Starting over

 I set the engine on the shelf in the fall of 2009 and began hoping to hit the lottery so I could buy a Rotax 912.  I pouted all through the Holidays and worked on finishing the shop at the farm. After the first of January I moved all my equipment there which included a lathe, vertical mill, valve grinder, seat grinder, mig and tig welder and a couple of truck loads of misc junk. I began looking around for something to build and everyone said to work on the engine.

 I didn't see the point in wasting the money, I wasn't having fun anymore. I finally gave in and tore the engine down just to see what happened. To say I was shocked when I took the heads apart would be an understatement and then I got really REALLY mad. The valve seats had a ridge or lip around the base that prevented the valves from sealing and the guides had way to much slop. I took the heads to my local engine builder and he nearly laughed me out of the shop. " You paid how much, a THOUSAND dollars for this junk? !!!!!!" I can't print the convesation from that point on. I asked what it would take to make them right and he said a complete rebuild. This meant all new silicone bronze valve guides ( the originals appeared to be plain brass) a three angle cut on the seats and while he had them apart just put new exhaust valves in them.  After all the problems I had with the engine I took it all the way down to the crank and started over. I found a few other problems that I should have checked but didn't the first time and corrected those. I reassembled the bottom of the engine and took down my old original cooked heads and began dreaming.

 My son in law was up early one Saturday and stumbled across some aluminum brazing alloy on one of those paid advertisement tv shows, so he ordered some and promtly decided it wasn't worth a nickle. He gave it to me. It was in a  box of junk that we hauled out to the farm and I threw it on the shelf forgetting about it.
 I had thought of adding fin extensions to the heads on the original build but didn't put forth much effort. I tried to tig weld one on that was not successful so I just forgot about it. I wanted to fly. I had been doing research on the Vw all along the build of the airplane and that is when I discovered Bob Hoover's blog about the Fat Fin Head mod. I had come up with the idea on my own and started looking around for examples of someone doing it. His mod wasn't quite what I had in mind and he made some good points against it, one was the modified head would likely not fit in existing tooling for repair. So I moved on without it, afterall, everybody else was flying without doing the extensions.
 One day I was thinking about adding some surface area to the head fins again and began to exam the old heads I had begun with. I happened to look up and there was this stuff called Durafix that my son in law had bought just laying on the shelf. The lights came on.