Cheers Brad - I'm not much of an open ocean 'boat guy' either, so the first leg will be interesting!
My brother in law, Craig, picked up a second hand case for me when he bought some odds and sods in Melbourne last year. The initial plan was to build a 1776 for this bus and then cobble an engine together for Iron Horse, however we were running out of time at a rapid rate and then late in the piece we found out it needed new barrels and pistons! So, a new plan was hatched to build this engine first as a 1679, drive it to Tassie then put this engine into Iron Horse and then take time building the 1776 for Cat...!
The 1641 had been fully balanced so the parts used for the 1679 were crank, (linished) flywheel ,(faced) cam, lifters, (re-surfaced) conrods, heads (stripped and fully re-built with new valves) distributor, (Pertronix - given a birthday) generator re-built (the bearings were shot!) and a kit put through the Solex 34 Pict-3 carby. She has also now has a new oil pump, fuel pump, inlet manifold and an improved j tubes/extractors/exhaust set up.
All this happened over few weeks under the guidance of a 76 year old retired VW mechanic. (the next engine he says he will just watch what we do, however he will be kind enough to let us know if we we are about to fuck something up!
)
While the engine was out a kit was also put through the fuel tank, a new outlet fitted and the fuel gauge made to work again. A good thing is this tank is an early bay Wiz special so it has more capacity than the og splitty tank.
No matter what happens they can't take you out in the street and shoot you......
