What have I done....

Well, proof positive that I have lost my mind. I am throwing caution, prudence, and conservatism to the wind, and trusting this thing called 'community' to get me through a full rebuild on a vintage engine that NO ONE wants to touch.

There is a real possibility that I'm going to flush a bucket of cash down the toilet, "drop the baby", do it wrong, miss a step. But here I am, out on the edges of my experience again, pushing up against the unknown and hoping I don't take a wrong step and blow a lot of cash on my own hubris.

The old hands on thesamba.com have convinced me that I can do this with the help of Tom Wilson's "How to Rebuild Your Volkswagen Aircooled Engine", the official Bentley shop manual, and Johnny Muir's Compleat Idiot book, plus majority assistance from the community. Rick Higgins

The deed is done. One head and cylinders off.
The case internals are now compromised to the environment.
There is no going back now.

I should place more trust in the community. it is rather a whacky thing, and often an echo camber of unreliable information. But I'm going to have to make the leap of faith and hope that they don't drop me.

Lots of things can go wrong:

• Vendor parts can be junk or 'not as advertised' or not to spec. 
• The community can abandon me partway through the process and leave me with a box of parts and no way to know how to reliably put them back together.
• The print resources (Wilson, Bentley, Higgins, Muir & Muldoon) all cover different sections in ferocious detail. Wilson and Bentley have specs, Higgins has video but skips steps in interest of time (and its still a three hour video.) Muir offers practical observations but they are tempered by procedural advice that is forty years out of date.
• Most of all, as Steve Kent (aka Merlin the Wrench) of Sacramento, California says, "Type 4 engine parts can go NLA while you're on the phone ordering them."

Apparently none of this matters to me, because I'm charging ahead anyway.

I contacted Vince's Auto Repair in Clementon, NJ as they have a machine shop and my father has a pre-existing relationship with them. When I asked for a quote to have two gears pressed off of the crankshaft and have the engine case hot-tanked (to get it scrupulously clean) I was met with what I can only describe and nervous caution. They would need to see the parts, see how bad the case was, etc. etc. Which surprised me. I'm given to understand that a hot-tank job ought to run about $25, and be a cash and carry sort of event. Pressing two gears off? This isn't even machining...yet.

Frankly, this is the kind of nonsense with which I expect to be met at every turn. "We don't work on those."

What...like it might ruin your reputation?