So when we had to leave our flooded house i had to decide, fix torana or find somewhere to store it ... with the latter not really a viable option and us needing a second car (VR Commodore was written off in flood) i decided to use the $5k payout from the VR and get the Torana back on the road.
So began the quickest project i have ever done!!
Plan was pretty simple:
* rebuild motor
* rebuild and fit T700 from VN Commodore (stage 2 shift kit)
* commodore brakes (vl turbo/vp v8 brakes)
* new shocks all round
* tidy up a few other little things
*** get it all engineer approved ***
ok this is the motor i had in the Torana before which was dynoed at 140rwhp ... its been rebuilt with more unleaded friendly compression ratio (it was flooded, that was the main reason for the rebuild) you can see in this one the CRS adaptor plate to mate the box to the engine, very nice kit i must say.
also had to do some mods to the extractors to clear the gearbox, more so the linkages for the shifter but yeah, this is what i came up with, originally both pipes went down side by side whereas the torana needs one above the other to clear the crossmember.
as can be seen here
also quickly whipped up a gearbox crossmember to keep the engineer happy.
bit of bling (which works unreal i might ad)
while i was at it i resolved the suspension issues
this is a shit picture, but as you can see, i have the commodore rear discs on there, i swapped them side to side to get the calipers at the front of the diff otherwise the calipers would hit on the shocks ... so to do that i left the handbrake mechs on their original sides and then re-located the handbrake holding bracket to get it to be at the front.
i then made these brackets to mount the cable at the front and screwed them to the floor of the car
i mounted them such that they would fit onto the original torana handbrake cable, this only just fitted with the use of the longer wagon cable!! (i love it when you can use off the shelf parts down the track)
the finished product ... and yes i will be cleaning the red paint off.
drivers side
and heres one of the fronts ... these had been done for quite a while now ... (before the floods)
as im sure some of you know, the T700 normally has a speed sensor screwed to the side of the box to tell the speedo and ecu what speed you are doing ... so when i put the gearbox in the torana the conversion kit came with a cable to suit my needs which works fine except that i had to put smaller tyres on the car compared to the stock commodore diameter otherwise they'd scrape on the guards ... so this created the problem that at 100kms the speedo was reading 120km .... which is not really bad as far as speeding goes but its really hard for anyone to just jump in the car and know whats happening.
So with that in mind aswell as the fact i need the speed sensor for running the VN ecu in the car (another project im working on) decided me to bite the bullet and outlay $350 for a VDO electronic speedo unit to resolve the problems.
so with a bit of cutting and modifying of the stock dash cluster i was able to easily fit it in there
a few mods to the wiring for lights etc and she was all ready to go in the car
only thing was that the original speedo has the blinkers and high beam lights as part of the speedo face, so i had to put some extra lights in to keep these on the dash .... you can see the two green ones for the blinkers and the blue one on the bottom right of the cluster is for the high beam
all in all very happy, it was easy to calibrate and at 100kms on the speedo the gps is reading 100.5km so i'm stoked!
thats probably the most of it ... theres pics at:
http://www.oldholdens.com/temp/torana/ if anyone wants to check them out ...
oh and this is the finished product....
the biggest killer is it needs 98 octane fuel.
