Recon 1.6 Gti engine

:dontknow: Not sure if this should be in restoration or not but here goes,

I am about to start restoring my '80 Gti in earnest soon, and at the moment the car does not have the original engine in it as the original ran a big end bearing, due to this the original engine has been sitting in my garage for years (about 12!) ops: . If I am going to be as thorough with this resto as I mean to be, I want the original engine in the car, now my question!
Because the engine block has been sitting for so long there has been dust, spiders webs even rust gone down all the oil and water channels in the block, I was wanting to know in your experience at what point does it become impossible to recondition a block? As far as I know the block itself is not porous, but I would be worried about going to the expense of getting new internals fitted only for a piece of grit/rust from these channels to get into the oil system is it possible for these to be honed out in any way or would it just be a high power jet type clean?

Thanks for reading,

Dougie

A decent (yes I know difficult to find?) engine/machine shop will have acid baths and allsorts of power washers, long wiggly brushes and everything to totally refurb any bits of engine. With enough time and ? anything can be done.

They should also be able to strip down the block and head and report back what needs doing and how much?

Cheers mate!  

you should be able to get it crack tested, again as per above this would be done at any good engine recon shop.

Thanks for the replys,

do you think an engine shop would prefer it if the internals were completely stripped from the block as I am assuming (maybe wrongly) that things like the crankshaft, con rod ends and certainly the top of the piston heads are very rusty? I will be using most of these parts from the engine that is in the car.

Dougie