Caught an hour in the garage this afternoon and managed to remove the head from the mk2 engine. It wasn’t too involved – I’d already removed the inlet manifold. So today all I had to do was remove the exhaust manifold, rocker cover, a few coolant pipes and I slid the cam belt off to save stripping the front of the engine.

Everything looks in order with nothing that stands out. I did start to remove the bolt holding the inlet camshaft pulley on but with no joy – it’s pretty tight. I think I’ll have to get the impact gun on that to free it up.

Away from the garage I’ve been shopping and have ordered:

• Paint for the engine
• Megasquirt DIYPNP ECU

I think I’ll also need to order new crank and cam position sensors too. The cam position sensor on the mk2 engine seemed to have been snapped off, and I don’t think the crank sensor was even there at all. I need to investigate the cam position sensor a bit further – it looks like on the mk2 it reads the pulley and I was going to replace them with vernier pulleys.

Will hopefully steal a few evenings in the garage this week. Need to get on with the fiddly stuff of disassembling the head and removing the crank.