Finally had a chance to get a solid several hours on the car this past weekend and hoping for another session this weekend. I decided to try another version of the aluminum "bufkin" pipe made by another vendor and had much better luck with the fit. I decided to order from Gruvenparts since they say they make them in-house, so I figured I'd have some recourse if I didn't like their version.



OEM plastic pipe, center is Gruvenparts version, right is an eBay version from "JP" (which is .4mm too large).



Next up was to get the cams installed...I fiddled with the 2 "bad" lifters that I had and even with purging and re-presurizing, they still seemed a little off compared to all of the others...decided to go with the 3 intakes on that cylinder...fingers crossed! Took my time to get the chains installed properly as I really don't want to pull it back apart for rushing through this sequence. New chains, adjuster shoes, and cam cap bolts. Now that said, I did see some telltale signs of non-OEM gasket sealer under the tensioner gasket, so my wear pattern on what I thought were the original shoes was definitely not from a 104k motor, but still glad that I have the peace of mind with new shoes!



And coming back together a bit on the front end....







Next up is to fine tune the cam timing...I'm just a hair off to my liking on getting the lock bar back on after several rotations...just need to pop the cam gears again to tweak. Once I'm happy with that, then valve covers back on and back on...this will give me a lot of my bench space back, so then on to the turbo rebuilds...