NE Ohio... myke_w never told you of me?? his starting life in vw and diesels is due to my father.. LOL.. i knew him way before his own shop and his freshman year of school working in "parking"
i was fed up with family business at that point and was gettin my education.. LOL.. i was a supervisor for parking when i met him first time.. so known myke_w 13ish years...
. since i had rebuilt the head
Had you done any thing to the bottom end of your engine?? I had 2 mech lifter engines that I had high oil pressure issues with.. Complete rebuilds on both.. They both would balloon the filter unless let to warm up.. Even a blip of the go pedal to get the alt charging would blow em apart.. The one blew an oil pressure sending unit apart at the same time the filter blew.. I had the proper diesel filter (Mann, Wix, Hastings, Bosch) they'd all pop.. I tried several oil pumps, including the original that was more or less just fine.. Checked the relief valve and it seemed to be working other than it couldn't bleed enough pressure off fast enough.. Bearing clearance was within the specs..
My final solution was to run really light oil till the weather warmed up and the engine broke in..
i had taken 3 1.8 8v engines to build 1 10:1 1.8 8v.. so yea everything was touched..
one had hole in block for the hydro head.. this was back in 94..
one was a gold label vw reman block that had the 10:1 pistons, but tried to throw a rod.. good block/pistons
one was for the crank/rods that was cooked..
i used the 2nd one for the oil pump.. which in the end turned out to be wrong as it had the wrong sized oil pump gears.. but its releife valve was stuck big time.. i unstuck it.. and no more issue till well oil up to 100*c and had less then 22psi at 2000 rpm.. used the cooked oil pump at that point for proper oil pressure when warm..
still one o fmy fav engines i ever built.. actually regret buying a 2.0 in 96 to replace it.. it would pull over 7k strong.. and got 2mpg better then the 2.0 ever did..
to me it almost sounds like you had a hydro oil pump on a solid lifter engine.. but till you take the pressure releife valve apart to see if the piston moves free.. cannot say.. its spring is too hard for diy on bench..
I thought too that maybe the new pump I got was for a hydro, but apparently not... I swapped a couple used pumps on from mech engines (heck I didn't even have a 12mm block laying about at that point yet) and the same thing.. I had to run 5w20 in the thing till the weather was consistently above 40 degrees (had about 7500 miles on it at that point) then went back to 15w40 from there on out with no issue..
