The Story:
One day of February of 2002 my father brought home a 944 Porsche at the time I knew nothing of this car I just knew it was a Porsche. One of the first things I did was get on kbb.com and determined the value of the car because my father was still negotiating the price. Shortly after my father had plans to resale the car in hopes to make a profit but to his and somewhat mine to misfortune I decided I wanted this car for my first vehicle.

After some time I started to run the car more and more around my Virginia home. Ordering miscellaneous parts such as a driver's side door handle and a center console to replace the cracked one and also windshield wipers which had been removed. Every thing seemed fine for a while until I discovered the catalytic converter was getting cherry red after a few minutes of operation and there was smoke coming into the cabin (*I thought from just the converter) I removed the entire exhaust except for the header and drove it for a while (it sounded awesome) and it still smoked a great deal.

Hoping that a valve seal job would cure the smoking (I knew in the back of my mind this alone would not cure the problem due to the severity) I removed the head and to my dismay when the head was checked the head man discovered that it had 3 bent exhaust valves which was not cheap besides the $50 dollar head gasket and the $30 dollar valve seals I also had to buy 4 (went ahead and bought four thought it would be the best thing) exhaust valves which was $136 dollars. After completing the head job I also opted to purchase new timing belt and rollers due to the heavy reliance of the engine on the timing belt etc. If it wasn't for Vertex Auto's low prices and high quality this would not have been possible

After the head job was all said and done I gutted the cat (catalytic Converter) and re-installed all exhaust system hoping to complete the job. The car ran good but smoke was coming from where the header mated to the exhaust due to blow-by oil leaking there, and burning. After this I decided piston rings was the only weak-link so I went back to Clarks garage dot com for a engine removal procedure (I also used this great resource for the head removal and still using the message board today My member name is 84n/a944). Shortly after removing the engine I called Vertex Auto's 800 number to order my main bearings, rod bearings, and block gasket set it came to $269 even with shipping and C.O.D. charges. It come to find out Pelican parts had piston rings cheaper than vertex ;by $25 dollars pelicans 64.80 rings beat vertex's. I also bought balance shaft bearings from pelicans since I forgot to, from vertex. It come to