After tearing down our car’s 1.8 liter engine and finding a fair bit of carnage, we decided to treat tragedy as opportunity and take this opportunity to not just rebuild our engine, but make it stronger, better than it was before.
Our engine’s deflection wheel–which is really a gear–had broken out of the cast aluminum lower timing chain cover. Since …
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So you're rebuilding instead of buying a motor from Metric mechanic?
The M42 was made with a forged crankshaft, while the M44 internals are cast. M44s were designed to be better commuters with less NVH (noise vibration harshness) and better economy. One other way to improve performance on the M42 is to switch from a dual-mass to single-mass flywheel. From what I've read, the dual-mass flywheel was mostly exclusive to US.
I have a spare M42 (w/a hole in the block) if you need any parts off of it. I'm also local.