DIRTY STUFF
EDITOR Andrew contacted me. “Street Machine is officially turning 40. Can you make mention of that in your next column?” “Really? Is it that long?” I checked my records to see when I began writing Dirty Stuff for then-editor Phil Scott: 1985!
Phil wanted three columns first up, to make sure I could write good stuff and keep it up. The first of these appeared in the October/ November 1985 issue, which makes it almost 36 years – and man, am I tired! Not really. But I do remember the lead story, which went like this...
I knew a guy called Barry Broomhall who owned a speed shop in Brisbane. I worked in a servo three suburbs away, and one day Barry roared up in a noisy Morris 850 Mini, leaned out the window and said, “Hop in and we’ll go for a ride.” “Okay.”
I dropped my spanners and slid into the left seat. Then I noticed the speedo wasn’t in its little central housing, only a big hole straight through into the transverse engine. Funny, I thought. But there’s two chrome throats of some sort of carburettor looking at me. Must be a dual-throat Weber.
Barry fired the engine and BOOM! All I saw was red flash fire, and my hair was alight! Everything seemed to be burning, including my eyebrows, and Barry was cacking himself. Mongrel. He knew that side-draught Weber carb always backfired and blew flames straight out of where the speedo had been. All I could smell for days after was my own burnt hair!
There were mobs of wild motorsport men about then. The Vermeulen boys had this old VW Beetle that wasn’t fast enough for them. But they also had one of Henry Ford’s cast-iron wonders, the heavyweight sidevalve V8. They made a few measurements and figured they could stuff this engine into the VW. Backwards. They made an adapter, cut out some tin, got the combination together and fitted some sort of a radiator, probably where the back seat had been. They figured this new street machine would be a tad tailheavy, and they were not wrong. The main problem they had was keeping the front wheels on the deck so they could actually steer the thing!
Dick Vermeulen would go on to create a series of mainly sidevalve Ford-powered cars for historic racing events, and, as a sideline, really fast Vw-powered lawnmowers. He would get hold of old Beetles and rip the body off, cut-and-shut the flat floorpan, mount a cutter blade under that to be driven by the flat-four engine, fit a seat with a steering wheel and pass these creations on to neighbours on acreage. They’d cut grass much faster than a tractor with a slasher!
Once, while working for a Brisbane car yard called Sports Car World, I got involved with trying to fix a V12-engined Ferrari 212 Inter sports coupe. This tired old device had been the first Ferrari imported into Australia, and now it had a cracked laminated windscreen and water in the oil. I had the job of making it right.
The 2.6-litre alloy V12 had single-cam heads with worn-out rockers, for this Fezza had covered a million kays. I pulled the left head looking for a blown gasket, but all I found were fire rings around the cylinders and a perimeter gasket to keep the coolant in. I then ripped out the triple-carburettor engine and stripped it into small pieces. Finding buggerall wrong, I successfully got it together again and back into the engine bay. I left that job and the new guy pulled the V12 down again after the gearbox seized from old castor oil, only to find that six of the wet cylinder sleeves had holes rusted right through!
Go-faster blokes were right into finding more power out of their mainly Holden and Zephyr engines, although Austin and Morris maniacs were right in there as well. One guy decided to really repower his old FJ Holden
THE FIRST DIRTY STUFF COLUMN APPEARED IN THE OCTOBER/ NOVEMBER 1985 ISSUE OF STREET MACHINE, WHICH MAKES IT ALMOST 36 YEARS – AND MAN, AM I TIRED!
sedan by slotting into the short engine bay a tall twin-cam six out of a Mark VII Jaguar. I don’t know how much tin he cut out of the FJ firewall to fit the engine and transmission, but I guess there wasn’t a lot of reinforcement happening.
He managed to tidy it all into a raging roadgoing missile, waited for a clear night, and went testing on a long, straight country road. The surface was a bit lumpy, but he reckoned his combo would steer pretty well.
So there he was, flat-out in top cog, and with his lights outrunning the road, he rushed up a sizeable rise and the front-heavy FJ got airborne. It came down hard to the sound of tin tearing and metal grinding on tar, and that Jag-powered sedan simply broke in half! Back to the drawing board, I guess.