Last year I decided, after a long quick drive, that it was time to swap typical sensibility for lude fun. Like all lude things the fun was short lived, and the pain to follow not so. It started with a typical hot Friday in late 2010. I'd spent the three weeks prior overseas on business and had returned for just the weekend enroute to India. The B4 cooling system failure occured unnoticed in the midst of catch up conversation and by the time I was 5km from home the head gasket was baked. Though I wouldn't know this for some time. I left it with a mechanic to replace the radiator and set off on holidays and proceeded spend most of the next 4 months overseas. So the car sat, largely un-driven until I finally had the chance to spend some time in Sydney again.
Boost pressure was the first sign that something might be wrong. The car doesn't run crazy tune, but it's fairly stable at 16 psi on both turbo stages with moderate ambient temperatures. But it seemed that after this little incident 0.7 bar had become more normal. I suspected compression given the overheating history, and champagne bubbles in the coolant agreed with this hypothesis. So, expecting a fairly cheap outcome, the decision was easy, let's pull the motor and see what can be done.
A friend offered his bosses workshop, and his far more adept spanner assistance, and so it began...
