Hi again everyone,
I was surprised to discover that VW offered AAZ cam caps as a part independent of the cylinder head casting. Here's why I'm interested:
Many years ago I purchased an AAZ from a guy in Canada. It was my first motor and it was totally unusable. The seller took a very long time to ship the motor and complained a few times about finding things -- he ultimately cobbled together a mess of worn out and incorrect parts (TDI turbo -- which looked like *** -- and manifolds, a mix of one and two stage injectors, injector lines that didn't fit, etc). The block had a melted piston and the head had the wrong cam caps and a cam that wouldn't turn. I was pretty thoroughly ripped off.
But it did provide me with a load of extra parts which turned out to be helpful when I was getting my second motor set up.
Anyway, the head had been rebuilt. Unfortunately, it was useless, on account of the cam caps. But as I said, I recently found some old stock caps. I was really surprised, given that cam caps are, afaik, usually part of the casting of a head and can't be replaced. This inspired me to look more closely at my motor, and I see that caps don't appear to be a part of the head casting. So I'm wondering if VW did something different here. Would it be possible to get a set of caps and possibly save this head? Or are these caps intended to be align-bored with the head? (a service I've already learned is hard to find and probably not worth the cost)
I'm asking both out of sheer curiosity and because it would be nice to save this head. I am not sure that I would trust the rebuild, given all that was wrong with the motor, but it might be nice to have in case of an emergency, and I could have a shop look it over.