I soon found out that 150 hp for a 2.5 ton vehicle just isn't enough. At around the same time I discovered that it used quite some oil, so I started chasing oil leaks. After I finally pulled the intake (after having replaced the old rope crankshaft seal) i was totally disgusted and amazed by what I found..

318 without any oilchanges....click to enlarge

I somehow got the impression that the previous owner(s) never ever changed the oil of this engine. It doesn't just look black, but the 2-3 mm layer of goo was sticky too.. The people at the machine shop that did the boring and honing for me asked if it had been grease lubricated or something. Even with steam-cleaners etc., they had a very hard time making the block and the heads presentable again. Even they had never seen anything as dirty as this one.

Anyway.. This gave me the opportunity to start hunting for another engine, and rebuilding this one. Improving it at that. After some searching (they're relatively rare in NL) I found one, with its A727 still attached. I just switched the entire engine/tranny combo's, and started tearing the "old" 318 apart some more.