Boingk's Supercharged VS Ute

[boingk]

I've always liked older (VG-VS) Commodore utes so started looking at them - there are a lot around, prices are low, parts are easy to find and cheap... and its a ute! Light, fast, 2 seats... the Australian sportscar. I'd just sold a motorbike and another project so had a bit of cash and space to spare.

I ended up finding a few options that for one reason or another just didn't work out, but then stumbled upon this fairly clean 1998 VS ute:

I read through the ad and a few things caught my eye. One was that it was fairly close, a mere 9 hours away in Melbourne. Seeing as Sydney is 12ish, yeah, that's close for me out here in the outback. The other was it had a 5 speed manual transmission and this under the hood:

Yep, that's right friends... that's a supercharged V6, the mighty L67. I got talking to the seller and lined up a price and a day.

More to come - boingk

 

[UP THE RED VS]

Looks good, sits at a nice height too. Keen for updates...

 

[boingk]

Ask and ye shall receive!

I followed up on the ute earlier this week and packed the car especially. The plan was to get off nightshift, sleep, wake up around lunchtime, go get the trailer around dinnertime and get out of town. The drive is about 850km so I'd need to sleep both on the way there and the way back ideally, factoring in being nightshifted as well as stuffing around with the car at the other end. Behold, the beauty of the wagon!

It actually made for a decent sleep, too. I camped in a carpark in Mildura outside Supercheap, haha...

The next day was uneventful until I got into Melbourne some 550km later. The ute went onto the trailer without a hitch:

Wait, no it didn't!

The ute is running lowered springs, it didn't look too bad in the photos but in real life it sure is low. The exhaust grounded on the trailer a few times because of its crappily short loading ramps... so the seller and I ghetto-rigged a solution by chocking the ramps and then jacking the side the exhaust was on while the ute was halfway up it. This allowed us to winch the ute on by the skin of its teeth without the exhaust grounding. Can't say I'd recommend this method to anyone!

After that it was a quick stop for fuel and food, then a few hundred kilometres into the night before I found a truckstop to park and sleep at.

The next day went well for another few hundred kay, until this happened:

Bugger. I check the spare on the ute (not there) and my car (wrong stud pattern) and then just swapped the rear tyre to the front. The blown tyre got chucked into the ute while I crawled at 70kmh to the nearest town and got a new tyre fitted for the princely sum of $40.

New wheel in place, I upped the ante once again and kept on trucking...

 

[VS_Pete]

Looks good.

 

[boingk]

Thanks VS_Pete!

The trip home with her went alright:

So, getting closer to home I started feeling pretty good about it all despite the tyre blowing and having a very cold sleep the night before in the back of the car. I kept the speedometer steady and plugged away at the miles. Eventually I pulled into the lane behind my house and enacted my plan of using car service ramps to extend the trailer ramps and make a nice, long, shallow ramp to get the ute off with.

It worked!

I had a good look around and decided that she's fairly clean overall, despite having a somewhat seedy past:

Yep... she's a Stance Whore. Goshdarn it, hahahaha...

At least one of the previous owners had the care to fit an upmarket Statesman interior - I haven't ever seen one of these interiors retrofitted into a ute, but its nice - the electric windows are a nice convenience for an older ute and the faux-walnut trim will look pretty good with a bit of a cleanup. The short-shifter feels very tight and is topped with a very nicely weighted shifter, too. Sound comes courtesy of a JVC headunit that I'm already looking at swapping out for a Pioneer as I have one hanging around.

By far the best bit of the ute, though, is the engine:

L67 goodness, rattling its 10psi note through a set of Pacemaker headers and a custom 3" exhaust. Its very rumbly, if you can imagine kicing a 40-gallon drum down an alley during a thunderstorm that's about the level we're playing with here.

So, that's the journey so far. She's safe at home after the mother of all road trips and there is more yet to come.

The tick list looks like this:

1. Change all fluids and filters.
2. Find the weird intermittent rattling noise - my bet is the exhaust grounding or the harmonic balancer going. Lifters are newly replaced.
3. Clean up the interior and get everything electrical contact-cleaned and functioning 100% (as opposed to 60% for the windows).
4. Think about swapping the spooled diff for an LSD unit.

...aaaand that's all I can think of! More as it happens.

- boingk

 

[C B]

Looks the goods mate Should have some fun with the L67

 

[boingk]

Yep... just not at the moment

Gave her a routine oil flush, filled back up with Valvoline XLD Premium 20W-50 and some Nulon 'Modern Engine' PTFE additive and as the engine pumped the new oil through the system I could clearly hear a rod knock. Classic dry double-knock on startup and then faded a bit as the oil pumped through the system under pump pressure. Bugger.

Good news is that I've found an Ecotec locally for $100 so should be able to do a quick and dirty swap while I sort the L67 out!

Cheers - boingk

 

[boingk]

Progress today is that I scrounged an engine cover and spare tyre for the Ute. Nothing much but I will definitely need a roadworthy spare for rego!

I'm finalising the pickup of the Ecotec engine as well. Its got a blown head gasket but thats not such a hard fix and its not a dear item either. Biggest catch is that its still in a car... so may or may not end up going that way depending on how quickly I can organise getting it out of said car.

- boingk

 

[wraith]

But that's not a super 6 engine cover....

 

[C B]

He's putting an ecotec in mate...