A freind of mine paid about $ 150 for an AHU camshaft, in the aftermarket,
not a dealer.
Lifters run from 10 dollars to a bit more .........should have new ones to
go with a new cam usually.

I personally wouldn't put it in a vanagon. They cost too much to operate
long term, or at least a large portion of the time.

I won't go all nutty here ..
but really ..
what I like is an engine that is likely to go without much going wrong with
for at least 150,000 miles..
even more.
Engines that are so fundamentally robust ..and so *not stressful on
themselves in normal operation like diesel are* that you know you are going
to get years of opertion out of it.

Like maybe the occasional water pump, or exhaut repair .....
or even head gaskets..
all nicely fixable, doesn't have to be very expensive fairly normal issues.
Waterboxers are like that.
sure, they have joke headgaskets that need to be done every 80K miles or 8
years ..but there's no timing belt to break or fail..
it's a non-inteference engine ....
low tech actually, underpowered sure, and silly head gasket design ..
but it's not likely to fail seriously, or at least not for a long, long
time.

Now if VW diesels were like say mercedes diesel engines ..
and they'll go for 200K miles and even more .........with barely any
attention ..
man would that be nice !

you know........give me an engine that I know is fundamentally robust,
durable, and not prone to catastopic failures like what happens with any
timing belt failure on any vw diesel . The belt gets out of place for one
second, and it's thousands of dollars gone, right there.
  Or ...at about 80,000 miles do a full rebuild ..and 'even then'  there's
still big risk.

it's that the margin between running ok and total disaster can be bridged in
an instant with vw diesels..
sometimes, for some people, without any warning even.

but hey ..there's good money in fixin' the dang things.
and we all get to know eachother better this way, and that's rewarding.
So thanks VW ..
if they were really built extra robust and strong, we wouldn't all know each
other like this and be helping each other out.
what fun.
scott
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Dearing" <VWBrain@AOL.COM>
To: <vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM>
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2011 7:33 AM
Subject: TDI bad camshaft

> hey guys have a 05 TDI engine that has eatten up one of the lobes on  the
> camshaft.   Is this a common problem and what causes just one lobe  to get
> eatten up. where is the best place to buy a new one. dealer wants $800
> for
> it.  I was thinking of installing this in a vannie but am having second
> thoughts   later  mark d