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Avenga's 1UZ V8 powered 1980 Avenger Wagon


Avenga

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  • 1 month later...

Good choice on painting the bonnet pin surrounds, more sleeper = more awesome IMO. I'm currently agonizing on whether to go pins for my thing, REALLY don't want to but seems like the only way I'm gonna be able able to run the intercooler I want dammit

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looking good now its coming along i like the older style bumpers much cleaner look did grim have that? its looking like i might not get around to doing a chrysler avenger will probably just stick too hillman i have two brand new headlights for one but i payed a lot for them:doubt:

pins look better body colour indeed.

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On 10/03/2019 at 18:10, KP_wag said:

Good choice on painting the bonnet pin surrounds, more sleeper = more awesome IMO. I'm currently agonizing on whether to go pins for my thing, REALLY don't want to but seems like the only way I'm gonna be able able to run the intercooler I want dammit

Yeah. They have grown on me. At first they looked odd, but it was just that my eye was drawn to it because I could see something had changed so they stood out.

On 10/03/2019 at 19:37, avengertiger said:

looking good now its coming along i like the older style bumpers much cleaner look did grim have that? its looking like i might not get around to doing a chrysler avenger will probably just stick too hillman i have two brand new headlights for one but i payed a lot for them:doubt:

pins look better body colour indeed.

I got the bumper off Ross, Oldschool on the Avenger forums. He had them left over from after he sold his Avengers.

They didn't come with the brackets so I had to steal the ones off my 75 Avenger, I'm currently trying to hunt some down so I can put the old bumper back on my 75.

Normally I like the Hillmans for sedans, but I quite like the look of the Chrysler wagons more than the Hillmans. If they are Chrysler lights then I wouldn't mind buying them off you, mine are a bit old.

On 11/03/2019 at 15:26, kiwisurf said:

Saw it at the Brit and Euro show....Its just as sweet in person.

Nice! It was a good day out! So many cars there, I spent all day walking around and still didn't see everything.

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I would flatten down the centre of the "cooling fins" where you propose to put the badge with sufficient equal space either side of about an inch,  the badge would then sit approximately level in height with the top of fins, paint the whole cover the same alloy shade and it will look even less like a Toyota V8 and more like a classic Mickey Thompson type V8 valve cover which would be more fitting for the car. 

Hope that makes sense. 

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^ what he said.

Love the Chrysler badge idea. Fucking with peoples minds appeals to me. And it will be awesome listening to Barry’s talk about it!

Also, the painted bonnet pins have grown on me. I’ll admit atfirst I was unsure, but like mentioned above it makes it even more sleeper. So now im down with it.

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7 hours ago, kyteler said:

I would flatten down the centre of the "cooling fins" where you propose to put the badge with sufficient equal space either side of about an inch,  the badge would then sit approximately level in height with the top of fins, paint the whole cover the same alloy shade and it will look even less like a Toyota V8 and more like a classic Mickey Thompson type V8 valve cover which would be more fitting for the car. 

Hope that makes sense. 

I was thinking of doing that originally, except the plastic isn't very thick, and it is sort of ribbed in the inside, sort of like the inverse of the cooling fins, so by the time you flattened it down you could break through the plastic.

4 hours ago, kiwi808 said:

^ what he said.

Love the Chrysler badge idea. Fucking with peoples minds appeals to me. And it will be awesome listening to Barry’s talk about it!

Also, the painted bonnet pins have grown on me. I’ll admit atfirst I was unsure, but like mentioned above it makes it even more sleeper. So now im down with it.

Bygones did a Zephyr with a 1UZ and all they did was put a ford logo on the top of the standard 1UZ manifold and it confuses the crap out of everyone. So I do like that. 

1 hour ago, Muncie said:

Could you make a feature of the spark plug leads ? Make it look extra hemi.... with a pentastar chucked in the middle.

images (32).jpeg

My theme for the motor is super clean and simple, so I want to avoid having any wires or leads visible. I do like the pentastar and mopar hemi badges on that engine. 

8 minutes ago, locost_bryan said:

Perhaps a variation on the rocker covers of the Sunbeam Tiger - "Tiger powered by Chrysler"

images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSaG5NWIa-zPyxCylPJINc

images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTvcr8TO0yMUgpfGlIn3ro

I do like that idea. I have model names for each of my Avengers. My 75 is sort of an Avenger Tiger+++ so I called that my Avenger Panther, and my wagon I have dubbed the Avenger Hydra, after the 8 headed monster of legend, so I could go for something like that.

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  • 1 month later...

Rear wheel/tyre combo looks so good on this, looks tough but retains some sleeper feel also. 

Re number of wagons left, where do you get this info? Have heard other people say similar things about other cars and wondering where this data comes from 

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Thanks. I agree. I think it's the perfect balance of tough and sleeper, any bigger and it wouldn't look sleeper, but any smaller then it wouldn't look tough.

I got the data from the "New Zealand vehicle fleet open data sets" https://www.nzta.govt.nz/resources/new-zealand-motor-vehicle-register-statistics/new-zealand-vehicle-fleet-open-data-sets/

It's a spreadsheet that they update each month of currently registered cars (including rego on hold), and you can download the spreadsheets and search. They have one big file for pre-1990 and then a separate file for each year after that. Basically unless it's deregistered then it will be in the database.

It is quite a pain to find every car, because some were registered wrong, like some Hillman Avenger Apline's we registered as just a Hillman Alpine, and same with the Avenger Supers. So I did a series of searches looking for the chassis number pattern, model, name and then finally just skimmed through all of the hillman's and Chrysler's just to make sure I didn't miss any.

The number I came back with was

Total: 276 Avengers!!!

Of those 

Saloon: 245
Wagon: 28
Van: 3

I could then break it down by year, colour and engine type. So I did up a little census of all the Avengers left.

http://www.avenger.co.nz/forum/index.php?topic=1114.0

The database is just a snapshot of cars that are still registered, including ones on hold. It took me a couple of nights of filtering the data and coming up with the lists but it will be a pretty accurate snapshot, I might have missed one or two but I went over the data pretty thoroughly.  

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There is something funny going on with the cert info though, Both of my Avengers have had engine swaps 1300 to 1500 and 1600 to 3968, and they both show up in the database with the new engine size. But then I know of 2 Rover V8 rally cars, and I'm pretty sure at least 1 of them is certed, and they don't show up, they still show as 1600's. So I'm not sure if the cert info only shows up if it was certed after a certain date or something.

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