The Engine rebuild begins

It's been some time since I last made any updates to project Corrado. I've been spending much of my time effort and money on rebuilding a house. I've since sold that house and was soon diverted to refreshing my Audi A4 Avant. While working on the Avant 1.8T motor in my garage, I kept staring at the Corrado which has been underneath a cover in my garage untouched for several years. It was time to pull off the cover and revive the project.

The wife and I looked at finances and budgeted some money towards getting this car back on the road. For those new to this blog, I had rebuilt much of this car except for the long block. With 179k miles, I still had even compression on all cylinders. I was able to get the car running, tuned, and with some effort smogged in strict California. There were some issues with OX in the exhaust which I eventually discovered was two broken exhaust studs on the back of the cylinder head. But I barely passed and was just happy to have the car back on the road.
I drove the car to break in all of the items that had been refreshed. After 1000 miles, those broken studs soon turned into an exhaust leak. Then I lost compression on the #2 cylinder. My overlooking of the long block which I assumed to be good simply wasn't. So back in the garage the car went.

Disappointment could not describe the status of this project. So working on the Audi and the house was a nice distraction. I've since bought another home but this time I left the remodel and refurbishing to a professional. My last house required six years for me to complete the remodel where these guys remodeled my new house in under six months. That allowed me to focus on my pending projects--and that's where the Endless Corrado project resumes.


First in line is the short block. After watching my brother rebuild his short block, we discovered that after honing the cylinder walls, there is still a perceivable indentation where the piston rings reach the top of the stroke. By simply installing the existing 81mm pistons and new rings, I run the risk of failure of the new rings when it encounters this ridge. So oversize boring is a good idea for longevity and would require the purchase of large pistons. The resulting increase in displacement is negligible. It will still be a 1.8 liter motor. My brother opted to replace the main studs with ARP fasteners which require an align bore of the crank. I'm going to reuse the existing OEM fasteners and crank arms. I will consider balancing the crank shaft if expenses allow. The only manufacturer I know that still makes forged pistons for the low compression PG motor is Woesner in the UK. The Glader was a very popular motor platform in England. They are available in the US through FourSeasons Tuning in Southern California. I ordered a set of pistons through them in a size 82mm. The machine shop will then bore the cylinder bores to match the size of the new pistons. Someones suggested going to the 83mm pistons and thus reaching the 1.9l displacement. This was common for tuners back in the day for a little more extra power. But I wanted to remain conservative and boring to 83mm is the extreme limit of boring for the PG engine block. Anything more and the cylinder walls become dangerously thin. By choosing the 82mm, I will have the option down the road to rebuild and rebore and still get more life out of this PG engine block.

At present my engine block has the Autotech lightweight flywheel attached along with the Schrick aluminum oil pan and windage tray. I'll remove those and install a standard old oil pan before taking this to the shop.

I don't see any reason to replace the connecting rods unless the shop discovers damage which I think is unlikely. There are some other items which will be necessary such as front and rear main seals, oil pan gaskets, main and crank arm bearings. The piston set includes wrist pins and new rings.

I did have another PG block in the garage that I had intended to rebuild however, the main pulley has a broken woodruff key on the nose of the crank shaft.  When I bought this from a fellow Corrado owner, I did not realize this is common on the PG blocks and all of the used short blocks I've looked at since have the same issue. It is difficult to remove the front pulley without damaging this critical piece. Since mine is still intact on the existing block, I'm going to leave this delicate procedure to the machine shop to ensure mine stays that way.

I'll be utilizing a local machine shop to do the work. One that's been recommended by locals on the VWVortex. So I'll post on how that progress when the time comes.