Bought a spare calibra 2.0 8V engine just after Christmas and now the weather and my new shed arrived, started the strip down. Took about 3 hours to strip with no nasty's found just one snapped stud on the exhaust that had just been left. No gouge marks in the crank bearings or big end, standard size bearings used so I just might get away without a grind, I will check with a micrometer tomorrow. The bearings have worn but only at the pulley and flywheel ends showing where the load on the engine is, the central ones look as new.
cylinder 4 is showing a lot of oil burning which would be guessing either valve stem seals or guides, both of which I am replacing. Oil leaking around the pulley/oil pump area is probably a worn seal tying in to the wear on the bearing shells there. The head looks like a recon unit as I found a tamper label dated 98 and it has been sprayed with aluminium paint where as the Calibra was a 93 it came from. It's a round tooth timing belt making it an early version (my current one is a square tooth).
Been undecided about whether to use the XE rods or stay with the NE ones, decided to stick with the NE ones with the C20GET pistons and limit the power to 280hp at the flywheel and revs to 6500 - it's a road car not a track day star........ I have a set of ARP bolts (direct from Amazon....) for the NE rods which are a known weak spot, which reminds me that it didn't take much effort to crack off the rod bolts but I had to use the jack bar handle over a sliding T bar to get the Mains bolts cracked off - maybe the standard rod bolts have stretched already.... Limiting the revs also means I can use the standard flywheel.
I bought a APSX wideband controller for the "outrageous" sum of £33 + import duty, the ECU is a speeduino V4.3c and tuner studio software, not top notch but more than adequate to replace the original calibra 8 bit cpu. Still have to acquire a LSU4.2 lambda wide band sensor.
I had bought a vernier timing pulley only to find out today I had been sold a 16V XE one - so it is going have to go back to Germany.
Uprated valve springs from newman cams to stop valve bounce with the turbo pressures, sticking with the stock cam and followers, replacing the hydraulic lifters as a set.
So I will clean the parts going off to the engineering shop - the block for +75 thou rebore, the pistons to be pressed out and new ones pressed in, the head for the valve guides to be replaced and hopefully not the crank.