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>>The ONLY problem with just starting the engine up would be if the wood were thick enough that it could jam sideways between the piston crown and the head and wouldn't compress enough to let the piston go past TDC. >> Here's another thing the wood could do: I once bought a H*nda motorcycle cheap because it had been sitting in the guy's shed for 3 years. I just wanted to know empirically that the engine was not frozen. So, over my protests to just take the alternator cover off & rotate it manually the guy hooked up his CAR BATTERY & proceeded to send millions of amps through the tiny $350 H*nda starter. I said, "Okay, that's enough" after the first crank, but this genius kept going for another five minutes, & when I tried to stop him he kept saying, "Maybe it will start! It sounds like it might start!" Anyway, he kept cranking until there was a bang & sparks & it wouldn't turn anymore. I thought, there went the starter, so I talked him down some more thinking I'd still be ahead even after buying one of these expensive little Jap parts. Come to find out, after I trailered the bike home, someone had dumped rice in the gas tank. Somebody took "riceburner/rice-rocket" a little too seriously, with the end result being tiny granules of the Asian staple in every, and I mean every nook & cranny of carb #1 & cyl. #1. Turns out some rice had gone through the carb & into the cylinder & lodged itself between the exhaust valve & its seat so the piston could only travel about 300 degrees of revolution before it hit the exhaust valve. So, all that to say, look out for that. It could happen to a motor near you. I wasn't sure what was wrong inside the cylinder, so I was trying to take the head off. There's a complicated marking procedure due to the dual overhead cams & timing chains & gears & all that good stuff. Well, this procedure involved rotating the engine all the way through several times, so I couldn't do that & I didn't trust myself to just take the timing chains & cams apart. Eventually I funneled a vacuum up to the spark plug hole, rotated the engine back & forth vacuuming out the chunkies, changed the oil & gas, installed the plug & my rice rocket fired right up. I don't know the clearance between the piston crown & the valves at either TDC in the VWs, but I'd turn things by hand with judicious use of a vacuum before using the starter. Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------- Search old messages on the Web! Visit http://www.vwtype3.org/list/