Just a heads up for anyone that does business with salvage yards.....

I bought a used 1.8T passat longblock with 70k on it for $1400 from Roman - right near that Cold War Remarketing place and "hotline auto salvage" - note that they are separate businesses and this should not reflect on them....

Anyways, it had a cracked oil pan, and a good size nick in the crank pulley - two things I really should not have ignored - but I decided to take Roman at his word since I really, really needed a motor, and he assured me the motor was good, that he had inspected it, and that he would refund my money if there was an issue. Lesson learned.

Long story short, I got home and started to tear it down. Bearings were damaged, and I found out the timing gear had sheared off the crank when I attempted to turn the motor over, and the timing belt/gear spun without the crank. So the valves are damaged as well. I brought the motor back to Roman, and after 2 hours of arguing, he refused to take the motor back, saying that the timing was off, and repeating about 100 times that he had tested the motor and the timing was on the mark etc etc, and insisted that I in some way had screwed with it or swapped some parts out and that I was trying to somehow rip him off or cheat him - because the timing came back and was off - but as I said above, the timing gear SHEARED off the crank...

In the end I was able to get $350 from him, and left with an extremely poor taste in my mouth. Trying to now piece together parts to put this thing back the way it was supposed to be - waiting to find out if the crank is bent as well from the machine shop, but either way, as you guys can well imagine I am taking a nice bath on this one.