Mystery Solved?

April 2002 The 1.7L engine was rebuilt and put up for sale. Having a few days left of the class I built that engine in, I brought in some of the 356 parts to clean up and inspect.

The crank cleaned up very well and is useable as is. Same with the rods. The one head is basically worthless, as are some of the valves, but that was expected. The spare head looks good. Then I put the case in the "hot tank". I hadn't noticed anything before, but with all the grime cleaned off a lot of things now made sense. The odd lifter. The low mileage parts, the hints the engine had never been back in a car.

The case had been damaged. From the looks of it, one of the lifters had lost it's head, and banged around in there enough to knock some of the casting loose. The lifter bore had been fixed by someone who knew what they were doing; that repair looks great. But what WASN'T fixed were two small cracks in the case, by one of the dowel pins.

My guess: The engine was rebuilt (poorly) after the lifter bore had been bushed. After the rebuild, the engine was started up for a trial run. Probably as the case warmed up, oil found it's way out of those small cracks. Someone then tried to "fix" the cracks with some sort of epoxy or sealer or whatever.

Oil had already seeped out the cracks, so the sealer had a very poor chance of working (not that it was a great choice to start with!). After the sealant set up, the leak was still there, and being faced with the choice of starting over with a new case, or repairing the existing case, the owner gave up. Hence the newly rebuilt engine that got a little run time on it and then sat for who knows how many years. I still can't explain the water in the cylinder, but that could be as simple as the engine sitting out in the rain.

I'm now faced with a similar decision as the last rebuilder. Do I fix this case, find a new case, or abandoned the project? At least I haven't bought any parts to put it back together yet.

The Ghia project has been underway for three years now. In that time I've MAYBE put 100 miles on the car. The original engine is still installed and with a little work it'd be driveable. The focus is now on getting the car back on the road. I'm VERY tempted to get a later model 1600 Type 1 engine for it, along with a newer transaxle, and call it a day. The only sure thing is, the 356 engine I already have won't be going back together any time soon.