$2600 pump rebuild or the importance of good test equipment

[belchfire]

This will be the final entry in the ongoing saga relating to those alleged Chinese cylinder heads.
I’m referring mainly to my original post “destroy all lifters”. Also, there was some discussion about the heads themselves.  Very technical and a lot of theories.
   Briefly, here’s the history.  I have a 1981 rabbit pick up with  a 1988 golf 1.6 turbo diesel engine.
The whole reason for the project was to run vegetable oil as a fuel. After a year of fussing, I finally got it right. I was doing about 85 passing a log truck when the bypass hose blew and I fried the engine.
After some research, I decided to buy a new casting from “prothe” on E-bay. Used heads were cracked (more later) and good rebuilds were $400 or so, and still cracked. Since my valves were still good, I figured the virgin casting would be a good deal. Had the valves ground and put it on the motor. It ran until the cam gear slipped and -destroyed all lifters. Got new ones and managed to salvage the head with the damage not being in any critical areas. Dutch keyed the gear to the shaft and re installed. Ran like crap. Rebuilt injectors, nothing. Did a compression test and it read 240 psi.  Bored and installed new pistons, same compression.  Since there is no combustion chamber and I was running the thinnest gasket, the only other variable was the pre-combustion chamber. Original was 10 cc’s and the new one was 12.5cc’s. Much discussion. Bought a dead head from the same engine and installed it. On the two  good cylinders, the compression was still 240-250. I was using a home made tester consisting of a cannibalized injector, a check valve and a 1500 psi gauge.  I bought an official diesel compression tester and tried it.
500 psi! Son of a B.  Reinstalled the new head and it checked at 495 psi. The extra 2.5cc’s apparently doesn’t make that much of a difference.  I had the injection pump checked and $600 later, I got it back.
They said it was normal wear and tear though a lot of it and not necessarily from the SVO. (yea!)
Diesel fuel injection service, Portland, Or.  Good guys.
Got everything together today and it seems to run fairly well. Some minor issues but that’s fairly normal.
      So here’s what I’ve learned. (1) Invest if good test equipment. That would have  saved about a grand.
(2) Just because something was running good before a disaster, doesn’t mean that it’s OK after.
(3) The new head castings whether they’re Chinese or not seem to be a good alternative to an original one with cracks. (4) Make sure you have enough room to store 650 gallons of oil while you’re trying to figure things out. (5) Lastly, be married to a very understanding  spouse or be single.
  I will try to post a picture of my old cracked head. I sawed and polished it so that you can see what the discussion is about. There may not be a lot of meat between the valves but it goes deep. I would think that if a pressure check turned out good, that it should still be useable with the cracks