3.9 modified.

[Anonymous]

Well, I decided to chuck a 3.9 injected engine into my old XA wagon.
Could be arsed with injection though, mess of wires and bollox, so I whacked a 350 holley onto an old singlepoint injection manifold.
Also cut out the water jacket and smoothed a few surfaces on the manifold, as well as opening up the plenum a little with a die grinder.
How I made this version of the adaptor, was useing a 4mm alloy plate, holesawed and drilled. The plate bolted to the manifold like the standard TB, then the fat alloy vac plate you see sits ontop, the plate bolts sit inside that, and then bolt the holley on top.
The next stainless adaptor will be made of two seperate plates and have a fairly tall oval tube inbetween.

Bugger all clearance there though, so currently making up a stainless adapter to bring the height up another 60mm. Which means, I'm gonna be cutting a hole in the bonnet.
Whats funny as hell is the engine now runs ten times better than it did injected!!!

For the distributor, I got an old xd/xe points dissy and put the EA gear on the shaft. Had to flip the gear over to match the ea dissy position and re-drill the shaft for the pin.

Full Shot of the 3.9

The old 4.1 I was running before I jammed the 302w in for a blast.

For shits and giggles, heres the rust fixing pictures!

Before:

During:

After:

Lastly; heres the old bag herself:

QUESTIONS!
The EA distributer, how can you use it on it's own? It's mostly controlled by the EEC isn't it? How and what does the ign module bolted to the side do?

Where are some pics of throttle cable mounts for the holley series? Hard to find ref pics.

3.9 heads have a softspot for cracking don't they? This engine seems to either have a crack or blown head gasket, gets exhaust gas in the water jacket.

Head swapping? say a 4.0 head onto the 3.9 block? whats the go? Chamber sizes? different gasket? Different passages?

 

[xctasy]

My old XE just used the glorious Valiant VG to CM BW 35 kickdown bracket. Add an accelerator cable from the XE, made longer to 1.320 m, and re-gigged with an Isusu F-sereis truck inner, which has a real smooth inner wire and a nice smooth outer so it won't bind. Straight bolt on to the Val bracket if you sit down for a few moments.

The XE dissy uses an oil filled multiple spark coil inside, which then hooks to a low ohm coil on the block. You can flick it for a combined Aussie Sigma2.6 Wagon/Magna 2.6 Wagon item, Aussie Camira Wagon, or an XT5 (1981 onwards to 1985) Holden V8 item, and thats the spark sorted out. Its branded HEC. As long as the spark is right, you can use whatever combined HEC coil is at hand. It all Bosch stuff, and you just rat out the info from a sparky, and follow your nose. The spark curve varied by the vac diaphram on the side, there are were about 30 to choose from. The one there is most likely an auto 4.1 or perhaps a 3.3 4-speed. The curve matters for the run-on and low speed pick-up...if you got an auto in Your EA 3.9, the 3.3 4-speed dissy vac advance is not gonna work that well.


Head cracking is due to

1) the 6 mm matrix in the stock EA radiator. Sand from the Geelong head casting would dislodge and form a nasty percipate whihc then caused water flow restrictions, then head gasket failure.

2) The use of LPG ensures that head cracking is assured.

3) It was fixed with the 12 mm core in the EB, but the problem was basically sands.

Should be okay with eh 4.0 swap if all is tranfered. Compression should be okay. There's bits to go with bits, and I can't see the point unless you just grab a 100 ping 4.0. Compression was up to 9.3 from 8.8:1, several types of chamber, 20 thou over pistons. Later heads got heaps of running changes, there are 9 basic castings, and a bunch of changes to the galleries, especially on the EL. AU was effectively all different in detail, lots of changes.

 

[wagon]

You could run the EA multipoint dissy and most of the efi computer but just use the electronics to run the ignition and leave the injector and fuel pump circuits disconnected. You could then experiment with different computers (3.9auto multipoint and 3.9manual multipoint) and play around with the base advance until you get the results you are after... You would more or less have an lpg setup but using petrol instead. Ah, but my fetish is efi (but I am a sicko)