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I just see a lot of people fitting them backwards and getting absolutely roasted for it. Usually by someone who has no doubt made the same mistake themselves.
The car could be absolutely immaculate, but if the engine covers are on backwards...

I have cleaned up the centre console. Still have to replace the padding in the arm rest but a stint in the sonocleaner took all the dirt and grime out of the cover.

In the utes they have a flat blanking plate at the rear of the console, so I have got the one from the old VS wagon wreck, which has the rear AC vents in it and butchered it. Have cut out all the vents etc and glued in a piece of aluminium, then covered the lot with liquid epoxy. Once the epoxy sets it finishes up quite nicely with a small meniscus around the edges and holes. Pretty handy if you making gauge pods etc. Still needs to be sanded once it sets and can tend to get a few air bubbles as well, but I find dancing the heat gun over it gets rid of most of them. I think they look ok for minimal effort.

In this I will mount a twin USB charging point and an additional cigarette lighter socket. This should give us an option for an FM transmitter to connect up to the factory radio that is out of the way (but it won’t be hands free). It won’t look factory and it’s not perfect by any means but was all I could think of to hide some of this out of the way and still be reasonably accessible. Plus no one will see my handy work. The USB charging point I bought has a digital volt meter built in too, but it will be too hard to see to be of any value. I have bought the cheapest 2 channel Pioneer amp i could find, but this will have to wait till the car comes back from the painters and I can work out where I am going to install it - most likely behind the seats.

Bit of an update.
Intake manifold is machined and the gasket faces look much better. There was only 0.003” taken off one face and 0.005” off the other. The risk of having a coolant leak here as opposed to the cost of machining the faces I think it was worth the extra $150. In my favour though was not milling huge amounts of the deck to get the compression height correct - I think the rule of thumb is whatever is milled of the deck or heads needs to come off the intake faces. There’s not many stock stroke piston options, let alone stroker piston options that don’t require around 0.030” milled from the block – I have no idea why most of the aftermarket pistons have such low compression heights putting them a long way down the bore.
Anyway manifold is all fitted up and the new distributor and leads are in, hopefully timed close enough. The new alternator and starter motor are fitted too but these will come back off again for the engine to go back in the car. Have fitted a new MAT, coolant and temp gauge sensors as well. All this might be a bit of overkill but I really want this to be reliable going forward.
I was intending to get new injectors but settled on the old set of 42lb Bosch green tops that were originally in the one tonner which have been cleaned and flow checked. Should be more than adequate.
All in all it looks nice but fully acknowledge there’s a lot more to an engine rebuild than just a shiny paint job and some stickers.
Haven’t primed the oil system yet, and still need to track down a decent power steering pump. New ones seem to be low priced on ebay, but suspect the quality is similarly low. Not sure if anyone has any feedback on these.
And ute has been painted, and collecting it aligned nicely with a trip away for some regional school sport trials which saved me 400km driving and another day off work.
Painters have done a brilliant job and am very happy with what’s been done. Body work and painting is a skill I certainly don’t have. They said it ended up with very little bog in it which is excellent. The tray is in the Raptor liner, and the sills are done in stone guard. It is very bright, arguably too bright, and I wasn’t planning on running any side stripes. Hopefully things like the side mirrors, door handles and rims will break it up a bit. On my WB I had the sills done in stone guard and I wanted the same on this ute. It’s not how they came from the factory but there are enough dirt roads out here and it offers a bit of added protection. We did weigh up how it would go at the rear bumperettes and I decided not to stone guard them as it would look out of place at the back at the cost of looking out of place from the side. Anyway that’s a first world problem and it’s more of a practical solution rather than something designed to make it look good. I will need to chase up a set of moulded mud guards for it too. I think I have a set of fronts hidden in the shed but ute rears would not be very common.
The storage box has come up nicely, and have kept the tub in body colour Raptor so should be very durable. I do intend to source a rubber mat for it.
While we haven’t gone with any side stripes (or not yet), I did opt for a set of the VS style V8 badges on the front guards, and the later style side indicators.
Glass is all back in except for the doors with a brand new windscreen.
But this week has been unseasonably hot at 36 degs, so was a long day driving into the sun in the morning and the same again on the way home. Very thankful we got down and back safely, and very little traffic on the journey back so didn’t really hold anyone up or get in anyone’s way. Also thankful there’s no damage to the ute from stone chips, and the fresh paint didn’t get a coat of 4L60 guts.

Anyway thought I’d get a photo with the wind farm in the background. Out of 43 wind turbines doing a massive 5MW when this photo was taken, my one tonner probably is probably making more power. But the first job is to get this ute off the trailer and into the shed with damaging anything or anyone.

brindo wrote: ↑Fri Aug 30, 2024 9:33 am Bit of an update.
Intake manifold is machined and the gasket faces look much better. There was only 0.003” taken off one face and 0.005” off the other. The risk of having a coolant leak here as opposed to the cost of machining the faces I think it was worth the extra $150. In my favour though was not milling huge amounts of the deck to get the compression height correct - I think the rule of thumb is whatever is milled of the deck or heads needs to come off the intake faces. There’s not many stock stroke piston options, let alone stroker piston options that don’t require around 0.030” milled from the block – I have no idea why most of the aftermarket pistons have such low compression heights putting them a long way down the bore.

Most stroker kits just use Chev pistons which are close but not quite right resulting in the pistons been down the bore.

Here’s the after photo. Will get more once it's on the ground.

This is the only useable photo that turned out ok before it went into the shed – I can add being useless at photography to the list. Have managed to enlist the help of said daughter for some of the reassembly. Engine is in which was painless which also involved enlisting the help of the youngest daughter to help remove the bonnet – she was on the bolts and removing the clips from the struts. No paint was lost in this operation.
The LH side header goes straight in, but the RH side takes years off your life. The rack needs to be slipped back and the engine lifted as high as it can go and the header can go in from underneath. I don’t have a hoist so there was some skin lost in this operation but I really needed the extra set of hands at the engine bay while I was underneath the ute. Anyway I’m much happier now that the engine is sitting in the chassis rails rather than on the floor of my shed. Looking underneath its not hard to see why these things run so hot. There’s precious little clearance around the headers to the sump, steering rack and chassis rails. Not that this will help much but have got hold of some insulation for the fuel and power steer lines, as well as the clutch cable. Figure something is better than nothing (particularly on the clutch cable) and it shouldn’t cause any harm. I would have liked to insulate the headers as the source of the heat but that’s not going to happen. Fuel tank is in and fits nicely – almost looks factory. Replaced the all the hoses including the rubber 2” elbow.
Interestingly Rare Spares sell a kit for the utes to replace all the rubber lines, but it looks like it comes with a straight coupler not the elbow so I don’t see how it would work. Anyway the hoses are nothing special and can be bought at Repco or Supercheap.
But these utes are notorious for the fuel smell in the cab and I am determined that this one won’t be the same. Cause it’s been sitting so long I have bypassed the fuel rails and just circulated a bit of fuel through the filter and lines and back to the tank for 10 minutes. Gearbox is in but no tail shaft yet as will replace the unis, centre bearing and CV. I reused the clutch and pressure plate that came with it as they looked pretty new. The flywheel I just got machined locally but it was all balanced with the engine. Penrite list a gear oil for these T5s which doesn’t seem right to me – I always thought they ran ATF so that is what will go in it.

Still have a lot to do electrically. I have upped the size of the battery leads, but might have gone a bit too big. But the cable was all they had locally. But I also need to upgrade the main alternator wiring. Alternator is 120 amp and all that wiring was dodgy and cut n shut so will up the size of the main output cable to handle the extra current. There was also no fusible link on this ute when I got it, but I have a Maxifuse holder that will mount up instead so that should solve that issue.

It's coming along nicely. I thought the gear on these was basically engine oil and not atf type oil(too thin). I have a manual on these somewhere. Will see what it recommends.

Haha, yep rare spares sometimes are really dumb. I just slapped a return label on my Rares shipment, new handbrake cable and rubber boots are perished already.


I highly recommend the insulation you are putting on the hose. I did the same for my clutch cable and boy did it make a difference, same thing, close to the headers. I also insulated the header in that location too.

But for my white car, I am redoing the pacemakers to get HPC coating, I had it done on my hot VP and honestly it still looks like new some 7 years later and it reduced the radiant IR significantly.

Book says 75w/90 gear oil.

Def do not use gear oil, Holden messed up on that big time and it destroys the synchros, physically and chemically.

Just a good ATF that complies with DX2/3 APIs as per Tremec's service/workshop manual (huge warning in there not to use gear oil). I just use the Penrite stuff, the difference ATF makes (which is actually just the T5 working correctly) is astounding. Gear oil allows the hubs to crunch dogs, chipping and rounding them off and deteriorates the friction material, burns them to nothing too.