The last 2 days i have spent pulling the freebie engine apart. The engine was oh so dirty from the outside, but inside there was still oil and to my amazement not a single screw was stuck. After carefully disassembling everything, i packed all parts in boxes and drove to an engineering shop about 40km from here, known to deliver quality engine work at decent rates. I did not expected them to know what a vw engine is so i went to the counter first and told them that "i had something that i´d like to have done but not sure if it was possible" They called the master engineer who came outside to my bakkie and in an instant recognised a vw engine, and told me it was absolutely no problem to clean and machine the parts for me. Ends up he has a camper pop top, it was parked in the back and he told me it was his third bus, 2 splits and one bay window. He promised to not only do whatever neccesary on the parts, but also to reassemble everything with the right parts in the right place. Ends up that there will be not much rebuilding to do myself, but in the end, how lucky can you be to find a shop engineer who did several engines already? The total cost would be 1000 rand for the work, excluding parts which he estimated on about another 1000 rand, which is $200 more or less. Wish me luck, i hope he´s right, this will give my bus quite a push.
Bart Bervoets