interested to hear about the engine bay painting. mines turning brown/yellow
take lots of progress pics
you hoping to get it looking anywhere near this? (the gloss black not the engine )

an interesting note the T3s come factory with like a satin black engine bay

Yep, but mine will be done with the bay stripped out, so no stuffing around with s**t in the way, also getting any signs of rust sand blasted out,

Reason for the change of colour is my bay is like yours, gone all yuck and s**t and the jet black was the cheaper and better option for me, plus some au engine bays never even had the bays painted in the body colour just left black from factory,

So while i am replacing the engine and auto, i thought id get it done and out of the way,

yeah anything that was a metallic colour had a black engine bay. solid colours got a painted one

ah didnt no that aye, thanks for the info, not long now guys, just organising a few things over the weekend

Thought i show ya the state of my engine bay is in at the moment




Pod filter is long gone,

Wont be like that next weekend

Your engine bay is tidier then mine.....................

cheers, will be very clean when its all stripped out lmao

Well i have been going through a few ideas of a intake set up for the new motor, so i cam up with this one


That rubber pipe is off a el, and i have joined my straight pipe and bend to it so it goes directly into my air box, so in other words the pod filter wont be affected to the heat

To fix my vent problem on the back of the rock cover, i am going to use a el tb and run pipe from the vent into the throttle body, this is how the el has it set up, au has pipe from the vent going into the intake it self, as i cant be stuffed tapping into the intake, the tb swap is just as easy and its all the same

Well so happy today. got a phone call from my mechanic who is doing my motor swap for me,

He sold his xb this morning and bought a 5sp manual au xr6 for 500 bucks with it pranged in the side, im luck ******** yeh,

So now i will be putting a depoist an dpaying him off each weeks for the full front end, head lights ,wiring loom and the front bumper, if its a series 1 im hoping it is, i will be putting the manual in it,

So happy now jumping for joy

The new intake setup looks much better, just be sure to enclose that pod in either the stock airbox or a custom enclosure and it will work very well

Looking forward to seeing this XR front end bolted up. You should also take the XR6 motor and manual gearbox conversion from him while your at it

i wish i could have the manual. not sure if its a wrecker or a fixer atm, its got passanger side door damage and about meter and half of the sill has been pushed up under neath, so also depends on other damages as well,

but 2 sleeps to go till, engine yanking

Day 1, Engine and Auto

Well today was a fun day, we started at 11.00 pm on the dot, put the car up on my mechanics ramp’s, and lifted the bonnet, and let it cool down for a bit

So at 11.30, while my mechanic and my other mate started pulling the front bar off and other stuff, I attacked the wiring loom on the driver’s side.
What a pain in the a** to get the wiring loom out, had to pull the fuse panel inside the car out to get to the wiring connections on the back of it, so after I undid the connections, I pulled the wiring through the hole and out into the engine bay,
Fuse panel out

Connections undone

The hole they came through

So then I moved onto the engine side wiring loom and found that I couldn’t get the ecu connection through the gap behind the dash because it was too big, so instead of fluffing around, I’m just going to leave it hang and my painter will just paint around it,
Ecu unplugged

Hole behind the glove box, look how small it is, now wonder why it wouldn’t fit

Engine bay hole, to small as well to fit anything through so I left it as my painter will paint around the engine loom.

So while I was finishing up with the engine loom my mechanic told me the radiator is stuffed, apparently one of my condenser bolts punctured it grrr. So I phoned me au wrecker and got another one plus a condenser for 40 bucks, I’m like you beauty
So at 2.00 pm we had most of the engine bay stripped out (see pics below) we were so close to pulling the engine out,
Both sides stripped out,

This is the rust in my battery tray and underneath it, that will be getting sand blasted out, to stop it from going any further,
On the tray,

Under the tray

So then we started to take the stuff off the engine to get it ready,
We removed the extractors first to make it easier to pull the engine out,
Extractors off, that was a night mare, bolts were so tight to undo it wasn’t funny

Then because we couldn’t access the starter motor we removed the bbm which made it a hell of a lot easier to access stuff after that.
Sorry no pics,
So then we undid the gear box from the engine and dropped that out first
Gear box out, sorry the picture was taken after the engine came out, forgot to get one before it did lol

Then we pulled the engine out using a block and tackle, lifted it out and put it on the ground
Ready to pull out

Up in the air

Empty engine bay

Then we decided to pull my old engine apart. So we took the rocker cover off and found oil burn marks at the front of the rock cover, and the head. Oil stunk so bad it wasn’t funny
Rocker cover off,

Burn marks

Then we removed the head and found that the bores in the engine looked in very good nick despite the amount of kms on the clock, also the head looks in very good nick as well, which I will keep and get cleaned up,
Head Pictures

This is the oil which came out of my old engine, very dirty,

This is how we left it at 4.00 pm this after noon

So tomorrow the engine bay will be getting a good degrease and a good scrubbing and some parts swapped from the old motor and onto the new motor.

Battery tray sand blasted





Car all sandy



Battery tray done





Car all primed






Bay painted, Note, wipers and the plastic arnt done yet as i broke the plastic trying to get it off but will be finished off next week or so, cheers

Replaced this part of the car today, will paint it in rust kill paint, as you dont see it anyways

To our suprise when we cut it off the car didnt twist a mm, but as a precaution we braced it up anyway

Well its raining grrr, so pray to god it dont rain tommoro and we can slot it in, but i wont have it back on the road to at least saturday or sunday, as my mech is going away and have people staying over,

So it gives me a few days to clean a few things up etc.

But today we re ran all the wiring back through the car, cleaned a few things up, reconnect a few as well.

Will get some happy snaps tommoro, as i need to get some bolts for my extractors and drop into the house,

Cheers