MORLEY’S WORKSHOP
DAVE MORLEY GIVES YOU THE CAR ADVICE YOU NEED – AND MAYBE A BIT ABOUT LIFE AS WELL
Sudden braking
G’day Dave. I’ve been reading wit h interest t he discussion about electronic park-bra kes, I recent ly bought a Series 2 V F Commodore SS which has an electronic park-bra ke, t he switch for which is in the console immediately to your lef t. My prev ious car, a V E Commodore, had the window controls, you guessed it, in t he console immediately to your lef t. You can imagine my joy the f irst time I ripped on t he switch immediately to my left in t he new SS, t hrough force of habit, on a ra iny day, tr y ing to quick ly wind up the window only to have the park-brake come on with an unpleasant sound.
I’m prett y sure t here’s a bell back at Holden t hat goes off and they pee themselves each time some clod who used to own a V E tries a hand-bra key in his new V F by mistake. Apart from that minor design quirk, t he SS is a fa ntastic car but I’m saddened to see what Holden has become.
Mark Petersen,
Email.
IT’S FUNNY isn’t it? For as long as Commodores had power windows, the switch was always in the centre console. Even in the very first Commodore, the VB of 1978, if you optioned up your SL/E with fast glass, the switches were in the middle of the car. And then all of a sudden, for the very last Commodore, the VF, Holden decides to move them to the armrest on the door.
Having them in the centre has always kind of annoyed me. The two Holdens I own now with power-windows both have them, and both still get me just a teensy bit fractious, mainly because every other car I drive has the window switches on the armrest. But it kind of makes sense for a car that’s been designed for export (as those later Commodores were) where one set of switches, a single console moulding and one door panel or armrest can be used regardless of whether the car is left or right-handdrive. One wiring loom, too, so it probably saved Holden a fair bit of dosh over the years. Still doesn’t explain the VF, though.
I’m absolutely with you on the brilliance of the Series 2 VF, too, Mark. I reckon pound-for-pound (and certainly dollar-fordollar) these were the best big, rear-drive sedans you could buy anywhere in the world. And when Holden announced it was putting the 6.2-litre V8 into the Series 2 SS and SS-V, it was a done deal for me. Then I drove one. What a car! I wish I could justify owning one, but the MBC is already home to a handful of Aussie V8s, and another one might just push The Speaker completely over the edge. Still, if they ever get really cheap (VFs, not wives) I won’t be held responsible for my own actions.
Meantime, don’t Commodore park-brakes make a shocking, horrifying noise if you pull them on j-u-s-t before you’ve come to a complete stop? Puts
your teeth right on edge. And no, you shouldn’t go out and try it, kids.
Quality, definition of
By geez Dave, I believe you’re spot on wit h qualit y being what gives you pleasure. My old ‘91 Apollo wagon gives me rea l joy, front-wheel-drive not wit hstanding. Hell, I get a k ick just sitting back look ing at it.
Problem is, not being a collectable, t he hardest part of keeping it look ing good is getting ot hers to respect it instead of seeing it as just another old shit heap.
I’ve had blokes leaning on it obliv ious to t heir jea ns’ rivets scratching it and passengers slamming t he doors. That’s why I keep t he back seats folded down under a permanent bed so I can only carr y one passenger which is much less likely to k nock it around. Okay, so I sleep in it sometimes but t hat’s a ll. (Now YOU stop thinking dirt y!).
Hey, I went to a loca l car show the other day and when I drove toward the genera l car-park someone yelled out and waved me over to t he classic car display where a couple of young blokes actua lly gave t he Apollo a good look over. I think the car would have been manufactured before they were born. Maybe the ol’ girl has some tangible qualit y af ter a l l !
On your ‘check up from t he neck up’ suggestion, on t he basis t hat I’ve actua lly read ZenandtheArt t hree times. Hmm... I got no come back on that one. You got me t here but you don’t expect me to agree with you surely?
Aussie Sadler,
AUSSIE, OLD MATE, I’d be a bit worried if we did suddenly start agreeing with each on subjects as your or my mental health. As for the Holden Apollo, all I have to say is that it seems a bit ironic that the most reliable car Holden ever sold was actually a Toyota.
For those who came in late, the Apollo was a rebadged Toyota Camry as part of the Button Car Plan that was instigated in the 1980s as a means of getting car-makers up to sustainable production levels. The idea was to co-develop models that would be then shared between makers. Typically, it all unravelled and wound up being a pretty sick sort of joke as Holdens
grew Toyota badges (and vice-versa) and we even saw a Nissan Patrol with a Ford Maverick badge (remember those?). But my all-time favourite was the Falcon Ute with a big Nissan logo all over the tailgate. Good times.
More quality debate
Regarding Robert Pirsig’s entertaining book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance, actually there are others who have read it a number of times over t he years, gleaning more from each read. I agree t he character drove himself nuts trying to zero in on the moment of quality( where DOES t hat start?).
But I disagree t hat happiness a lone is enough. His example of the guys fixing a bike, while the radio blared and they joked around, only to damage it in t he process, would ring a bell wit h many, including myself. The mechanics didn’t care, they had fun and listened to some great music, but is that why they were t here?
The only way to do something right (qualit y) is to care before you sta rt, care whilst doing it, care t hat it is what the customer wanted. That brings satisfaction, happiness and qualit y. You may say that I too need a journey down the hall of mirrors, but my psyche tells me I’m not cra z y.
Carr y on, you’re doing a f ine job; a good qualit y inclusion in t his f ine magazine.
Trevor McNair,
NSW
HMMM. You raise a very interesting point, Trevor. I guess my assertion that quality is whatever makes you happy needs to be considered in a holistic way. That is, if the outcome (in the example you’ve given, a damaged bike) isn’t what you were after, then it’s not quality anyway, even though you enjoyed the journey up until it all went wrong.
And does your example mean that you can’t combine two or more activities at the same time and get a quality result from either? And what about the notion that it’s possible to over-think a situation and turn a potential quality moment into a battle between the left and right hemispheres of your brain?
On the other hand, you’re clearly correct when it comes to some activities and I immediately thought of the act of driving as a great example. For those who dislike driving; who treat it as an inconvenient means to an end (and there’s a lot of them out there) the task is just that, a task. It will never bring them happiness because they resent having to do it and they will never make a quality job of it. From my experience, these people are the worst (lowest quality) drivers around and they should all be issued with a bus-pass and told not to go near the front-right-hand seat in a
“IT ENDED UP BEING A SICK JOKE AS HOLDENS GREW TOYOTA BADGES”
car again.
Just watch the road-toll fall then. Which in turn would mean that a whole lot of people touched by the road-toll now would escape that fate and would lead a higher quality life. Maybe quality breeds quality. Oh heck, here we go again…
Where were the Ts?
I just f inished reading issue 435 of UniqueCars. It was a great issue and I especia lly enjoyed the X A GT stor y. In regards to the performance Fords from Tick ford, namely t he stroked 5.6 Windsors that were in T3 sedans and P250 utes: t here didn’t appear to be any mention of the TE50 vs TS50 or the P250 uti lit y. I appreciate if utes are not included in t he categor y, but t he sedans needed a litt le more cla rit y I believe.
The TS was the high-spec version, climate-control, traction-control, premium sound etc, where the TE was standard XR fare. Leat her was standard in both, a long with a Momo steering-wheel etc. The ot her major price dif ference in today’s market is manual versus automatic which makes a manual TS the most valued and an auto TE the cheapest. The P250 is t he same, just ta ke of f a few thousand. Appreciate the great magazine.
CJO,
I GUESS the TE50 and TS50s are the forgotten hot Fords, aren’t they? There was also a version based on the long-wheelbase Fairlane of the day, badged TL50. And they were actually great cars. Tickford claimed all along that it wasn’t trying to take HSV on at its own game, rather that it wanted to offer Ford fans a more refined and less visually shouty – but still fast – alternative. I reckon the mistake Tickford made was to ignore the brilliant XR-spec quad-headlight front. Instead, the TE and TS50s got a Fairmont front end with some odd looking black-outs in the headlight reflector area. I know the idea was to separate the Tickfords from the mass-market XR6 and XR8, but I reckon a few well chosen black-outs on the quad-headlight fascia could have really worked, too.
Anyway, the bottom line is that the TE and TS50 never really gained much marketplace traction at the time, although we remember them fondly now. My pick would be a TS50 manual with the roller-rockered, alloy-headed five-litre. Why not the 5.6-litre stroker? Because it was quite a bit less refined in vibration terms and it drank like a thirsty fish. And that 200kW tune on the five-litre Windsor was a real high-water mark in that engine’s life.
The other forgotten Fords – for my money – were the FPV Force 6 and Force 8. These were leather-clad muthas with tweaked turbo-six and V8 engines and it seemed to
“THE TE50 AND TS50 ARE THE ‘FORGOTTEN HOT FORDS”
me that they defined what an FPV should always have been: fast, comfy but visually able to fly under the radar a bit. I’ll take a Force 6 in gunmetal grey with the optional Oxblood, dark red leather trim.
It’s also worth mentioning that these cars were from the era when Rod Barrett was at the helm at FPV. We lost Rod just after Christmas after a long battle with illness. Rod was a proper car guy and a terrific bloke to be around. Any trip to the FPB skunkworks when Rod was in the chair was guaranteed to be a worthwhile effort. The world of factory muscle cars is the poorer for his passing.
Mix-N-Match Motors
As a mechanic in a Chrysler dealership back in t he ’70s, I can confirm the mix-andmatch engineering that went on back then. I recall a whole heap of He mi six es wit h excessive oil usage and severe piston slap getting are call. Chrysler sent out crates full of piston and con-rod assemblies with A, B or C marked on top of the pistons. Upon dismantling the engine, the bores were measured and the relevant piston fitted. That’s all I did for two whole weeks.
Another time it was an upper ball-joint recall and further down the track, we had steering-box replacements all under warrant y. Needless to say, I never did own a Valiant and became a staunch GM-H owner and, to this very day, a competitor in Historic Group N racing in an EH Holden. By the way, I never miss your column
Claude,
I HADN’T heard about Chrysler doing the A, B and C piston thing, Claude, but it doesn’t surprise me one bit. Mind you, the bad news is that Holden was probably even more guilty of this than Chrysler, but I’m guessing your EH race-car runs a carefully hand-assembled six and not something that came out of a factory in the 1960s.
And did you know that the Hemi six was initially developed by Dodge in the USA as a replacement for its ageing slant-six truck engines in the 1960s? About halfway through the project, though, Dodge lost interest and the plans were stuck away in a drawer somewhere. That was when Chrysler Australia started sniffing around for a new six to replace the slant-six in its local Valiants and somebody in the US remembered about the Dodge project.
So, the half-finished engine was shipped to Oz and the Hemi six was the result. There’s also speculation that one team doing half the design and development work and another team finishing it
off half a planet away is the reason the Hemi’s camshaft had no mechanism to stop it floating in its bearings and altering the timing in the process. Anybody who has ever bought somebody else’s dreaded `unfinished project’ will know what I mean.
And Ford did it too…
Just wanted to add to your story around undersized bearings and other odd things in new engines. My fatherin-law spent 35 years in the Ford engine plant in Geelong producing the old inline six. Generally, if there was a machining issue with a crank or a casting issue with a block and it was repairable, it was fixed.
The inline six had notoriously thin cylinder walls so If there was a casting fault they would just sleeve it. Cylinder bores were measured and matched with pistons. I went through the plant in the early ’80s and the machines looked old and worn out. If there is one thing I remember it was the stockpile of 351 engines in the corner of the factor y that I believe were for the F-Series. Strangely enough they had 4 bolts main bearing caps.
Laurie Mahony,
AGAIN, NO problems believing any of this, Laurie. And I reckon you’re spot on with a big pile of 351 engines being set aside for F-trucks, as the last Aussie Falcon to use the big fella was the XE way back in about 1982.
The other engine stockpile yarn at Ford revolved around the big stack of five-litre engines that were used in the EB and later Falcons (once Ford had finally realised the balls-up that was its decision a decade earlier to ditch the V8 option). By then, the only mob using the old five-litre Windsor engine was an operation making inboard marine engines, and our Falcons were far and away the last blue-oval passenger cars anywhere in the world to get the old Windsor.
Anyway, the point was that Ford was forced to stockpile these engines, in some cases waiting years before they were ever fitted to a car. In the meantime, a lot of them developed rusty bores, and many a V8 Falcon owner complained about oil consumption.
The other quirky fact is that FPV was also using the engines and was picking from the same pile. But to make sure that no FPV cars got brand-new smoky motors, FPV was pulling the heads off each one, honing the bore and reassembling them. So, if you were buying a TE50 or a TS50, you knew you were getting an engine that had been checked and fixed if necessary. But the buyer of an XR8 or a Fairmont five-litre? Not so much.
“ONE THING I REMEMBER IS THE STOCKPILE OF 351 ENGINES SITTING IN A CORNER”