Eastside Cruisers

The coupling in my 1st photo above is a nolathane one. It's destroyed. It might not look like nolathane, but it is actually red - it's just filthy dirty (to match the rest of my car)

Way over-due for updates again here.... but good progress (finally) over the last 2 months...

All machining, dummy fitting, clearancing, checking, modifying, repairing, and final assembly is now complete

It turned out to be a lot more work than expected. Heads required a new valve seat and new intake valve guides. Exhaust guides needed honing. Decided not to risk any old valves, so bought brand new Ferrea 6000 series competition valves. Also had the heads flow tested, and the results were disappointing (didn't even get to the advertised factory figures). For a grand, I could have improved the figures drastically (with valve seat & bowl work), but there was no way I was spending another grand on these heads, I'd rather buy alloy AFR's! So they'll do for now as they are.

Spent ages contemplating camshaft choice. Changed my mind about 4 times. We were really worried about the compression (or extreme lack of it). The heads had already been decked once, but ended up going back for round 2 and a total of 0.080" came off them. So the intake manifold needed heaps of machining too. Awesome, more money

But now the static comp should be up around 10.3 or 10.4. Even with that, still worried about poor dynamic compression with the cams we were looking at, so ended up "wussing out" and putting in a really conservative hydraulic roller. It's the smallest cam I've had yet. Should still go alright though.

It's not cheap going to a full retro-fit roller cam setup, but it's something different I wanted to try, and to also make the long wait worthwhile. Chose Morel roller lifters which are meant to be awesome, and ended up going with bee-hive style valve springs. The stick itself is a Comp Cams unit.

Everything else eventually came together really well. The bearings needed slight tweaking to get enough clearance with the SCAT crank to satisfy my engine builder (he's fussy). Even though I bought stroker clearanced rods, they also required a poof-teenth of grinding too on the bolts.

The new roller cam meant fitting a thrust button, which then meant using a stronger alloy timing cover to prevent flex. Cool, let's keep spending cash again! haha. It also required modifying to get the right amount of end-play. Nothing is ever easy hey.

Then we had drama's with the new oil pump and pickup. Sat too high off the sump floor.... more custom mods.... got there in the end. So glad I didn't decide to build this thing myself, it was full of traps.

Anyway, couple of photos from the journey...

















More pics soon...

looking good bretto. cant wait to see her back out on the street.

Great stuff Brett! Looking forward to seeing the rest of the pics! Hopefully you have got the beast running by now!!!

I can't wait to go out cruising with ya!

thanks for update Brett - I feel your pain, change one thing and it leads to another to another to another which has to be fixed/modified/improved/replaced - it's just $ $ $!!

Looking like some progress is happening, keep pressing on mate.

Great to see some progress mate! will be good to see another torry out and about at the events!

Cool Bretto, so looking forward to seeing LXCHEV back on the road.

Good stuff!!

Bet your really itching to get it going!!
Just in time for summer too

Thanks everyone. Just chipping away bit by bit.

Here's the new engine arriving home...



Time for a fresh lick of paint:





Daddy's little helper... (also the cause of many missing tools)

Out with the old...



In with the new...



I'm still working through putting the finishing touches on my new fuel system, it's almost finished now.
My new carby caused more setbacks as it doesn't have any vacuum ports at all. So I ended up drilling and tapping my manifold to take a new fitting. Another problem solved

I'm sure something else will pop up, but I feel like I'm finally on the home stretch, haha.