fbekholden.com

Donnie,

Early Holden cooling systems don't like it when you go from freeway speeds to a dead stop immediately. There's a lot of heat stored in the cylinder head, and when you turn the engine off, the coolant stops flowing also. The stored heat's got to go somewhere, the coolant inside the head ...

BR50 is EK.
BR54 is EJ.

Part way along EK production, the grease cup (at the base of the distributor body) was deleted.

The vacuum advance in all grey distributors up to and including EK has the female fitting for a 3/16" pipe. The vac. adv. unit in EJ distributors takes a hose. You can swap the ...

I'm imagining a bathplug-spitting contest on startup . . . or . . . maybe you could have more fun under the garage roof with a bag of Kipfler potatoes.

But my goodness that cylinder head is a work of art.

Rob

The Zeta was a sort-of pastel olive-greenish colour with a red central speed stripe and the name "Zeta" on the rear 'bumper' in the same style as the Zeta Sports brochure.

The rear wheel arches were quite enlarged to take bigger wheels: steel, in black, with plain chrome hubcaps. The rear wheel ...

Spotted on the Augusta Highway between Ports Pirie and Augusta: a Falcon towing a car trailer. On the trailer was a small, boxy vehicle that I mistook for a Trabant at first . . .

Nope. It had a sticker on the back that read "Zeta". And it was not exactly stock in appearance either. I figured if ...

The A30 is a dead ringer for the one my grandfather had . . .

Rob

What Blacky said. Those are first-rate repairs you have done.

Rob

. . . noting that HD/HR passenger vehicles have 1-3/4" width rear brakes.

Rob

Everything's in the right position, but the engine mounts don't look right for a manual EK. FE-EK rear engine mounts are the compression-only type: a rectangular piece of rubber between two flat steel plates. The one in your photo (passenger side) looks like a compression/shear type, which makes me ...

"Did up the Hr front calipers yesterday , don't those piston boots bring out some colourful language ."

Yes, indeed. Had to get a brake place to show me how:

Install inner and outer seals in their respective grooves.
Lubricate inner seal and the outside surface of the outer seal with brake fluid ...

Blacky,

Your question goes to the heart of the matter.

All drum brakes self-energise to a certain extent on the leading shoe. I read somewhere that the self-energization is a very "steep" function of the lining's friction coefficient, in that small increase of friction coefficient will give a very ...

"Is it possible to upgrade FE-FC FB-EK front brakes to EJ-EH or HD" is a question which comes up fairly often. The accepted method is to change over to EJ-HD steering knuckles, supports, steering arms, backing plates and brakes as an assembly. But I got to wondering -

Is it possible to bolt EJ-HD ...

@Harv,

Yep. Got there and back. The car had its moments. I had to unblock the main jet a couple of times on Friday: one in the classic manner (stop car, remove air cleaner, start engine, rev, clap hand over air intake, check for correct throttle response, replace air cleaner, drive away and think ...

Clay,

Replacing the front wheel bearings won't fix the apparent free-play problem. There'll be something wrong with the stackup of parts, so either the nut's bottoming on the stub-axle thread, or the washer's bottoming on the outer bearing surface of the stub axle.

I can tell you what happens with ...

Today, I'm not so sure about the leaky fuel riser pipe hypothesis. I was about to try the hose-in-jerry-can trick and saw that the fuel pump bowl was full to the top. That wouldn't happen if the fuel riser was leaking. I started the car and ran it for about ten minutes. There was no hint of air ...