Anybody ever look at what i guess is a stock T4 exhaust stud.  I 
never really had.  The set of heads we pulled off the '78? engine in 
the '73 I parted are going to Steve Dolan, and while pulling them a 
few studs instead of nuts had come out and I noticed one of them had 
a stripped and heli-coiled hole, didn't look too good and I prefer 
solid inserts so I was about to order some from memory as I knew the 
head end was bigger than the nut end which is M8-1.25 (no suprise) so 
I assumed it to be M10 but as I was at work looking at the 
McMaster-Carr and the stud was at home I waited to order the inserts. 
So grab it to measure the pitch which is also 1.25 on the big end and 
then measure the diameter, comes out major on the external threads
0.347" which is about 8.81mm, WHAT THE F***, an M9-1.25, now 
for those of you not being suprised, go out and try to buy an M9 
bolt, any pitch, anywhere, then come back to me, look in the metric 
thread table, this thread does NOT exist, well is it english and they 
have been reworked, close would be 11/32-20, also does NOT exist, now 
admittedly you can cut and specify anything you want but VW went 
truely off the deep end on this one IMHO, they must have manufactured 
their own taps to put these in, and hell how do people rebuild or 
find the darn things.  How did it get a heli-coil in it to begin 
with?  I'm sort of miffed to say the least, everyone else might have 
known this but sure suprises me, I got a 1700 head I'm going to pull 
a few studs out of tomorrow to see what they are or if this was a 
"process improvement"  Really odd, and I don't truely think that 
tapping an M10 would have removed that much critical material.

Anyway just babbling.
John
vwbus@netbiz.net