Open heart surgery

Unfortunately, we were not happy with this backyard situation. Sure, we were allowed to sleep in the car, but our car is completely open in the backyard with no roof or anything and our parts are lying in the sand. Then it rained for 3 days and everything was full of sand. So we went to the city to find another workshop and quickly found one: The Bosch Diesel Center. In Bolivia, the engines we have are banned, the only diesel vehicles are construction machines or large SUVs (which also explains why we were at construction machine mechanics), so it is difficult to find a qualified mechanic. The owner did his training in Germany and then returned here. We liked the idea of a South American-German solution. So we ordered a tow truck again and off we went to the other side of the city to the Bosch Diesel Center.

We arrived there with the initial situation that only the cylinder head had to be replaced. However, our mechanic (Carlo) wanted his tool shop to take another look and measure it, etc... They had no good news for us, the cylinder block is not damaged but warped, apparently this happens when the engine overheats strongly and then cools down quickly (e.g. pouring a bucket of water over it), well let's put it this way: we certainly didn't do that. In addition, the cylinders are heavily worn, which is unusual for the mileage. At this point, a big thank you goes out to the idiots from the Bundeswehr! You managed to destroy the engine in 20 years and 120,000 kilometers. And now we have to pay for it.

Now we have three options.

- Have the cylinder head and block reworked in the tool shop and import the individual parts

- Order a cylinder head from Argentina and only have the block reworked

- Use a replacement engine (Toyota)

Unfortunately, all solutions are not ideal and also relatively expensive, especially when you consider that a VW T4 engine costs €600 in Germany.

Furthermore, solutions 1 and 2 take forever.

We still can't decide, but we tend to go for the replacement engine option because it is the fastest, we can always swap the engine back in Germany.