I contacted the shop that built the second engine today. He told me they use magnetic drain plugs. It's possible that what the guy is seeing is normal and he just freaked out. The other possibilities would be that he got eager and turned the boost way up with a manual controller or that he way over-revved it (not sure how many RPMs that would take). The guy on the phone confirmed that unless it's a stock rebuild, they have a guy they send cars to for tuning. He even offered to have his guys look it over, no charge if I end up buying it. I think it's also possible that the turbo is on it's way out, so I need to see if he bought that new recently or not. I think I'll still go check it out and see what kind of shape the rest of it is in. Whether it's worth the money is going to hinge on whether I can determine how likely this guy is to beat on it, I guess. Even if I have to rebuild it, if it isn't making noise or smoking AND it was actually built 8000 miles ago, I think it's unlikely to need major machining, if any at all, and most of the parts should be use-able so that's something.

Every other donor I've seen in the last two months is either trashed, definitely needs a complete rebuild, which will cost me between 1500 and 2000 anyway. Seems like everything I find is between $5k and $7k once I add everything up, not counting whatever I can get for resale. It's possible I'll over-pay if I get one of these, but I don't think it will be by so much that it hurts my feelings a lot. I'd rather build than search, so that's worth something to me (not sure how much, lol). That said, I'm still prepared to walk away if I don't like what I see.

I also took your advice and priced out what I could. It looks like the first guy probably did spend more money on the parts listed. I'm not sure whether that will translate into more resale, though.

I was holding off on ordering it until I have a donor sorted out, thinking the lead time was a few months. Now I have absolutely no idea where I got that. Just did a search and found times closer to 10 months - 1 year. This might change some things for me.