Hello all. Names Sam and I’m from Tumut, a little town at the foot of the snowy mountains in country nsw.
I have always appreciated the turbo and have been on this forum hiding in the background since 2012.
A little bit of my background.
I finished year 12 of high school in 2004 and went straight into a machanical engineering (fitting and machining) apprenticeship before the year ended. From there I learnt a lot from the trade as well as picking up fabrication skills mainly in stainless steel tig welding. The shop I worked for specialised in both machining and boiler making and fabrication. As a apprentice you tend to get shifted about a bit learning from all the tradesmen.
My hobbies back then were mainly fishing, camping, 4wd touring. Playing rugby league in the winter, cricket in the summer and playing golf in between.
My first car was a 1986 2.4 diesel Toyota 4Runner. (Still have it as my knock around Work car). Being non turbo it was a real slug. Especially after the 33” mud tyres and lift etc went on. So I changed out the diff gears from 4.11 to 4.88 ratios and rolled like that fit a couple years. Then I built a high mount tubular style turbo manifold out of stainless steam pipe (with bung for egt probe) and built flanges on the milling machine on my lunch breaks.
After fitting them up I built a mandrel bent 3” stainless dump/exhaust with a hotdog muffler. A bit of a tweak on the injector pump according to egt and still happy as near 100k later. Next on the list for the old girl is top mount intercooling. Have the bits there to do it but never got around to it.
2010 my beloved dragons won the nrl premiership and I had a career change. I went in to be a production engineer at a local craft paper making mill doing 12 hour day/night shift basically 5 on 5 off. And still doing it.
2009 saw me buy a 2005 ba mk2 manual GT-P falcon in rapid yellow with 25k on the clock. Did all the usual bolt ons. Lowered suspension with bilstien shocks, full Difilippo exhaust, ballistic cats, underdrives etc. eventually bluepower air box,Herrod cams and blue power tune around 2011.
2012 saw me Drag race for the first time at the fordforums drag nationals where I travelled down with a group from Canberra. And seen me come home with the encouragement award. Bowing out of the dyo Comp by over running my dialed time running my pb for the weekend.
2013 I went back to the same event travelling with the same group. And come home with the trophy for the 12.00-13.99 dyo winner. (Haven’t been back since)
A couple more years went by having fun with the GT doing khanacross, short tracks on cootamundra airport and hill climbs with Wagga car club.
2015 seen a exploded diff so I installed a new harrop trutrac centre and second hand 4.11 gears bought from tweeked a year or so earlier.
To this day the hasn’t been any other major changes to the GT. Just issues with intermediate timing chain tensioner plastic guides on the drivers side bank. Done 3 of them now since the herrod cams and maybe 35k travelled. First time seen bent valves in 2014 on a qld holiday. So all new chains and sprockets, valves, machine work done through elite auto. 2016 was the 2nd time I got lucky and only had to remove the sump to clean out the plastic etc. 3rd time was at the start of this year about 40m down the road from home. I suspect some kind of engine harmonics are making the drivers side let go maybe from the cams. But this last time the plastic guide grabbed and went around the sprocket and caused a big skip in timing and broke most of the intake finger followers in half. No now it’s living in the garage unregistered until I figure out a plan and what direction I want to go with it. Possibly built motor to hand more revs, bigger cams and something around 200 shot of nitrous OR built motor with single turbo all dabbed up by me or procharger set up. (Brother has au Ute with built dart block/heads 363ci with pd Supercharger so would like to do something different in that regard).
Now after all that jibberish leads me to here.
Married, mortgage, two kids in daycare under 3 years old. Mrs is driving a 120 prado as the Mum bus. And my only running car was the trusty old 2 door 4runner which isn’t car seat friendly with the little ones.
I started looking around for something suitable for me to drive and run the kids around while the Mrs works. Looked at g6e, g6e turbo, f6e and dare I say it, some cammed Expensive Daewoo caprice and Calais.
Also at this time my mums partner of something like 20 years recently retired and decided he would trade his ex cop 2007 bf mk2 turbo with the zf in winter white for a new mustang. He called me from the dealership he was thinking of accepting the trade in price of a measley $4k. I told him I would buy it from him for that, so I run to the bank and bought it off him for that price the same day. Happy as Larry.
Now pics of the all important turbo
When I got it the paint looked cloudy and was in a pretty poor state. Some fading by some kind of chemical used to remove the police stickers. I should have gotten close up pics of it all to show what I mean but these two are the earliest pics I have of the car a few weeks after I went over with tardis to remove old wax that hadn’t been removed and tree sap, bugs and tar
After about 18 hours of detailing fun over a few days...
3 stages of cut and polishes topped with Wolfgang fusion estate wax
