John,

Thanks for your helpful list of needed changes, that makes it sound much less doable than I was hoping. I am just afraid of putting an additional $2,300 (the extimated cost of replacing the engine this time) into having another used motor installed and then being burned again.

In response to your question about what happened, two weekends ago I took the car up into the mountains for the weekend. The car performed great. I was almost home when I noticed a little hesitation in the turbo, nothing serious but noticable. The next day I made an appointment with the shop that put the engine in last year after I first bought the car. That night I began to get some pinging in the engine, I was thinking it was the turbo going out on me. When I took it in the next morning, the shop manager said that the turbo was fine but that they couldn't figure out what the pinging was about. They had found that the number 1 cylinder was down to about 75 psi, but that all the other cylinders were fine. They swapped the #1 and #2 injectors to see if the reduced compression in #1 was a result of a bad injector in the first cylinder. They couldn't find anything else wrong with the car, but the car still ran like crap. The shop manager assured me that it was just bad gas and that I just needed to "drive out" the remaining gas in the tank. This didn't make sense because I had put Chevron high octane gas in the car for the weekend and had run 3/4 of the tank out without a problem.

We put some gas drying agent into the tank and I tried driving the car home. I could quickly tell however that it was running so rough there had to be something other than bad gas going on. I returned it to the shop told them of my concern and asked them to take another look at the problem. The next day I found out that their solution to fixing the problem was to leave the car in their back lot and idle it for several hours to try and remove the bad gas. They never did re-examine the situation, just told me to come and get the car, fill it with some good gas and it would be fine.

I nursed it the four miles to my house and it never did start again. Before it stopped running I did hook up my timing light and found that I couldn't even see the timing mark when the stroblight went off. Out of frustration with the first shop I towed the car behind my truck about 4 miles to another shop (something I learned that I shouldn't have done from the machanic at that shop). The second mechanic did both a wet and dry compression test and found that I now had no compression in the first two cylinders during the dry test and about 20 psi when the wet test was done. Another one bites the dust.

So here I am with a very clean car that I think is one of the nicest looking cars ever designed and the most fun car I have every owned, trying to figure out what to do. I can't justify pouring another 2 grand into the car, but it makes me sick to think about selling the car.

I am considering trying to find a good used engine on my own and swapping the engines myself. I was thinking that a non-turbo engine would be a cheaper and less overwhelming project, but your advise indicates otherwise. This would be the first project of this size that I would be taking on since my dad and I swapped engines in a 72 Chevy pickup during my teenage years. How problematic is it to put a new turbo engine in one of these things. I have worked on quite a few different engines, but not any projects this big. What advise would you give?

Sorry about the length of my explanation, I am just frustrated about how this whole thing has been handled.

Thanks,

Kelly