No test drive? Can't hear it running? Glenn Torrens crosses his fingers on a second-hand engine
I’ve just spen a Saturday arvo cleaning and panel-beating the tin floor of a Holden six-cylinder sump. No, it’s not the one from my ‘Coomadore’ project car that I brought back to life in a wrecking yard. This bent-to-buggery sump I’ve just put some effort into is from a 3.3-litre Holden Blue engine I bought to drop into yet another early Commodore I’ve been working on.
This car is a complete-except-engine bargain-buy wagon that someone planned to drop a toughie V8 into. So, the car’s original 3.3-litre six was lifted out… then nothing more happened. That was a decade ago. Recently, the seller realised nothing would happen, ever, so for a fistful of moneys, I bought the mouldy engineless unfinished project from under a gum tree.
To build myself a fun summer cruiser I needed a driveline so I answered a For Sale ad for a Commodore 3.3/auto combo. It was a sharp price, not too far away but it had been removed from the car… Naturally I was a little hesitant about buying an engine I couldn’t hear running nor test-drive but a few messages back and forth explained to and reassured me that although the engine was not in the car, it had come from an untidy but allegedly low-kay Commodore that – and here’s a familiar story – sat doing nothing for years.
The car had been bought from a farm, driven on and off the trailer and ‘around the block’ to test the brakes, steering and diff. The seller’s son also said with a cheeky grin that he’d done a bit of a skid in this new-to-them Commodore, too, as a goodbye to the six-cylinder engine before it was replaced by a V8.
Well, you can’t do much of a skid with a dud engine so I decided to buy it. I handed over the dollars and we craned it onto my trailer. At home, I lifted it off the trailer to give it a quick wash and a once-over before it began a new life in my Commodore wagon.
But with the engine swinging in the breeze 80cm above the ground, I noticed the sump had been punched up about 25mm, I guess by the impact of this ex-farm car engine having been used for a bit of a paddock-bash.
Hmmm… with the oil pickup being so close to the floor of the Holden sump – as it is in most motors – the sump needed to be removed to bash and bend things straight again. I drained the oil and unbolted the sump. Not only was the oil pickup damaged, but there was a thick layer of sludge that hadn’t drained-out with the rest of the oil. Yuk.
I’m smart enough – or dumb enough! – to make my own decisions when buying second-hand stuff but I’ll admit in this case I didn’t notice that damaged sump. So don’t get me wrong; I‘m not having a dig at the sellers. In fact, the young bloke said g’day to me at a drive-in movie night the very day I began working on this engine and he was keen to know if I’d got my car, with this old farm-find engine, running.
As mentioned, I’ve cleaned and bashed-out the sump and have continued getting the engine ready to drop into the Commodore’s freshly painted engine bay.
These old Holden sixes – like most other Aussie stuff from the era – are pretty tough… I just hope there’s no long-term hidden damage caused by either the bashed-in sump or the sludge blocking the oil pickup to starve the engine of oil… Fingers crossed!
From Unique Cars #475, Feb 2023