Is my head scrap?
 

I am really fed up with the HLA rattle on my 94 1.8 and have been looking for a 99 head almost since I bought the car. Well I got this head on ebay a few weeks ago for about $41 and I even got a bag full of shims!!. Hooray problem solved.

No.

Having just got round to looking at the head I find that all of the cam journels are scored. If I had to guess I'd say that the fuck nugget I bought it from put the cam caps on in the wrong orientation when trying to re-shim it.

I'm thinking that I can probably just clean it up with a little 1200 emery paper and run it for as long as it holds together.

Any opinions on what I should do based on the following pics would be appreciated.

Thanks

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:vash:

Judging from the photos the wear is normal. Unless there is something that is not coming out on the photos, you are fine.

Don't use emery cloth or anything else on the journals, leave it as is.

Tony

have you not tried simply cleaning and decompressing your current lifters?

The pics arn't the best I'll get some more tomorow. There is some pretty bad galling on some of them, grooves bad enough to catch your fingernails on.

Yes I did try decompressing the lifters and cleaning them but no joy :(

Measure the gap with plastigauge, it looks like you may be OK.

From a hydrodynamic perspective, as long as there isn't metal sticking up toward the bearing your ok. Deep cuts will just fill with oil and be dormant. I would think as long as its not too bad even if there is a little bit of interference it would wear away.

Don't really think there is much to loose in running it though. If a cam siezes the worst thats going to happen is a sheered timing belt, or a sheered cam pin/jettisoned cam sprocket. The best sign that things are not going well in the head before anything worth of mt.net pictures occurs is sending in an oil sample after 500 miles. If you have a bunch of oxidized oil and aluminum fragments pull the plug.