History
My latest find for restoration. She's a 1980 VC Commodore L ex-GMH demo car. Country car, so it works and runs well. Optioned with the cloth interior, air conditioning, and power steering. Awesome little package and I'm happy I could find a numbers matching car with all those options and the manual gearbox. Plans for the future are to just get all the rust in order and tot up the paint and mechanical side of things. I also want to slightly lower it and put a set of white Simmons B45's I have on it (but I will switch between these and the stock wheels depending on my mood).
In the 3 weeks of owning it I have replaced the brakes (booster, master cylinder and pads), got the rear door to open (more on that later), purchased the optional Jesus handles for the roof, fixed the oil leaks (timing cover and power steering), fixed the water leaks (boot rubber), new vac lines, and a good old service.
**UPDATE: Have found the ORIGINAL build sheet taped behind the rear seat of the car. I will be scanning this in and uploading it to the album.
Upon purchase there were a few little niggly bits to sort out as expected for a 35 year old car.
The biggest problem I had was the rear passenger door failed to open at all. The outside handle was all loose and the inside handle did nothing. After asking heaps of people on forums and at wreckers, the common advice I was given was that I'd need to punch a hole in the mint door cards to unlock it from the inside :( . Not happy with ruining my door trim I tried pulling my back seat out and getting the door card off that way. Unfortunatly the door car fouls on the body line so that wasn't an option. I then tried unlocking the door manually by feeding an inspection camera up a s**** hole in the door trim and using a piano wire with a hook at the end to open the latch through another s**** hole. The camera feed showed the inside of the door was caked with dust and rust on the door mechanism so I was less than optimistic that I'd get the door open. I successfully hooked the piano wire around the latch I needed to unlock the door (pulled the driver's side door card off to inspect). Tried to pull on the wire; wouldn't budge, seized solid. With hopes at an all time low I decided to leave it for a few days and think up another method to get the door open. One method that came to mind was to pull the whole door off. I started to hammer the door pins out, but this just became tedious after about an hour of working one of the pins only 1/2 way out. Just as I was going to bite the bullet and take the car down to a crash repairer and see what they said about the door I came up with an idea to go to the wreckers and just buy a new door latch mechanism because I'd need a new one either way once the old one came out. I bough myself a new latch and studied it for about 5 minutes before realizing I could just release the lock on the door latch by simply pushing up on the hammer that holds the door latch from inside the car. It took about 10 seconds and the door flung open. 3 weeks of a lot of swearing and sweating and I finally got the door open and the new mechanism in. It opens and closes a dream now. Such a shame on the same day I decided to see why my vac advance wasn't working properly only to find the bottom of my distributor has been seized solid (explains the poor performance). Trying to investigate the issue I ended up breaking the distributor and need to get a new one now :( HEIs are getting harder to find at the wreckers so I think a repo is the way to go.
Modifications
None at all. At some stage it's had a doors closed touch up on the canary yellow paint job and the motor reconditioned. Other than those two small things it's about as stock as it rolled off the factory floor.
