I decided in the end that I couldn't justify the cost of shipping the van up North and converting it to a 1.9, so I had a recon 1.6 shipped down from vwenginerecon.co.uk (I got great service from these guys). I'm spending about 1.2k instead of 3k, it'll still "only" be a 1.6TD but with a recon engine and brand new turbo, and it was good enough for the v-dub engineers back in the day I'm still excited about getting it back
I think I need to find a pneumatic thingy to keep one of the diff-locks on, but will examine that more tomorrow when I get her back....
R