Skoda Rally Blog

… that was cursed.  By now, I should have a running Ibiza, and have it ready for the MOT.  And therefore for Longmoor Loco.  But as you may have surmised, I don’t.  I’ve had a long delay with the ported cylinder head – the company doing it said they’d done one and then found a crack on final testing, so another one was needed.  During the long wait, I had bought a standard head on eBay (just in case), and then the guy who was sending it forgot to mention it would be another week before he could send it.  Great.

Anyway, on Monday the ported head arrived – unfortunately I was out at the time (helping a friend of my Mum with a problem with her car that turned out to be a blown head gasket), so didn’t get it until gone 5pm.  I got it all unpacked and ready to fit, and then on Wednesday started looking at fitting it.  I’ve never timed up an engine with two cams on it before, so a bit of research was done before I got started, but it all seemed simple enough, and having a spare head with no valved fitted made it easy to check out what was going on.  Next up, time to get the cambelt off and everything ready to fit, which sounded simple enough, but took an hour or so to get it all done and the timing marks checked properly.  And time to bolt the head on, which was easy enough – the engine has an ARP stud set fitted so it was nice and easy to put on, and it all torqued up easily enough.

Getting there?

Unfortunately I then had to ‘pop out’ for 3 hours or so to check out a replacement car for my Mum’s friend, so that was half the day taken up, and then time to put the exhaust on, which was easy enough too.  And next up, the camshafts.  The studs for all the cam caps had been removed for machining, so it’s a laborious job to put them on, so while I procrastinated for a bit, I decided to check out the camshaft caps.  And found a problem.  A big one.  One of the caps is from another head.  They are all numbered, and when they are made, they are bolted in place and then bored; it’s not possible to get a spare one as they are machined as a set (head and caps are matched).  The ‘replacement’ one was from another engine, and nowhere near right – it’s about half a mm out of line at the parting line.

So far I’ve heard nothing in response from the company that did the porting, via email or phone.  Great.

However, today the ‘standard’ head has arrived.  So it looks like Saturday’s work will be to remove the head, get the standard one fitted and see if I can get the car running.  I’ve also been to the machinists today to chase up the brakes which I’m having reground because they had some water damage (these were brand new AP discs), they should be ready on Monday.  I have most of next week off (well, 3 of the 5 days), so hopefully it’ll be up and running soon enough, but getting it MOTed in time looks like  a real stretch.  We’ll see…

On the upside, I have tarmac tyres fitted to enough Skoda rims to do the event anyway, so plan A is all looking fine anyway.