igor

I've been a passenger on a Catch-a-bus Hiace with over 800,000 on the clock. It looked like it too but it was still going okay.

A guy at work showed me pics of his XD coon clicking over 500,000 the other week. I should ask him for permission to post on here.

Made this stretcher like thing for carrying full honey supers that are too heavy for one person to carry easily.

Yeah. Look once, see shitbox, look twice, gone. Funny how people don't expect to see roughish old cars go fast. 

Just read this whole thread. Keep up the good work. I'm a Falcon driver but I don't mind the look of the VL Commie. Borrowed a V8 one off my Dr once to pull a heavy tandem axle transporter. Went bloody well. I was most impressed with it. Pulled 80-130 in fifth gear to pass a slow car like the trailer wasn't even there. Clutch was mega heavy, race spec gearbox felt clunky, and the cam was so wild it wouldn't do 50 in fourth gear so second and third round town but I could easily live with that for the V8 coolness factor.

Nice. Looks like a rarity. What's the interior like? Still good?

^ Only just noticed that cool military looking thing. What is it? WW2 Quad gun tractor?

Cut the rivets off with a cold chisel and seperated the two halves of the bonnet then removed the hinge pin with the use of lots of crc, vice grips, and a pipe spanner as well as a claw hammer and a big drift punch. 

 

 

Thought I'd do a bit of the easy stuff so took the bonnet into the workshop to bash the lumps out of it and make it actually open and shut properly.

Had a go at fixing the electric start a while back too. Put a battery in and tried to crank it over. No go. Knew it should at least crank over as we had previously had it cranking and trying to start with jumper leads off our real farmer mate's Ford 6610. Took the starter motor off and when I turned it over rusty brown water came out. Hmm. That's what I get for leaving the bonnet off. Stripped down starter motor and cleaned parts. Never done this before. Figured I couldn't fuck it up any more than it already was so being too tight and too broke to pay someone else I had a go anyway. Discovered one of the carbon brush springs had half dissolved in the aforementioned water. Sorry no pics. Dunno where the camera was that day. Looked only slightly better than the above pics of the horn. Reassembled and refitted starter motor complete with dodgy broken spring and put jumper leads across it. It cranked over but did not start. I'm guessing fuel starvation. It's had issues with that several times before. Most of the time cleaning the filter gauze on the fuel pump and bleeding the air bubbles out has made it go again. I've drained the tank and cleaned it out as much as I can and blown the filter cartridge out with air pressure even though it looked like a newish one but I'm still thinking there is a fuel supply problem. Will replace the filter cartridge when I can. I'm hoping it hasn't sucked some crap into the injector pump cos I'm not keen to fuck with that myself and getting a pro to check it sounds expensive.

I have been doing a bit of work on this again of late. I think I have found why the horn doesn't work.

 

Man from Hinds garage ordered a new manifold from England for me. He had two 40' containers coming with some old trucks and other stuff so all seemed good. Free freight. Woohoo. The day his mate in England finished loading the containers the new manifold had not arrived at his depot so he stripped the manifold off his own tractor that he had been using that day to load the containers and sent that one instead. When I went to collect it the guy showed me where he thought it was but we couldn't see it. He was busy so I was given free rein to find it myself. After I had spent what seemed like a couple of hours searching through a four bedroom house jammed full of parts as well as two big garages I found the manifold under a stack of bumpers less than a foot from where he thought it had been. This whole process took over a year from ordering to collecting but I ended up getting a good second hand part for $80 instead of paying $150 for a new one so I'm claiming that as a win.

I bought this loader which of course was different to the one that had previously been on the tractor so the subframes, rams, and hydraulic pipework were not the same. Changed them over, managed to make it work after a fashion and got a bit of earthworks done. The chain is so that the hydraulics can't leak down and drop the bucket on the ground.

Loader ram had a conflict with the exhaust pipe resulting in the manifold looking like this.

Can see your point re cops pulling him up in that thing. BIL and his mad mate got done big time for driving a home built go-cart on the road forty years ago. Can't imagine the law being any easier now, stricter if anything. Of course they were pulling about 60 mph in a resdential street so there is a little bit of a difference.

Whatever else you change you absolutely must keep the column change and split bench seat. Fairmonts with that must be as rare as rocking horse shit now.

Perhaps now is a good time to start a build thread for Austin, NIKI!

Yes please. All of the ADO16 goodness.

Was three cards in the 1kg box, two in the 750g, and one in the smallest box that almost no-one with a family would buy anyway.

'80s rear drive Sigma? Have you considered a non Japanese six cylinder for max oddballness? Would it even fit? How 'bout a Hemi six out of a Val to keep it all in the Chrysler family? 265 with triple carbs, maybe full on E49 spec. Crazy money but fair hauls arse in a Charger so what'd it do a Sigma?

Amazing progress in just two years. 'Twas your post of this on LSB shortly after you bought it that led me into OS.  Would love to come for a look some time.

Waihola on Saturday.

 

 

and it's for sale

 

 

Today at Pukerau.

Louvres on this car would totally have to be brown or beige to match everything else.

I'll give you that tgb. I did read the whole thread. We did have an issue with a mid 2000s Ford Courier at work that blew 5th gear. The first thing the mechanic asked was had we been towing in 5th gear. We hadn't been. The handbook didn't tell us we shouldn't though and the boss's reaction, and he's a serious car guy too, was similar to mine. 

Bloody brilliant car rusti. 

I'm thinking mostly of old cars with three or four speed gearboxes not moderns with a super tall overdrive 5th but even then there is always going to be a situation where it is probably appropriate to use it whatever the handbook says. If the gearbox can't handle towing in top gear then the car is not fit for purpose / there is a serious design fault somewhere. It would have been a very slow trip if I had not used 4th gear when I towed a 6x6 trailer full of my possessions from Whangarei to Bluff with my ADO16 when I moved South in 1994. My EA Falcon tows pretty well in 5th gear too. Even a double horse float. No handbook I have had for any of my cars mentions not towing in top gear.