I picked up a 1976 with a 2l a few months ago and finally started tearing the car down. Fairly clean car that has had paint once in its life. It should have been white but has been painted silver. Ive worked on type 1's quite a bit in the past and have a 65 I am currently working on as well. This is my first 914 so somewhat of a learning curve.

After the EFI quit working the previous owners parked it and left the engine cover open. Over its life quite a bit of water got into the intake and ruined the jugs.

I got the engine torn down the case looks immaculate has all std. bearings that all measure out including thrust. Something that stands out to me as weird is the two plugs near where the oil filter mount is bolted are staked in and had some kind of material covering them and the plug to the bell-housing side of the same oil tract has the same. I cannot tell that the case was opened but I really have no idea. The case has silver paint over the aluminum and the paint is over the epoxy material on the staked plugs. BUT there is a faint blue lettering /rubber stamping below the oil fill box.

Its definitely a 2l engine but I'm hoping on some insight to the case and why there would be epoxy over those plugs other than a leak.

It was a relatively common practice in the past to put epoxy over the oil gallery plugs to help keep them from popping out. Current best practice is to remove the plugs and to replace them with threaded pipe plugs.

--DD

Was it ever done at the factory? Im interested in details that could help me pin down if this engines been apart before.

-Pistons are all Mahle stamped 93.96 with a + on each
-Each piston has been stamped 1-4
-Case halves were sealed with a brown sealant
-No obvious stampings in the case except for a number below the oil fill tower and blue ink stamping above that location.

AFAIK, the epoxy was never done at the factory.

It used to be conventional wisdom to epoxy over the plugs any time the engine was out, not necessarily just when it was apart.

The 93.96 and + are factory markings on the pistons. I'm not sure, but the 1-4 sounds like something that a rebuilder would do, not something done at the factory.

The blue ink stamping rings a bell, but I don't remember where from.

--DD

I noticed the engine and my new gasket set has cylinder base gaskets and head gaskets.

I thought I saw somewhere that these cause issues. Any issues with these engines if I just lap the jug to the head surface like on a t1?

Depends on who you ask. VW instructed their techs to leave the head gaskets out of their Type IV motors when the heads were off, and lap the cylinder to the head. Porsche never did, but they do seem to defer a lot of stuff to VW on the four-cylinder engine...

The late Cap'n Krusty was in favor of using them. Jake Raby is not.

Leaving them out will increase your compression ratio by a noticeable amount; you will have to get measurements of the pertinent volumes to see how much. This could be a good thing, or not, depending on your use case and your actual motor. If you decide it's not a good thing, then you would need to use thicker (or additional) shims at the cylinder base to lower the compression ratio back to your target number.

--DD