When my son's jetta did the total dump I expected a lost engine.  However I
went ahead and fabricated a new cross tube and put new hoses on and new
engine mounts and filled and fired it up.  It ran perfect.  Later when I was
finally able to check compression it was just fine.  That jetta ran for
another year and a half before being totaled by a weird accident.  It was
just beginning to develop some valve seal problems at that time but it also
was a 150k mile engine.  The trick is to not overheat beyond the what the
heads will handle.  If you have you will have compression problems, overheat
problems, external head leaks, or any combination of them.  So if you have
none of those three after a couple weeks you probably are good to travel.
jimt

On 5/23/05 1:54 PM, "Aaron Pearson" <Aaron.Pearson@GXT.COM> wrote:

> so if a compression test is good now (or at least as good as it was
> before the pipe failure), then i'm probably okay?  is there a better
> test, or something else i should look out for?
>
> aaron
> '87 syncro gl
>