Stone-age photo-shop?
I have been follow ing t he debate about red motors in EJ Holdens and I have studied t he picture on page 94 of issue 426 of
Unique Cars and it looks ver y much that the picture of t he red motor itself is an i l lust rat ion. Yet it appears to be t hat t he EJ picture of t he vehicle is actua lly a photograph. The batter y, chain, lif t ing tool, manifold, carby and motor etc look more like t he work of an illustrator. The cowl, steering wheel and what is v isible of t he driver’s door looks fa r more like a photograph. An early example of “photoshopping” ?
I would be interested in your t houghts if you feel my obser vations have merit and what this might mean in the ongoing debate.
Ian Doust,
Email. HMMM, YOU could quite well be right about this, Ian. I thought the whole thing was a hand-drawn illustration, but maybe Holden did, in fact, merge a drawing with a photograph to come up with the illustration in question. Certainly, hand-finishing (mainly colouring) photographs was a common practice back in the 1950s and 60s before colour photography was as accessible as it eventually became.
The other factor that supports your theory is that, back then, companies like Holden had distinct departments to take care of different roles. There wasn’t always a lot of cross-over between two departments, either, sometimes based on the old class system that was still a part of Aussie life back then. For instance, an old mate of mine who knew him, once told me that the late, great Australian engineer Phil Irving identified himself to new acquaintances as a member of the drawing-room team, rather than just the engineering department generally. He probably wasn’t being a snob, that’s just how it was back then.
So it’s quite possible that whoever produced the illustration we’re talking about, was from the graphic arts department and the graphic arts department only. By which I mean he or she might have been an illustrator who just happened to work for Holden, rather than an illustrator with any knowledge of cars. Tasked with creating a complicated, melded image, this is what they came up with, inadvertently whetting the lips of every UniqueCars
reader nearly six decades later.
As for what it means to the argument: Well, I’m tipping nothing. Just as the illustration (on face value) never proved the red-motored EJ theory, neither do questions over the same picture’s authenticity or production disprove the same school of thought. I said all along it was just a picture and that you lot were welcome to read into it what you wished. Nothing has changed there. Nice to see you’re paying attention, though.
And another one
That apparent photo of a red motor suspended over an EJ engine bay looks to me more like a rendering/art ist’s impression. Perhaps an over ent husiastic graphics guy got his metaphors mixed.
Oh, and A9Xs came with the L31 308 and, I suspect would be prett y much f lat k nacker at 200kmh, regardless of gearing. (Don’t ask me how I know.)
And, by t he way, I still have my ‘barn find’ Land Rover in as found condition, only now it goes and stops (hooray) and FY I, it does have a red motor in it (a 179 HP) so maybe that’s where Holden was diverting t heir red motors to.
This can be confirmed quite easily by researching online selling sites or your own f ine publication, where you will find more early Land Rovers sporting red motors than the Rover boat anchors they came with. Keep the conspiracy t heories coming. Rob H, Email
OKAY, BUT even if the illustration was an early form of photo-shopping or rendering, I still have to ask how nobody within Holden picked up the fact that the picture shows a red motor going into (or coming out of) an EJ. That said, I would have looked through that very service manual and not noticed the significance of the pic in question, so maybe it’s possible that it escaped the eagle eyes of the GMH proof-readers of the day, too. Or maybe the proof reading was out-sourced to the publisher or printer and was simply not recognised for what it was. We may never know. Ah well…
Meantime, I once read somewhere that all production A9X Toranas ran a 3.08:1 diff. Based on the redline of the L31 V8, that equated to 210km/h, pretty close to your guess of 200 kliks, Rob. I guess the other factor (beyond gearing) would be whether the 240-horsepower or so of the stock L31 (depending on who you talk to, of course) would
have been enough to get the car beyond 200 in anything other than perfect conditions.
Certainly, the same situation didn’t apply to the Bathurst race-cars which made use of the new Salisbury rear-end to specif y a 2.60:1 diff ratio which gave them a startling (for the day) 44km/h per 1000rpm in the 1:1 fourth (top) gear. Theoretically, that gave the Bathurst cars a top speed down Con-Rod of something 269km/h which was really honking in the 70s.
As for Land Rovers with red motor transplants, a few of my mates over the years have done exactly that. It certainly gives the old Pommy a lot more get up and go, but apparently at that point the axles became the fuse. Anybody who used their red-motored Landie as nature intended always carried a spare axle and knew how to change it in the bush.
False assumption
I read with amusement your article on assuming a major meltdown when a minor problem was overlooked. This sort of thing happens to me with monotonous reg ularit y. I present t he example of my 360 cubicinch Mopar-powered 1970 Dodge Challenger which began leav ing an ominous cloud of smoke in its wake on a return trip from Sydney.
A quick stop and look underneath revea led engine oil over ever y t hing from front to back. Aha,
I t hought, t hat long term weep from the rear of the engine has finally become terminal. So after yanking the lump and removing the sump I discovered that the rear main sea l looked okay. So it must have just been a bad sump gasket right? Might as well do a few other gaskets, some cleaning and repainting while I’m at it and t hen ref it and return to t he f un bit.
Imagine my dismay when, on init ia l f ire up, oil began pooling under the car and burning on the ex haust again. Insert swearing here. On close inspection, I discovered t he oil-pressure switch lea k ing like t he proverbia l. On an L A engine t his switch is at t he rear of the engine behind the inta ke manifold and a llows oil to snea k ily run down each side of the block and pretend to be a rear-mainsea l lea k. The replacement switch was about $20 and a took a whole 15 minutes to change. As t hey say; never assume. Richard Mahoney, Nowra NSW
“A QUICK LOOK REVEALED ENGINE OIL OVER EVERYTHING FROM FRONT TO BACK”
beetling along in the little white bugger when, out of nowhere, the oil pressure starts to look a bit low. Not crazy low, but about half of what it should have been at those revs and that engine temp (yep, I’m a train-spotter for this stuff ).
I nursed it home, still with some, if not all, of its oil pressure and started to ponder. But this time, I’ve got it all worked out in my head, and, this time, it ’s simple. Instead of ripping off the sump to fix an assumed blocked oil pick-up, or tearing off the oil pump to change it, I had a good look around. Mind you, you didn’t need to be Columbo to spot the oil all over the side of the engine bay.
By now, by looking at the location of the Exxon Valdez under my bonnet, I’m figuring he capillary tube to the factory oil-pressure gauge goes into the engine block via a little elbow fitting and that fitting has ceased to keep the oil on the inside. So, after a few kilometres, the Pinto had pumped out enough oil that it was j-u-s-t starting to starve the pump. But by then I was back at the MBC, shut down and no harm done. A right mess, though.
Next morning, I’m out with the spanners and I tear into removing the capillary tube and its fitting from the side of the block. Geez, but there’s a lot of oil here. With the fitting out of the engine block, I’m having a bit of a feel around. That’s funny, thinks I, that thread for the fitting feels rough-edged. No it didn’t, because what I was feeling wasn’t the tapped thread for the fitting, it was a hole about the size of a two-dollar coin in the engine crankcase. Yep, the RS2000 is in dry-dock again.
I’m not sure what happened and I won’t be until we pull the motor and do an autopsy. But my theory right now is that sometime in the engine’s past, a thrown big-end has ventilated the block and somebody has fixed it on the cheap by bunging up the hole with some liquid metal or some-such. Over time and heat cycles, the repair has loosened and started to leak (which is where my oil went) before falling out completely (which is where I’m at right now). Or maybe a previous rebuild left a stray nut or bolt in the sump which has somehow managed to get jammed between the crank web and the inside of the block, leading to the hole I’m now gazing into with a frowny face. Certainly, the engine was still running fine and not making any noises, so it’s not me that blew it up (for
“IT WAS A HOLE ABOUT THE SIZE OF A TWO-DOLLAR COIN IN THE ENGINE CRANKCASE”