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cletus's vg valiant


cletus

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 Next plan- this is getting the engine out of my coupe, which was seized, pulled it apart and ordered a bunch of bits for it. When i bought the coupe, i had 3 at once so i did a big swap around, pinched all the good bits off the ute i had and sold it, and kept them for this car.

So it will have a mild 318, with some small mods to make it a good family cruiser. 500cfm edelbrock carb, dual plane manifold, MSD ignition, headers, little cam, some 30 over magnum pistons which are a bit different to the original ones

 

Have had wanky ideas of running a cat converter on it, i would like to see if i can get an old shitter like this to run close to clean as a modern car just to prove it can be done. And if it doesnt i can leave the cat off and say nothing and pretend it never happened.

 

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the brown car is a 770 Regal so it has some fruity bits the standard valiant doesnt. The plan for the brown car does not include any form of anything that doesnt need to be on it to function or make it faster so some of these parts will end up on the white car. started with fitting the stainless guard trims, which are a bit different to the 4 door as the rear guards are different.

nothing a cut off wheel couldnt sort though

 

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and stripped the heads. i thought i would get away with a quick clean up of the ports and throw them back together but one exhaust guide has a bit too much slop in it and one inlet valve and seat is pitted from water getting in it. so it will get a set of new valves, and new exhaust guides and hardened seats fitted

 

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quality. theres some horrible daggy casting marks in these

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after some goober with a die grinder attacked them

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waiting on valves to arrive then will send them off for some exhaust guides and seats.

 

block should be machined this week. its having a 40 thou haircut to get the comp ratio back up. SB chryslers are terrible for low compression which is part of the reason i built a turbo one. most aftermarket pistons have a much lower compression height than original- the best ones i could find at reasonable price were out of a later model magnum 318, they were still 30 thou shorter than the factory slugs. without decking the block they would sit 60 down from the deck, about 8.5-1 comp. depending on weather the heads need a skim, comp should be 9.3- 9.5 now. will probably need shorter pushrods now too......

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so i couldnt fit a triple pass muff in, not enough room at the back and i CBF changing the middle muffler again, so i put a 2 1/2 coby type thing in the back which has a chamber in it, seems to work ok, not droney etc

 

had to take a bit of timing out of it as it was having a rattle at light load with the vac advance hooked up. might reduce the amount of total advance as it seems to like 15deg initial timing (runs slightly nicer at idle) but it has over 40 all in

 

got stuck on the motorway for 40 mins in the stinking hot, and the temp didnt go over 180 which was nice. with the other engine it got quite warm quickly.

 

and put some speakers in the front, made new kick panels and carpeted them.

 

uhnn tiss

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I am now officially sick of working on the distributor on this.

 

The original lucas electronic dizzy shit itself a couple of months ago. i had a spare points one that i was going to throw in it but it was a bit pooched inside after i pulled it apart, so i dismantled the lucas one to make one out of the 2. But they are different inside.

 

So start looking for a replacement. i have a MSD flash harry one that i could put in, but would need to change all the plug lead ends, and i had a clean out and threw out the other set of plug lead ends that would have fitted. Plus i need the flash one for the good engine in the other car. In the end i reset the gap on the magnetic pickup and it worked, so i figured it was ok, and then was a good opportunity to sort out the advance curve. So i welded up the advance stops and filed them to get the right amount of advance, put it back in and away it went, ran well for a couple of weeks, until yesterday when it wouldnt go again.

 

So, the only things i could get easily was a $700 MSD one or a selection of $120 china ones. Didnt want to spend $700, so got a billet china one with no vacuum advance, put it in, but it had a million more advances than it needed again- 40 deg all in even with setting the initial timing at 5deg, at which it sounded like a flat old turd.

pulled it out again, it doesnt have any sort of adjustment but i expected that, dicked around with welding up the weights and using science and luck and my eyecrometer, now it has 36 all in and 16 initial, which it seems to like.

 

The good thing about having to pull it apart is it doesnt seem too badly built for the price.

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oh an i put a tow bar on it (easily removable, as towbars and mudflaps can GTFO) so i could tow a car back from rotorua, but I fucked it up and made it so it cant fit the type of hitch that the car trailer has, derp.

 

didnt find that out until i went to put the trailer on at the hire place.

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So i have been making a list of stuff to improve on this, fixing annoying things and stuff id been meaning to do for ages. last time i drove it down to my brothers place i got sick of it bouncing off the bumpstops all the time so i wound the front up slightly, that made a big difference to how it drives (surprise, durr) so i thought id make some more bumpstop clearance by a couple of easy mods to the lower arm.

I bought a cotton reel engine mount that i can chop in half and make some new bumpstops out of, as the original ones are quite soft, already trimmed and are now a bit hammered. However after checking how much total travel it has, the upper balljoints bind if the bumpstop is any shorter than what they currently are anyway so flag that idea, ill just make the new bumpstops and leave it at that. Might be a job for later if i make new upper arms for the brown car with less balljoint angle, i might make 2 sets.

 

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other things were the torsion bars, i never got around to putting V8 bars in it even though i had a set sitting under the house, there are 2 different size bars for aussie valiants, .850" for 6 bunger sedans and .870" for V8/pacer/charger/utes. I never got around to this cause i thought they were going to be difficult to remove but it took about 5 minutes to remove them

I also put new wheel bearings in.

 

While it was on the hoist at a mates shop on saturday while i swapped wheels over yet again, i measured the difference in height of the steering drag link side to side, the left inner tie rod end is 15mm higher than the rh one. i knew it was a bit on the piss but had never worried about it and just assumed it was usual chrysler standard of workmanship, although looking at the idler arm, it may be that is either damaged or was made incorrectly as the bush isnt in the right place by the looks of it. While the torsion bars were out i thought id do a bump steer check to see how bad it was, expecting it to be less than impressive.

So i made a cobbled together arrangement of wood i had laying around

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and came up with this.

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23 mm of toe change over most of its travel, which is pretty yuck, but not a surprise. explains some of its behaviour which i have got used to/ignored.

20mm is regarded as a lot for an old car, more modern stuff, 10mm is a lot.

 

i think there are 3 reasons why it sucks so much-

1- the idler arm issue, i will try to get the tie rod ends at the same height. one out of this car on the left

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2- it needs a proper wheel alignment, last time i had it done i set it up roughly by winding the rear adjuster right in and the front one half way which resulted in a fair bit of negative camber, and probably heaps of caster. i was expecting the wheel alignment guy to set it up properly but these are difficult to do an alignment on so he just set the toe.

The problem with too much caster or it being miles away from factory spec is it tips the steering arm down which can make the toe change problem worse. these are meant to have negative caster originally

3- its a valiant. not much i can do about that one...

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In more exciting valiant front steering geometry news in just now- changing the idler actually made the bump steer problem worse, 25mm now with the idler in the right place. Which means the outer tie rod ends need to be moved down. Which also means the caster is not a problem. I put a 14mm spacer under the tie rod ends and checked it again and got 9mm over the full travel of the suspension. So now I need to make some new heim joint steering arms

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i now feel like the more analog version of romandave, but regarding valiant front suspension rather than toyotas.

 

i got my new tie rod things

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painted and put in

 

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also made a thing to reduce the amount of droop travel to counteract the shortened bump stops, so the total suspension travel is more like original. this didnt make much difference to toe change problem though.

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check toe change again

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BINGO.

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toe change reduced from 23mm over 100mm of travel with original tie rod ends, down to 6mm with new ones.

It drives much better, even with a wheel alignment done by eye, it feels much more stable at open road speed over humps etc.

 

 

 

its quite surprising how much difference shifting the pivot point down a minimal amount can have such large effects on the geometry. the new tie rod ends are from memory about 9mm different to the original ones

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Anyone wanting to do the same thing-

 

the tie rod ends i used are early commodore manual steer ones-  Camelot part number TE526R available from Autolign

 

the joiner part has a female 9/16 UNF left hand thread in one end to fit an original valiant inner tie rod end, and a 14x2? male thread to suit the commodore tie rod end at the other. the whole thing is 210mm long which should suit any valiant VE- on. the threads are cut to a length of 65mm. Also you will need 4 jam nuts, 2 to suit the valiant tie rod ends and 2 to suit the commodore ones, the left hand thread nuts were slightly tricky to find, but Atom Fasteners in east tamaki had some.

The joiners themselves were made from 4130, not because thats what i asked for but thats what the guy who made them, had in stock.

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