'73 914 2.0....what to do first?, New to a project like this...where to start? Options

[AKFish]

HI there, my name is Dominic and I have an avid reader of this forum for nearly a year, now its time to get rolling on my project...

About this time last year, I purchased a 1973 914 2.0. The previous owners bought it as part of a bundle of 914's and only kept a couple.
I have some documentation from when the car was first purchased, but the more recent owners have proven elusive. It was owned by a member here named "kurbfrog" but he/she has not responded to my contact attempts, so recent history is a bit murky. Sounds like the guy I really want to talk to, headed south of the border in a bit of a hurry.
I acquired the car in a partially disassembled state. The engine, a 2.0 with it's original FI still attached, is out and pretty much everything is removed from the engine bay and the interior. Many of the removed parts are carefully bagged up and some even have labels. On the whole, the car is in pretty solid condition, however, there are some of the typical rust issues.....
The engine shelf has been cut for A/C and there is rust in the hell hole and I can see rust developing in the outer long (I think that's what it is called). My reading here would suggest that there is a lot more than meets the eye.
What I would really like to do is find out if the engine runs...and if so, just put the car back together and drive it for a while. I could decide after that, if a "rustoration" is right for me...I have zero background in fabrication/welding.

Question: What are the MUST DO items to perform on the engine while it is out, to give me the best odds of getting the car going again?

P.S. My car came with this 1975 Roller that is pretty well gutted.

[bbrock]

On double-walled repairs, I took two approaches. My preferred option was to cut the outer layer oversized so that the patch for the inner layer was smaller than the outer and weld the patches in separately. If the original layers were spot welded together at the patch location, I would punch the outer layer patch before butt welding it in so I could plug weld the patches together after the butt welding was done. That option may have been overkill, but I felt it got me closest to how the original structure was built.

Option 2 was done when there was not enough room for option 1, and was what you are thinking. Spot/plug weld the two layers of metal in the patch together and then butt weld them in as a unit. When I did that, I ground the edges of the openings and the patch to make a 'V' and made sure my welds were striking the bottom layers to make sure both layers of the patch were solidly butt welded to the structure. It does no good to install a double-layer patch if only the top layer is welded to the surrounding structure.

Make sure you treat the rust inside those longs while you have them open. I sprayed the insides of my longs with phosphoric acid using a garden sprayer. After that sat for a day, I rinsed them out with water and very thoroughly dried them with a heat gun, making sure to bake all of the seams dry. My longs were opened wide so I followed the acid treatment with two coats of epoxy primer. After everything was welded shut again, I coated the internals with Eastwood Internal Frame Coating. Then after I had painted, I coated all the internals with 3M Cavity Wax Plus. Again, probably overkill but after all the rust I had seen, multiple belts and suspenders didn't seem so crazy.