Quite literally at the start of my weekend (Saturday Night) I was able to leave work extremely early @ 11:30 PM due to production line time stop. I made it about 5 miles from work when my CEL started flashing and I lost a lot of power. I limped it about 2 more miles till I was at a location that I could pull off and inspect what was going on. I figured I was only running on 2 or 3 cylinders at that time so I refused to drive it anywhere. I gave my father a phone call and he brought out my code reader which did show a Cylinder 2 misfire. Alright cool no problem lets swap ignition coils and hopefully that it! To my luck it wasn't and I had a hard choice, but also an extremely easy one. Do I dare drive it home or do I call a tow truck. I finally made it home at 1:30am after the tow truck dropped my baby off. Immediately I pulled the plugs and checked them. I definitely had deposit build up so I cleaned them up the best that I could and was hoping it might just be bad plugs, but it wasn't so I went to bed drained, defeated, and highly depressed as worst case scenario kicked it that it might be the rings.

Now lets back up a bit in time. For little over a year I was having little to now power on the car and at the time didn't have a boost gauge. I decided that I really needed one to determine exactly what my boost was. I purchased one and it proved that I was sitting at about 5 PSI and eventually tanked to 2-3 by the time I figured out the problem. I had a extremely clogged cat and after knocking it all out my problem was solved. So I went ahead and ordered a JHM test pipe and have a lot of fun installing that sucker /s.

Here I am now 3 months later with this issue. The next morning after having the car towed home the first thing I did was a compression check. Each cylinder was reading around 160PSI while cylinder 2 was at a big 0. I throw a bit of oil in the top and gained a whopping total of 4PSI. That told me it could be valves, rings, gaskets or cracked head. All of which I really didn't want to tackle as I remember how crappy it was replacing the timing belt. The wife and I talked and felt it was time to trade her in so she could get a new car and I would inherit her aging '07 Jetta. Well lets just say I had second thoughts the next day after visit the dealership and was more determined than ever to figure out exactly what went wrong on the car.

The next day I figured the next step would be to do a leak down test and after about a full day of diagnosing different methods under different conditions I determined that my problem is a burnt exhaust valve most likely due to the heat build up from the clogged cat. I'm almost certain of this as the exhaust manifold has a slight crack in it as well which could have been there prior, but I have no way of knowing.

I believe its worth tearing the head off and replacing the valves, but would really like some knowledge and tips about this from anyone who has any prior experience in the matter. What valves would you recommend? Is there anything I should definitely know before doing this? Is there a write up or other documented pages that would help out in this matter (IE: valve cover/head torque pattern & rating, camshaft info, one time use bolts). I wont order anything until after I pull the head as I'm not sure what will need to be replaced until afterwards. I plan on replacing all the exhaust stems and seals and gaskets though.