The updates from this weekend were mostly piston/cylinder work.
The cylinders came in really nice. All 4 of them measured the same, were round, and had very good clearances with the supplied pistons. One of them, however, had a cracked fin from being punted by a UPS guy. This weekend, Jason got a replacement which was not a perfect match for the other 3-- it was a tad longer (.0015"), so it was chucked up in the lathe and cut down. It's perfect now and ready for installation when the time comes (after a dingle-ball hone).
The piston pin heights were off .007" from one another out of the box. This was corrected by trimming all 4 of them on the lathe to get them as close to spot on as possible (.0009" variance). Then he balanced them to within .1 gram. Most folks balance to a factor of 5-10x that.
The Deeves rings and Total-Seal second rings are still on back order, so he's done with pistons and cylinders for a while.
This stuff takes crazy amounts of time and attention, and VW parts are not aerospace quality out of the box, so it's akin to polishing turds into truffles. I'm amazed at guys who can do this and do it really well.
More details as they develop.
