Well rather than take an illegal lap around the block yesterday, I spent $78 and bought an "Unregistered Vehicle Permit" so I could "test drive" it, and took the little white beastie for a blat up the freeway. I figured that as it was over 100 deg C, a 30 mile drive would confirm my suspicion that I had a blown head gasket on one cylinder bank.
As expected, the temp gauge came up pretty quickly, so I parked it around in the back of a big Shell service station and had lunch at Hungry Jack's (Burger King) while I waited for it to cool down. As I was walking out, I saw that they had 24 packs of 600 mil (1 pint) bottles of water for 7 bucks, so I bought one, and tipped the first 10 bottles into the radiator! (oops.......)
Anyway, I went to start it and the battery decided that it was a good opportunity to fail. Hmmmmnnn. I walked back around to the servo and discovered that they don't sell batteries, so I bought a set of jumper leads instead, in the hope that I could convince someone to donate some volts.
While I was sitting in the car, slowly melting in the 106 degree F (according to my iPhone) temps, I wondered about the lost art of push starting. My car was parked on a slight (very slight) incline, so I opened the drivers door, pushed it backwards with one foot, got a bit of a roll going, put it in reverse and dumped the clutch, and Varoom! I was away.
It didn't overheat on the freeway, but as I got off the freeway and back into traffic, the temp gauge did come up the 3/4 mark, and it started misfiring, and by the time I got home, it was running on 2 cylinders, and once I did an inspection I noticed that there was a creamy substance floating in the radiator overflow tank. Poop. I retired into the cool of the house, and sank numerous cold drinks to rehydrate.........
I was trawling thru eBay last night and there are a few WRX engines for sale, and one wrecking yard nearby has a "good running engine" for sale, and they offer installation (for extra, obviously) so I've messaged them to ask how much it'll cost to have my engine pulled out, and theirs installed, and what sort of warranty they offer, etc. If it's not too savage I might just get them to do it, pulling engines out of cars pisses me off............