Innehållsförteckning för October 2019 från Street Machine

14-15 SEP, MAITLAND, NSW Toranafest, Maitland Park. Visit toranafest.com.au. 14 SEP, CARRUM DOWNS, VIC Kuztum ’A’ Rama Warehouse Party, 115 Frankston Gardens Drive. Email kuztumarama@gmail.com. 15 SEP, MELBOURNE, VIC Coffee & Cars Morning at Albert Park, 22 Aughtie Drive. Visit bmwdcm.com.au/ event-3501949. 15 SEP, BEAUDESERT, QLD 2019 Super Sunday Show ’n’ Shine, Beaudesert Showgrounds. Visit scenicrimmotorsports.com. 15 SEP, APPIN, NSW Appin Wheels Festival, Appin Public School. Call Melissa 0420 662 396. 15 SEP, MAROUBRA, NSW Maroubra Beach Hop charity car show, Broadarrow Reserve. Email rickochev@ gmail.com. 15 SEP, KYOGLE, NSW Kyogle Motor Vehicle Club Show ’n’ Shine, Kyogle Football Grounds. Email kyoglemotorvehicleclub@gmail.com. 20-22 SEP, SPRINGVALE, VIC Shannons Nationals, Sandown Raceway.Visit thenationals.com.au/sandown/. 20-22 SEP, JAMIESON, VIC Jamieson High Country Rod Muster. Call Greg on 0484 637 605 or email HighCountryRodders@hotmail.com. 20-22…

IN A SPIN G’DAY guys! Regarding the story on Mike Bowden’s spinner ute (SM, Sep ’19): with all due respect to Carly Dale, she’s wrong. There is no such beast as a 1949 Ford Customline. The ’49-’51 Fords, colloquially known as ‘spinners’ (’49s and ’50s were known as single-spinners; ’51s were twin-spinners), were actually labelled ‘Custom’, as can be seen in the photo of the side trim on page 65. Nor is there such a beast as a Customline utility. The Customline name was first used by Ford for the 1952 sedan models, and utilities were given the name Mainline, which was taken from the US base model, no utes being sold in America until they ‘invented’ the Ranchero – but that’s another story. Phil Minns, email YOU are dead…

EVER since he was an impressionable youngster, ACT inhabitant Joe Tyler has had a passion for EH Holdens – he owns seven of them! This Special wagon was a local car and in pretty tidy nick when he picked it up around five years ago. “It was in pieces, in boxes,” says Joe. “But all original, with only a small amount of rust.” The build started out as a resto with a few upgrades. However, a few Friday nights in the shed, combined with a few beers or 10, saw those plans start to go sideways, in true street machine tradition: “It got out of hand, and we cut it up!” Joe laughs. One of Joe’s buddies planted the idea of giving the EH wickedly low ride height and making…

WHAT happens when your 600hp XY Falcon is feeling a little flat, and you’re after something more? If you’re Sydney’s Shadi Tobaji, you build a completely bonkers ’72 TC Cortina with an aspirated 890hp Windsor that has gone 8.84@150mph! Shadi’s other car, a neat orange XY Falcon known as RAW GT, is well known around the traps, having copped plenty of hidings at Summernats, Powercruise and the like. But it wasn’t quite keeping up with Shadi’s needs. “I wanted more power and a tougher car than RAW GT,” Shadi says. “I built the XY a long time ago and it wasn’t keeping up. I pretty much had to wring its neck to do burnouts and I was killing it, because I had built it as a streeter to put the…

RULES is rules, but sometimes they get out of control and suck a lot of the fun out of things. And lately in motorsport, it’s the rules protecting the cubic dollars tipped into modern car-racing that suck most deeply. Did you see, for instance, Scott McLaughlin getting fined for taking a poster onto the podium recently? This is what we’re doing now? This new PC era is also why the pinnacle (so they tell us) of four-wheeled sport, Formula One, now amounts to slot-cars driven by robots. Even in our beloved Supercars, not a single car runs an engine, gearbox or diff (or anything else) that you or I can buy in a new road car. Reality check, anyone? Rules and restrictions are everywhere and just about every category has…

AS MOST readers will understand, there’s something special about driving older cars that more modern stuff tends to lack. When Tomi bought the XB, he didn’t really intend it to be his daily driver for nearly 10 years – he had an EL Series II XR8 for that. “The EL was a much nicer car to drive than the XB,” Tomi says. “It was more comfortable and handled beautifully, but you just couldn’t get me out of the XB. I used to drive it everywhere when I was at uni; I even drove it around Mount Panorama a few times.” Of course, all of that changed when he decided to take the XB off the road for a bit of a tidy-up, and you can see where that idea led!…

NOT many folks can say that they still have their first car parked in the shed. But for 31-year-old mechanic Tim Saliba, it’s a gleaming, Ice Blue reality. “I first saw this car in 2000,” says Tim. “My sister’s boyfriend owned it. She then bought it for my brother in 2003. I remember being impressed by the five-inch monster tacho on the dash!” Tim says that by the time he took ownership of the car in 2004, its condition was “stock and abused”. He went about fixing it up in earnest, giving it a new coat of paint, a fresh 304ci Holden V8 and T700, VL diff, HSV brakes and Simmons FR19s. The VP was well on the way to appearing as it does today. “It was clean-as and had…

MODIFIED car builders will deal with three basic grades of carbon-steel bolts and screws in building the car of their dreams. For safety and reliability, it’s important to choose the proper grade and the correct installation to ensure you’re safe in your machine. The main grades of steel bolts and screws in both imperial and metric are shown in Table 1 (opposite page). BUCKET OF BOLTS MILD-steel bolts (also called Grade 2 or metric 5.8) have a proof strength of about 385MPa. Proof strength is the stress that the fastener will withstand without any permanent set (irreversible damage). Grade 5 bolts have a proof strength of 600MPa, and Grade 8 has 840MPa. So the better the grade of the bolt, the more load it will withstand while still remaining elastic.…

DRAG Challenge has come a long way in its short five-year lifespan, from being laughed at with the mantra of: “You’ll never get away with that in this country,” to over 250 entrants per year and cars being built specifically to take on the event. Zero5 Performance in Rutherford, NSW is joining the cavalcade this year with a pair of stonking Holdens. Zero5 is the brainchild of owners Brad Lowe, Chris Sheppard and Peter Champion. Peter has been the owner of the HDT brand for the past decade or so, but unlike HDT, the Zero5 guys aren’t just about Holdens. They specialise in HDT-style upgrades for models such as Mustangs, Camaros, 4WD Rangers and Colorados, with bodykits brake upgrades, exhaust systems and so on. The real party piece from our…

SYDNEY DRAGWAY 14 SEP Test & Tune 18 SEP Race 4 Real 21 SEP Fuel Altered Challenge 02 OCT Race 4 Real 09 OCT Race 4 Real 13 OCT Sunday Street Meet sydneydragway.com.au Phone (02) 9421 0700 WILLOWBANK 13 SEP Test & Tune 14 SEP Qld Championships 15 SEP Junior Dragster Blast 21 SEP Kenda 660 Radial Series 25 SEP Test & Tune 28 SEP Test & Tune 09 OCT Test & Tune 12 OCT Test & Tune willowbankraceway.com.au Phone (07) 5461 5461 SPRINGMOUNT RACEWAY 21 SEP Track Championship springmountraceway.com BENARABY RACEWAY 20 SEP Off-Street Meet 21 SEP CQDRA Championships 05-06 OCT Qld Championships benarabyraceway.com Phone 0419 703 710 LAKESIDE 15 SEP Off-Street Drags facebook.com/lakesidedragracing WARWICK DRAGWAY 05-06 OCT VW Nationals warwickdragway.com PERTH MOTORPLEX 18 SEP Euro Night 25 SEP…

THE URGENCY WITH WHICH THE CAR LEAVES THE LINE SPEAKS VOLUMES FOR THE LOWDOWN GRUNT AND RAZOR-SHARP THROTTLE RESPONSE OFFERED UP BY THE HARROP BLOWER IN THE August issue of Street Machine, we brought you a step-by-step guide to fitting Harrop’s brand new TVS2300 Holden supercharger kit to my long-suffering LC GTR Torana. To up the degree of difficulty, we did it live in front of thousands of people at MotorEx in Melbourne, and managed to have it up and running with the blower by the end of the weekend. From there, we took the car to MPW Performance, where Adam Rogash tuned it to deliver 302rwhp – almost double the typical output of a stock injected 5.0-litre. There’s plenty more grunt to be had by treating the junkyard powerplant…

Part 2 WITH so many fantastic vintage shots to play with, we’ve decided to share a few more from my dad Russell Parker’s personal collection. I love that Dad was right there at the birth of drag racing in South Australia in the mid 60s, with him and his mates being pivotal in creating the Brooksfield track. His path was then set to become a dedicated and winning drag racer. 01. ACCORDING to Dad, drag racing in South Australia started with Trevor and Dennis Edmonds’ Payneham Road service station. “They probably had the first dedicated drag car, an early Ford Prefect gasser that ran the first sprints at Gawler Belt,” he says. “Sid Eckert Motors sat behind the servo, which is where my brother Warren and mates Danny Daros and…

THANKS to the power of the internet and the inescapable stupidity of human beings, the AU Falcon has gathered a rather large cult following in recent years. Young millennials have taken meme culture to a new level, turning what is arguably Australia’s ugliest and least-loved car into an internet hero. This fascination with the cockroach of Australian motoring recently prompted an event on Facebook, ‘Storm The Old Ford Factory and Restart AU Falcon Production’. While clearly a joke, the event gathered enough steam to generate over 8000 people ‘attending’, 20,000 people interested, and news stories from The Herald Sun and 3AW radio. We shared the event with you lot on our Facebook page; here’s what you had to say. JuneMike Denison – If you’re going to fire up the machines…

NATHAN Peters’s race-spec Barraswapped VC Valiant was borne from a want to bring his tight-knit family even closer together. “My parents, daughters and I have been around the drags our whole lives; it’s part of us,” Nathan says. “So in mid 2017 my dad Peter and I felt that it was time to get back on the track and to other events, instead of being spectators.” Father and son were keen to build a ride worthy of cutting decent quarters while also being a turn-key family cruiser that would hold its own in the show arena. Nathan has owned the VC for two decades but it’d been off the road a while. An epic comeback was planned – this time it’d be stripped bare then finished to a superior standard…

THE day WA’s Gareth Lougher bought this HR, he and his wife Alison were leaving to take her showstopping LH Torana, 6APEAL (SM, Apr ’13), to MotorEx Sydney in 2012. “The HR was a good solid car that was built in the late 80s and licensed with the 350 Chev,” Gareth recalls. “That was a huge bonus, as it’s very difficult to get this type of conversion to pass rego now in WA.” Gareth’s a pretty handy fabricator – handy enough to have had a hand in some of the fabrication on XBOSS (that’s a lot of hands). But after all that high-end show car stuff, he wanted to build something a bit more street-friendly, and had a long-held desire to own an HD or HR Holden. “I always loved…

IT LOOKS like a cold misty morning on Petrie Creek but it’s not fog in the air, it’s vaporised rubber! The Sunshine Coast is best known for beautiful beaches, but for three days in August it was on the map for burnouts and blown Hemis instead, as the town was transformed into a revhead haven. The locals let loose for the inaugural Power On Petrie auto festival, and organiser Matt Sharpe said the smell of E85 and burning rubber is what the sleepy hamlet of Nambour has been missing. “We’ve put on an auto festival like the coast has never seen!” Matt beamed. “A festival for enthusiasts to come and drive and celebrate their cars.” Matt was proud to be showcasing a range of driving events that have never been…

THE 308 CRANKED OUT 1023 HP AND 780 LB-FT ON AARON’S ENGINE DYNO, WHICH IS MORE THAN AMPLE FOR BLUEY’S PLANS IF WORLD-renowned Alien artist HR Giger had applied his vision to an engine build, the result might have looked like Bluey Hill’s latest Holden donk for his famed stepside HJ One Tonner (SM, Sep ’88). A beautiful melding of both hard-edged and organic industrial design, it has an almost biomechanical look that Giger was famous for. But the delicious visuals are just a by-product of what this build is truly about: glorious horsepower from one of our most iconic local engines. Aaron Hambridge from Advanced Performance Machining is the man responsible for the build, and the final link in the chain of Bluey’s 25-year engine odyssey. “I’ve known Bluey…

DANIEL SCIBERRAS 1969 HT HOLDEN “THIS HT has been in the family since 1970. It was originally my nonno’s; he passed away when I was three months old. I was gifted the car at 13 years old, and dreamed of the day when I could finally build it. My family owned a panel shop so it was always in my blood to build something. But my father passed away suddenly when I was 15, so the dreams of both of us spending nights building the car after hours were cut short. However, over the past seven years, my stepfather Tony helped me build it. As a panel beater, he taught me as much as he could about how to do bodywork and spray, before he was diagnosed with a brain…

WOULD you like your carnage with cheese on top? Get stuck into 1967’s Thunder Alley, which serves up vintage US stock car mayhem with kitschy teen grooviness, baby. Yes, it’s cheap B-grade drive-in fodder. Yes, it stars a couple of vanilla-flavoured hams whose careers were on the slide in former Mousketeer Annette Funicello and pop singer Fabian. And yes, the storyline is as flimsy as an old wooden guardrail. But despite all that (or perhaps because of it?), Thunder Alley is good, dumb fun. It’s got car crashes, fireballs, mud wrestling and bar brawls, and a wild party that Austin Powers wishes he’d scored an invite to. Fabian plays pretty-boy stock car racer Tommy Callahan, who finds himself working as a stunt driver when he is suspended from NASCAR (although…

THE XW Falcon of Dandy Engines’ Frank Marchese has a serious claim to the title of Australia’s quickest street car, having run a PB of 6.96@211mph and taken out the 2018 Street Machine Drag Challenge, the hardest-won prize in street car racing. Amazingly, Frank’s 3800lb X-Dub runs these numbers on leaf springs and a 275 radial, with a twin-turbo small-block Ford under the bonnet making over 2800hp at the hubs. Away from DC, Dandy Engines is the Aussie distributor for Pro Line engines and FuelTech ECUs, so Frank has had his hand in some of Australia’s hottest sleds to hit the quarter-mile, including Steve Bezzina’s six-second, 220mph XW sedan, and the 2500rwhp twin-turbo 632ci Chev in Daniel Szabolics’s HQ Monaro. With so much power at his fingertips, we had to…

NOTHING beats heading north for a few days in winter to take in some sun and drink beer on balmy evenings. And if you happen to be in Darwin on the right weekend, you can head out to Hidden Valley Raceway for Gazzanats. I wasn’t the only one escaping the single-digit temperatures, with 16 cars hauled up and over from WA, as well as a truckload of Riverina Thrashers cars from NSW. For most it was the first of a two-phase mission in the NT, with Red CentreNATS being held in Alice Springs just two weeks later. It’s a massive trek to the Top End, but well worth the effort as Darwin is such a great place to hang out, with a laidback vibe and a multicultural experience like no…

AARON Gregory built Memphis Hell, his awesome ’51 Chev pick-up, to do bulk road miles. Since debuting the car at MotorEx in 2012, he’s driven it to just about every show on the east coast of Australia, and has landed in the Top 60 at Summernats twice. As the hyper-talented fabricator and car-builder (and semi-professional dancer and comedian) shook the truck down, he also played with its style. It debuted as a billet-equipped showpiece, transformed into a more traditional hot rod look, and is now a genre-busting race truck with custom three-piece wheels, aero modifications, a manual transmission, and even a new tub and roof chop! “I had five months off work sick over a two-year period, which gave me way too much time to think,” Aaron laughs. “The truck’s…

PRACTICALLY everyone on the planet agrees that XA-XC coupes are right up there with the best-looking body shapes ever smashed out of sheet steel. However, there’s a lot less love for the humble more-door version out in the modified car world. Tomi Vatavuk’s stonking sedan bucks that trend, and demands much more than a cursory glance. Tomi’s family played a significant role in developing his passion for 70s Falcons from a young age: “My brothers are eight and nine years older than me, so I grew up being that annoying kid following them around,” he says. “They always had tough cars. There’s a video of one of my brother’s mates in an XC doing doughnuts in a car park, and I was in the back seat! I must have been…

THIS month, we’ll walk you through two of the most common ways to use an oxy torch to straighten a sheet-metal panel, via a process called heat-shrinking. There are a lot of misconceptions when it comes to applying heat to steel; hopefully the following will clear up some of those fallacies. HOT SPOT SHRINKING THESE high crown areas (below left photo) can be caused by numerous things, including over-stretching the area from hammer-and-dolly work, or a patch panel not having the same contour as the area it has been fitted to after welding. To fix the problem, you can apply heat from the torch to cause the metal to pull together, and therefore rise up. This might seem like the opposite of what you want to do to get rid…

MARK Whelan is proud to trumpet the aural credentials of the stout 549hp, 521lb-ft Clevo under the bonnet of his sleeper XY Falcon: “It’s loud and obnoxious!” He didn’t forget to swap out those skinny 14-inch steelies for steamrollers, though. Nope, Mark’s been wanting a wolf in sheep’s clothing since before it became fashionable. “I always liked the sleeper thing,” he says. “I find that everyone is doing the GT lookalike, and I do like that, but I’m an old-school dude; it is what it is. “I bought the XY about nine years ago, as I’d always wanted one,” Mark continues. “I had an XA GT when I was 21 years old and I sold it when we got married and had kids.” So, with the kids now grown, it…

COMING from the wide open farmlands around Mandurah in south-west WA, Natasha McMahon really had a thing for a tough steel-bumper ute from the Blue Oval stable. Now she has a sterling example to call her own. Ripper ute you’ve got there, Natasha! What first got your attention about it? It was the colour; it just pops. I like the carbonfibre black-outs it came with too, as it’s different. I wanted the ute because my husband Tony already has an XC coupe and an XC GXL sedan, and I like XYs. We actually started looking at sedans, but the one we took for a test-drive broke down and we had to tow it back to the guy’s house! Sounds like a ute was meant to be. What happened next? We…

LEFTOVERS A MAN sits down in a diner and asks for a bowl of hot chilli. The waitress says: “Sorry, but the guy next to you got the last bowl.” The man looks over and sees that the guy next to him has stopped eating, but the bowl of chilli is still full. So he asks the guy: “Are you going to eat that chilli?” “No, help yourself,” the guy says. So the man slides the bowl of chilli over and starts to eat. When he gets about halfway down, his spoon hits something. He looks down and sees a dead mouse. He immediately pukes all the chilli back into the bowl. The other guy says to him: “Yeah, that was my reaction, too.” Rhi Gurjitate, email HEAVEN SENT A…

EVEN though most of the GM-H V8 fettlers have moved on from their faithful old Holden Five-Os into the wonderland of LS power, some iron lion warriors are still toiling away and making big numbers. Craig Bennett of Torque-Power is one of those. Craig is taking the evolution of the humble Holden V8 to levels we’ve frankly never seen before. Torque-Power’s range of Little Paw blocks are proving themselves to be seriously capable units, from the 800hp mill you see here to the 2400+hp donk found in Brenden ‘Bubba’ Medlyn’s twin-turbo VH Commodore. This example is a 427ci aspirated monster, with a bucketload of Torque-Power’s fruit. The bottom end consists of a US-sourced Scat billet crank, with Oliver conrods and CP pistons. The camshaft is where things get interesting, as…