12-11-09, 22:14 GMT+10#1
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Howdy All,
.Ive been around here for a while but havent posted much. Thought this would make a good intro by starting a thread on the long-going rebuild of our VL LE Calais Turbo
To cut a long story short, we ended up with the car out of chance - we werent looking for another HDT at the time as we had just purchased our second VK SS. Talking with a mate about a car he was watching coming up for auction at the local re-po shed, "what ya rekon a turbo LE is worth?"
The rest is history..............i should never answered the question.
What we bought was a Evening Blue 86' LE Calais, it had the purple springs, stocky turbo set up, all of the right bells & whistles including the obligitory "Energy Polariser". However, the condition of the car - well thats where it gets nasty. Cigarette butt burns on every single velour panel in the car, including the rear qtr surrounds.......every f/glass panel had been repaired with a 'home handy f/glass kit' and there was something "Milky" about the oil cap???? Missing were the Momo rims, replaced with a buckled set of Walky rims, however i did score the original venatians with it
Paint had recently been done by an absolute knucklehead.....it was that bad that despite the relatively minor body damage i had to repair, the decision was made early on to strip her back to at least the factory base primer..........something i would later regret.
The engine had obvious top end dramas but a quick removal of the head, immediately showed the problem lied with a blown head gasket.Pressure test and face the head for safe measure, commetic head gasket with head stud kit to keep things sealed and hi-flow turbo rebuild with 3" turbo - cat pipe to gain a few more kw. We wanted to keep any mods to the engine out of sight - hence no coolers or big turbos and manifolds....nothing to notice at all.
Work Begins.......
Stay tuned......
Some original photos have not been recovered yet.
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