Ants delco twin cam gemini

[VL400]

Thats awesome Antus! Rather interesting way of getting more sway bar in there!

[antus]

Haha yeah it is a bit unorthadox, I got the idea from this article holden202 sent me, and already had 2 factory bars sitting around and so I figured i'd give it a shot. Very happy with how the handling turned out.

http://autospeed.com/cms/title_Sway-Bar ... ticle.html

[Holden202T]

looks good man, doesn't seem to sit down too low either so shouldn't cause any hassles ....

oh and as to your rear sway bar not being an easy option, i wouldn't bother with it .... if its sitting dead flat now then the rear one ain't going to do much and like i said before, its just more chance of lifting the inside wheel with one .....

so whats next on the upgrade list ??

[antus]

I was asked about how my IAC is mounted, so I figured i'd put the pics here for others to get ideas too. Its cut out of a VN throttlebody and tapped and plumbed around the standard ITEC throttle body instead.

[Holden202T]

if you had a mill or something you could easily machine a block of alloy similar and just tap some threads into it ... good easy way to adapt to plenty of different cars.

[antus]

Well it was a sad morning this morning. The car was running very poorly and I thought I must have made a mistake with the tune, but no... I was taking it for a drive to my mechanic to get an upgraded alternator, and didnt make it. I thought the car was running a bit rich but I guess it was burning oil and having touble... ended up heating up.. I was watching the temp so aborted driving as soon as it got over the hot end of normal. I gave up and got my trailer. The engine had cooled by then so I decided to give it a kick to see if it'd start to drive on the trailer. It just made a big ker-klunk and wouldnt even turn over. Batt volts didnt drop so I knew it was looking like major physical problems, not power problems. My mechanic suggested it might be water in a cylinder that cant compress, and I had some tools and checked it out and it turned out to be true. Lots of water and oil in cylinder 4 under the spark plug. I think that the engine had been gradually degrading for some time, but I didnt detect the problem.. So she's off the road for a while. I need to find out of the head is ok (twin cam heads are rare, so I hope so!) then consider what to do next. I have a twin cam gasket set and am thinking of rebuilding and boosting with $12p next!

[Holden202T]

evening if there is a part coroded out of the head the machine shops can usually weld a new bit of alloy in there then machine it and you'd never know! aslong as its not too bad.

boosted gemini should be a ripper

[antus]

This week my mission has been to get the head off and find out what happened - if It was just a gasket and the head was OK, or if I needed to find a new head or....?

This is what we found... coolant where it wasnt meant to be and a definate head gasket failure between cylinders 3&4. Apparently this is a common fault on g200w engines as there is not much between cyl 1&2 and 3&4.

[antus]

So, we thought this wasnt too bad, and maybe the engine was good. We checked the head for damage, and found it to be fine. The rings and bores looked pretty good, and I decided that all was well enough that we could probably just clean it all up and use a VRS gasket set I had on hand, and put it back together. So some hours later (we did clean the valves up more after these were taken)...

[antus]

Thanks to the timing diagrams on the twin cam forums, we got it all aligned properly. Shiny links and pully marks right at the top and the bottom, but note the camera angle makes the bottom look a fraction out... its not...

Interesting enough the shiny links seem to move across in relation to the pully marks as the engine turns but the crank and the cams stay in alignment with each other. After about 8? revolutions its all aligned as per the starting point again. As far as we can tell, this is normal.