I've done business with dre on several occasions. I bought my first engine from him back in 2005 or 2006. A VE motor. The vehicle it was in was probably hit in the side because the head had some scars on the side by the timing chain. It was just cosmetic, but it was disconcerting. I bought a VE head from him about a year later and it was in decent shape. It had a bit of orange and black tinge under the VC but nothing too crazy. A few oil changes cleaned that up. I never got a perfectly clean motor, but they always seemed to work ok.
A few months ago I started a project on a friend's B13. We ordered an engine from Miko and we were excited to get it! The motor was beautiful, and looked low-mileage. But the oil was very badly sludged. The oil pan was ripped and required a replacement, but that was becoming a common replacement item with these swaps. We put on a new oil pan and I figured a good oil change or two and the engine would be like new. The motor was in the car for about an hour, but we couldn't get the oil light to go off below 2000 rpm.
We checked oil pressure and it was under 20psi at all times, dipping to under 5psi at idle. The oil pump seemed to have been damaged or something, but the engine was getting worse in the couple hours we had it running. We called up Dre and he agreed to send us a new engine. The new engine wasn't as clean on the outside, but was cleaner on the inside by far. The new engine had a Fuji header as well which we considered fair compensation.
Looking at the engine we did notice the distributor was damaged, and the cam cap that holds the top bolt to the dizzy was broken off. Inspecting it showed it would no longer seal along the o-ring for the dizzy, and would leak. We figured "what the hell" and installed it anyway. We found the exhaust cam was broken, so the drive wouldn't engage the dizzy. So we needed a new exhaust cam. I had a spare head in my garage with spare cams. I put the new cam in the engine and cranked her over. Won't start. After a lot of troubleshooting trying to find out if we didn't wire the Dizzy correctly, we found the dizzy wasn't turning. The new cam we installed had snapped right by the cam gear. Note that everything was torqued to spec here, but the cam was completely seized in the head. I put in another new cam I had laying around and got it running. Car has been running good since.
I'm not here to rag on Dre, but just to remind everyone that these mishaps happen. I would have loved to get a working engine on the first try, and I really wish the new engine didn't leak a quart of oil a week out of the dizzy cam cap, but it is what it is. There is no fixing the issue now. Sourcing a cam cap to work with this engine is impossible, so to really fix the issue this engine will need another head.
I am not very active with this community much since I've moved on to other projects. All I can do is hope the next engine I get from Dre is as high quality as we all expect from him.
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Andreas Miko
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