BLOWN BIG BLOCK XW FALCON
THERE’S NOTHING WE LIKE MORE THAN A MOUNTAIN OF CHROME POKING OUT OF A HOLE IN A BONNET TO SIGNAL ONE’S INTENTIONS. WHAT DO YOU THINK RAJ PATEL PLANS TO DO WITH HIS?
It appears that, in Whanganui, the habit, be it good or bad, of cramming the biggest possible engine into an engine bay is still alive and well — so much so that Raj Patel had to go to the extent of shaving his strut towers so that he could fit 545 supercharged cubes of Henry Ford’s biggest and baddest into his XW! We really don’t know what is in the water over there, but, for some reason, Whanganui pumps out stupidly over-engined street cars with almost monotonous regularity — not that we’re complaining. This big blue Falcon has had a few different heartbeats over the years. The story almost reads like a ‘grandad’s axe’ tale — you know the one: it’s the same axe he’s had for 50 years, but it’s had three new handles and two new heads. You get the idea? Raj has owned his XW for 20 years. It all came about when Raj — who, until then, had owned a couple of Cortinas — was out and about downtown in Whangas, minding his own business. He spied the XW and immediately thought to himself, Man, I gotta have me a piece of that! Monies were exchanged and Raj had his own XW, just like the one that had faithfully served his mum and dad and the family back in the day. Their one wasn’t running a 351 Cleveland, four-speed Toploader, and a nineinch like his did, though. For a couple of years, old Raj felt 10-feet tall and bulletproof — as most of us did at his age. Like many locals of the time, he spent more than a few nights out on the prowl, occasionally thrashing the pants off the car.
Unfortunately, his exuberance eventually came at a cost, as is often the case when you abuse a car the way he did, and the big blue brute developed a misfire. Long story short, the Clevo had eaten a lobe off the cam at some stage in its high rpm lifetime. Any sensible person would simply look at replacing the cam and carrying on as normal, but this is Whanganui, and when it comes to cars, they tend to be as far from normal as humanly possible. There was no way Raj was simply going to replace the cam when the XW’s engine bay was gagging for something larger. So, instead of replacing the cam, Raj decided to buy a gnarly 429 big block off a bloke in Tauranga. “She’ll be right; look at the size of the engine bay — it’ll bolt straight in, sweet as; we just have to hook it up to the four-speed and Bob’s ya uncle!” Ah, not quite … A desperate call to fellow Wanganui Road Rodders member Dean Scott followed, and Dean, who works at Rivers Speed and Spares, soon fabricated Raj a set of custom engine mounts to unite the mechanicals in perfect harmony — albeit an extremely loud harmony, though, as there wasn’t much room to run headers. The car was loaded onto a trailer and shipped east to Palmerston North to make things a bit less feral in the passenger compartment once the ignition key was twisted. Sadly for Raj, three months later, the car was chucked back onto the trailer and shipped back west, sans headers — “too hard”, apparently! It was straight back to Rivers Speed and Spares, this time with Grant Rivers on the tools. A couple of days of head scratching later, and a plan was hatched. “If we shave the strut towers a bit here, and massage things a bit there, I think we can make something work,” he reckoned. A month later, the job that had been “too hard” was complete, and a wicked set of custom headers was bolted in place — should’ve shopped local first, huh? With things all sussed in the engine department, Raj could turn his attention to the exterior, which was in dire need of a bit of a spruce up. Shaun Smith of Ross Francis Panel and Paint — and methanol-drinking Donovan-poweredDatsun-ute fame — smacked out all the imperfections and squirted on a hue of blue to make things nice and shiny on the outside.