I thought it would be best to wrap this up, thank you so much to everyone who has chimed in with regards to this engine.
It is now built and finished.
We ran it up today but not before a huge amount of work went into it, as "Caddy" has mentioned.
The heads needed a LOT of work, the seats were all over the place, they have been sorted, all new install heights matched with a nice 3 angle valve job, all new cutback and tapered guides, new valves throughout.
The crank has been ground and new bearings machined and modified (oil squirters) to suit.
The unknown dry sump has been removed (for now) in favour of a 30mm pump and deep sump.
the carbs have been fully gone though by myself and are now perfect.
Barells dial bored for true/ovality and honed, new rings on the npr/deano pistons.
Caddy had it all built back up and ready to run yesterday, he ran it up on some 44's, i installed the solex pII's on the s&s manifolds this morning and fired it up, a quick tune revealed a couple of issues, one check valve below the accel pump was sticking and bleeding fuel from the float chamber back into the progression chamber and filling once the engine was shut off, a quick strip down and trouble shoot cleared that up, i then tuned it down to an 1150 rpm idle to keep that oil pressure up nice and high and that was pretty much it job done.
It sounds fantastic, compression is fairly tame around 8.5 with the hemi chambers and just under 1.5 deck. but with the 32mm vents its snappy and docile at idle and everything seems 100%, my job was the carbs, and im so happy they work fantastically we had to fabricate an adapter for the snail so i could accurately dial them in but they run nice, really really nice.
Its just down to the customer to install and enjoy now, there was no point giving you pictures of it on the test bench as its running test tinware et al, which doesnt do the engine justice, but thats another bit of history somewhere in the vw tuning world saved.
Thanks again for your input folks, i really appreciate it.