Heres a quick vid from a Glass House Mountains trip I did on Sunday.

Ok, well….ive been getting seriously sick of having no where  to put extra switches in the ute (I have a thing for carling switches).

So..i decided to can the utes ash tray and make room for 6 more switches

First I removed the ash tray and with a die grinder carefully made room for the switch panel.

And there ya go! Now there’s plenty of room for extra switches

(Please note, I can now resell these Free Spools!, please email me at glenh@monster4x4.com.au for prices.)

Well, ive wanted one for a a looong while, but to be perfectly honest, they were just to dam expensive.

Ive been researching them on a off for years, and was fairly close to getting one built, and I saw the this beastie from Delta Tek.

Warn 8274 High Mount Winch Air FreeSpool

Warn 8274 High Mount Winch Air FreeSpool

Fitting was pretty easy, just take the winch off the vehicle, and remove the top hat.

Pull up the plate on the drum side of the gearbox and this should release the drum.  You can then remove the old drum and install your fancy new freespool!  Dont forget to put the locking plate back inplace!

Then put it back in the vehicle, hook up the airline, solenoids etc, and your good to go!

Ok, well, after tenting for all my camping life, the wife and I decided to splash out and get ourselves a little bit of luxury.

So we got ourselves a new 2012 model Kimberley Kamper!  So far we are very happy with it.

More (and bigger) pictures HERE

Ok, well after a few months of stuffing around and being ripped of by a online tuner (DrBOB), I ended up getting all the parts together to tune the engine myself….as it ends up this was a much better idea, and ended up with a great result!

So, as it stands, the engine is running very well, with a lot more power than the original. Saying that, if I look back on it, I think that if I were to do it again, I would just go through the pain of installed a LS series engine. (Which im pretty sure ill do at some point)

There were a few other things I had to swap over, like temp probe and oil pressure sender for the GQ dash etc etc, but all pretty simple really…

The install took about 6 hours, and I had a mate who luckily came over that helped me mate the engine to the gearbox …would have been a really pain in the arse by myself…

Guess what ?  It fired first go!  I couldn’t believe it!

So im now just waiting on a ECU tune to suit the engine…but after the engines first 100 kays or so I can honestly say Im not particularly impressed at this stage…I was expecting MUCH more power, and at this point I would only say it was equal to a standard engine….

I had LPG injection installed on the old engine when I first purchased the ute, so I could reasonably afford to drive it. (The ute is my daily driver)

I was originally going to just swap the manifolds over, but once I was able to compare the manifolds, I was quickly convinced to reinstall the lpg injectors into the manifold that came with the new engine…

I removed the injectors from the old manifold and found what size  / thread they were…luckily I had just the right tap for the job.

I then tried to copy the positions of the holes on the old manifold to the new one.

After that I installed the injectors into the new manifold with some loctite and then a covering of silastic just to make sure…

While I was playing with the manifold I also drilled and tapped the thermostat housing for after market temp probe / gauge I use.

after I made sure everything was ok, I clean up the mating surfaces and bolted / torqued the manfiold back onto the engine….

Oh yea…check out the porting done on these heads!….mmmm sexy ….althought I was a little concerned about the coolant spread…

Another one of the jobs I wanted to do while the motor was out was to replace the idle bearing in the air con compressor.  A few people had told me that the AC compressor is not something that people can service….what a load of BS.  A quick call to a Sparky mate (Thanks Rossco!), confirmed that replacing the bearing is actually very easy.

Ok….so the first step is to remove the lock nut from the top of the compressor..

Undo the allen key bolts and remove the top cover.

You will then need to remove a cir clip

After thats done you ‘should’ be able to remove the clutch plate pretty easy with a few taps on the back.

You should now be able to remove the dud bearing from the clutch plate and install a new one…To quote a gregory’s manual…installation is the reverse of removal

Well, it really only took me about 4 hours to disconnect all the wires / fuel etc and remove the engine….

The hard bits were then to come…

After removing the old engine, I found that the although the clutch / pressure plate were in good nick, the flywheel had missing teeth on the ring gear…doh..

After thinking about it for a while and a few calls to mate, I decided not to replace the flywheel but instead get it resurfaced and purchase a new ring gear and fit it at home…..

I ended up ordering a new clutch kit too, I figure while it was out, I might as well…

Once the clutch kit with the new ring gear turned up I quickly put the oven on 250c (Dont tell the missus) and whacked the new gear in to heat up.  After about 20 mins, I put some welding gloves on, took the gear out of the oven and it just slipped over the flywheel very easily….(chamfer side towards the flywheel!)

Just thought I would quickly throw up a good link ive found that shows you how to check pinion angles….very handy for SWB trucks that have a decent lift…

THE LINK