skiracer

Incredible work, yelcab - all I can say is that you must love your wife very much!

yelcab

All in, just a tad over $10K.

yelcab

I do love her, but ... I had a choice of fixing this beast for $10K or buying her a new Lexus for $70K, and I much rather have her in a Porsche 997 for $10K.

PV997

Thanks for taking us along for the ride and great work.

This is why I get annoyed when there's pile-on peer pressure to push people toward a $30k FSI rebuild when they find they have borescoring. FSI makes a great product and I would love to have one, but I cannot justify the cost. That would particularly be the case if I was hit with bore scoring out of the blue and hadn't planned to spend the money. I've got one kid who just started college and another who thinks he's Caltech material in a few years.

Yelcab just demonstrated that if one controls the "while we are in there" impulse that a high quality rebuild can be affordable. Plus this is an engine rebuild, not neurovascular brain surgery. Anyone can do this provided they take the effort to learn everything they can, do their research, exercise careful attention to detail, and take their time. In this day and age where information is at ones' finger tips the excuse that "I don't know how" just doesn't fly anymore. Plus with the really long lead times of shops like FSI, this will be faster.

I wouldn't recommend people undertake this as their first DIY and I'm not suggesting that. But if you are handy, or have a friend willing to help that is, and spend the time to learn everything before diving in, this is doable for pretty much everyone on this board. Plus if one shops around and goes OEM wherever they can the parts costs are also manageable. I posted my parts list up in comment #31 as I was surprised at how affordable this could be.

Thanks yelcab for showing us it can be done.

jchapura

Did that include the specialty tools?
Thank you for this thread.

TheMurse

@yelcab Congratulations, job well done! One of these days I'm gonna have an engine rebuild, with or without bore scoring, and your efforts have paid off for you and set an example for me. Cheers!

yelcab

Oh hell no. Plan on $1K for that stuff, but you will have it forever. I don't count tools as expenses. There is no way for me to justify a dozen torque wrenches, three Snapon among them. Good tools just make the job faster and safer.

r_towle

Thrilled to see you out driving again.
I was contacted by my engine builder and mine is next.
we already sent the case to millenial for Boring and replating with nickelsil, so that is all back

now it’s up next….so I’m hoping to have it back soon.

it is worth saving.

rivh

yelcab

I think this is the final update.

After the initial start up, I saw two oil leaks:

1. Left side of engine, toward front of the car, in the vicinity of the AOS bank 1 connection.
2. Right side of engine, over bank 2 valve cover where the Valdez incident caused massive oil leak washing over the valve cover.

I could not figure out why. So I just let it ride for 200 miles. As of this morning Leak 1 is totally gone with the car parked slightly up hill. Leak 2 over the valve cover is gone.

Leak 3 is a one drop per drive at the head gasket of bank 2, over the chain box area. I did use some copper spray over the head gasket in that area but I guess that is not enough. I might try tightening up those M6 bolts a bit.

I stuck a borescope behind the alternator to find that there is oil pooling at the crevices on the left side. No doubt this was from the large Valdez oil leak and it will just need time to work itself out. With any luck, the head gasket chain box leak might decide to go away after 1,000 miles. Stranger things have happened.

My wife is happy she has her car back. The 4.0 engine does get up and go.