Street Machine Australia - May 2018

BLOWIN’ GASKETS

STORY GLENN TORRENS

S

O, I’VE been bangin’ around in a

Toyota HiLux 4WD for six years.

Good rig, but I was over it. I’ve got

me a little fast Vee-Dub for a bit

of weekend track fun, but driving the lifted,

knobby-tyred HiLux anywhere apart from

over the Snowies or across the Simpson was

giving me the craps, especially as before the

’Lux I’d had a 15-year run of V8 dailies, with a

VP Calais and then a VT Senator.

And in mid-2016 I’d bought an ’89 VN V8

Calais as a collector/cruise car. But I was soon

sneaking to the shops or the pub or the post

office or wherever in the Calais rather than

the HiLux, enjoying the high from its hits-from-

the-bong injected V8 torque almost every day.

Oh yeah.

But that’s not why I bought it; it was because

this lovely original two-owner VN had only just

clicked 100,000km and would be H-plate-

eligible in NSW in 2019. And there I was, with

the car on full thousand-dollar rego, running

1500km in a weekend sometimes, and risking

it with moron mums in school-zone traffic. It

had to stop.

So when brother-man and fellow Street

Machine contributor Dave Morley mentioned

• over a couple of pots, of course – a dead
  Commodore V8 wagon he knew of, I was all
  ears. It sounded like a set-up, too good to be
  true (and knowing Morley’s larrikin humour, it
  could have been!), but nah, he assured it me
  was legit. No kiddin’.
  The story was, the previous owner was fully
  Facebook-qualified so had whipped off the
  intake, fuel rails and one head to install a lumpy

cam before realising: ‘Oh jeez.’ Eventually,

even his mum wanted it gone. Morley’s mate

Bondini was right place, right time to collect

it for next-to-nothing. But then Bondini had

got busy.

Parked under gum trees and covered in shit,

it was a 2002 VXII Berlina. As well as the

orange hue of cylinder rust, it had rat poo on

the pistons. But everything else was there,

including a battery that had just enough mojo

to light up the instruments and reveal just over

240,000km – a bit of life remaining. Morley

organised a tow to his place and it sat there for

a few weeks until I could drive back to Melburg

with a toolbox.

I began by soaking the open bores with Inox

and scrubbing off the fuzz with 600-grade

abrasive paper. Then, by hand-turning the

BACK ON THE WAGON

GLENN TORRENS WAS TIRED OF THE ’LUX LIFE AND WANTED A LOAD-CARRIER WITH A BIT MORE

SPRING IN ITS STEP

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