill at the moment. Just when I though all hope was surely lost ANOTHER local FT motor popped up for a good deal, so I scooped it from a cool dude on the East side of Houston. All we knew is that it was supposedly good but had sat inside on a stand for quite some time.
I just had to know what I was working with so of course this one came apart, too.
Sweet Jesus hallelujah! Finally one worth messing with. I ran a ball hone through it mostly to knock the carbon off to get a good look at what was there.
This is where I should have cleaned up and painted the block and bolted the head back on. But I didn't do that. This motor was a little sludgy in the top end, and had a lot of crunchy carbon build up in the crankcase, so I pulled everything out, threw my previous "plans" out the window and ordered bearings, and H beam rods. And also picked up a used MS2 setup from a member here.
All the bottom end bearing and crank surfaces were (un)fortunately mint, so I don't anticipate any issues with rolling in new bearings. Plus I gain that piece of mind. All I'm waiting on now is a Yoshifab order, and the rods. Hopefully they get here soon.
New engine plans are NA pistons on Maxpeeding rods, new bearings and gaskets everywhere, pull and lap the valves, reclocked 15G on 90+ manifold, stick with LH and Buchka wasted spark for now, and run it. This is how a simple +T turns into a lightly built motor all because you don't want to screw around with welding an oil return into the oil pan...
As far as the rest of this hoopty goes it needs some attention as well. I was able to fix the cruise control again for the 10,000th time, that makes my 70 mile per day commute a lot nicer. After reading some threads in here I'm 99% sure that the new blower motor is wired backwards, so I need to reverse the polarity on that bad boy. I'm also somewhat confident that's causing a lack of airflow over the evaporator which is at least a partial cause of my heavy condensate/freezing evaporator issues. I need to find out why the power lock stopped working on the passenger's side, and will most likely add remote locks after that's figure out. The subwoofer ground has been an on and off issue since the initial install, and just needs to be done properly one of these days. Right now I have a janky setup with some jumper cables rolling around in the trunk. And I REALLY REALLY need to face my fears and fire up my buffer to get some more shine on the poor thing.
I'm hoping to be able to drive it to Vegas, turbo or no turbo, in September for my wedding (this looks less and less likely every day when reading the news), so now there's a time frame.