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Saturday night I discovered that the #2 cylinder in my Beetle's engine had a big crack running around the base.
Well, that means a Change In The Plan. One of my big faults is I like to have a plan and stick to it. I'm happy to have a tree of contingency plans, that's just a plan with fallback positions (I'm a programmer, after all). But catastrophic excursions from The Plan tend to make me grumpy. ("Hey, Craig, instead of going to the airplane museum, which is what the plan always has been for this weekend, let's go to the Museum Full Of Paintings Titled Madonna and Child. I told my best friend that you wouldn't mind changing the plan and meeting her there and staying for the day"). [Just to be clear, my wife does not do this. She is aware and tuned to this particular neurosis of mine. When plans do change, as is inevitable sometimes, I sigh and mostly accept it gracefully, knowing that she doesn't it intentionally and that we work very well as a team.]
Back to the car. The cracked cylinder was a major Plan Deviation, so I was grumpy on Sunday because I wanted to be assembling engine. Monday, I called Vee-Dub Parts in California to ask them to send me more parts. Cylinders and pistons wear together, and a set isn't that bad, so I decided to just replace the lot in the engine. As long as I'm getting new pistons and cylinders, it seemed silly to be putting one new cylinder head and one old one on the engine, so I asked Vee-Dub to send me (in addition to the piston & cylinder set) another one the cylinder heads that they sent me before. It's a stock head, except that it has deep thread spark plug holes (3/4 of a inch rather than 1/2 which is stock for VWs). That's when the conversation went downhill.
I was told there was no such thing, that cylinder heads that require deep spark plugs are all high performance heads that have specialized over-sized valves. I was pretty sure that the valves were stock size, but I hadn't measured specifically. I said that I would call them back with measurements and the date of the last invoice so they could at least look it up.
Yesterday (Tuesday) I called them again and spoke to someone else, this time armed with more information. I read him off the casting number and a description of the head, and so he said that he'd check it out and call me back. By the way, here's the head in question:
The casting number section shows the part number:
The big number is the casting number, which says something about when it was cast and where. The smaller number on top is the official part number: 043-101-375H. This is what I read off to the guy on Tuesday, and he said he'd try to find someone who carried that part, and that he'd call me back. No call Tuesday.
I did get a call today, however. They called me back and after talking to 6 suppliers, they did find one that would sell them that head. He told me on the phone similar information to what I found on Google last night:
That head, the 375H head, was manufactured for Mexican fuel-injected beetles. I don't think they've been made for a long time. He had no idea how I came to buy one from their store. (When I made the original purchase, I was told that it had the deep spark plug hole. Let me stress that wasn't a surprise; what I didn't realize was how rare that head was.)
So Vee-Dub Parts totally came through for me, and they're sending a piston-cylinder set and another new head that matches my existing one. I sort of liked these guys before, but now they've earned my business for VW parts, and I'll buy frmo them unless they absolutely don't carry what I need.
Now waiting for parts again. You do a lot of that when you own a vintage car