Here comes the Judge, my 69 GTO

Another thing that needs to be working to get an Australian roadworthy cert is the blower for the front screen to be able to defog the screen when needed? mine works fine so that?s a tick



Because the car has movable headrests they must work, so another tick..



I?m not sure how?ll I?ll go with the belts, the Challenger belts where illegal as they were a lap belt only & then a second shoulder belt could be clipped onto the lap buckle & as the second belt was only a click on & it had no buckle it had to be replaced with a proper 3 point belt?.. but this car had two complete belts per side, a lap belt & then a separate shoulder belt with a second buckle, plus the ADR?s (Australian Design Rules) change depending on the year of the car, so as this is an older car I?m going to leave them as is & see if they pass or fail





Next up was to diagnose the poor brakes, it?s pretty clear that the master cylinder is leaking here



I tested the booster & it seems fine so a new master cylinder was ordered.

The front disks look great, no big lip worn into them & heaps of meat left on the pads



The flexible line looks good too



The rear finned drums where a pig to get off



When I finally got them off there was signs of leaking on the rear cylinders, no shock I expected to find that



Looking at the plug leads again, I will need to replace them or rerun them at the least, one wraps around the steering column & I?m sure that that will be frowned on

The new windshield washer bottle… it’s tiny



A new washer motor as I have no idea if the one on the car works



And most importantly the new hood tacho





Sadly it comes as a complete sealed unit, so I’ll need to make up a tool to open these weird 3 pronged screws so that I can simply replace the guts & not have to repaint the body of the new tacho



Next box of bits is scheduled for delivery tomorrow… so I know what my weekend looks like already….

With that I bit the bullet & broke out the die grinder & enlarged the bonnet hole to take the new housing & then took it to a local panel shop to get the paint matched… it’s turned out pretty good & looks like it’s been there for years & isn’t something that was just painted yesterday.





Right now that I’ve done the childish bit & I have a working hood tach it was time to start fixing some of the bits that actually needed to be fixed before the car would be approved to go on the roads. First of the real jobs was to replace the Alt, now with the position of the top radiator hose & the belts it wasn’t the simplest task to get the bolts & indeed the whole Alt out of that spot, in hindsight I should have just taken the opportunity to flush the rad & removed the hose, but with a lot of wiggling of bits & the odd expletive thrown in it came out.





Of course when selecting the replacement I opted for the higher output version to be sure I can run the uprated lights & whatever else I decide to install later & again call me childish but I always opt for the shiny finish when shopping for muscle cars



Now the install would be just as awkward as the removal with one added issue, the old Alt is externally regulated & is a two wire connection type & the new one is an internally regulated single wire conversion, so some minor rewiring would be needed





So the connector seen above won’t fit the back of the new Alt & needs an adapter wire & the external regulator on the firewall seen below needs to be bypassed in such a way that the light on the dash is fooled & doesn’t just stay on the whole time

Next up was to swap out the lights for the correct Australian right hand drive facing set, I did briefly toss about the idea of changing the front end to retro fit the hide away lights option that was available for the 69, but then I decided not to mess with the spec of the car just yet.. mind you it will get a RAM Air conversion at some point I think.

Removing the lights is pretty simple, 3 screws hold in the surround & once that’s out its just 3 screws per light to remove them.. my big worry was would they be rusted solid & snap as they are tiny little screws & very little on this car has been removed in the last 30 years by the looks of the rusted bolts all through the engine bay.







Unfortunately the original connector is not the right shape to connect to the back of the new lights



So I had to trim the side off of them to make them fit



Job done… now she has great night vison

I had noticed that 3 of the 4 wheels had broken studs & that would be an instant no-no in getting the car passed as fit to drive on the roads, so I had ordered a full set of replacement studs as they were only like $1.50 each. So I jacked the car up to pull the fronts off (note to self either finish the other cars or buy a 2nd hoist)







Then when I had one disk off I noticed that it was a completely different design to the other…





Turns out that the one in the last pic above is the uber rare factory 69 one…. Sadly its worn below the minimum thickness…. So looks like it’s new front disks for the old girl.



Clearly now was the time to replace the bearings too & I decided to finally splash out & buy a bearing drift, for years I’ve just used a socket but now I have the right tool for the job sitting in the tool box





Bizarrely the bearing kit didn’t come with a new dust seal… but the ones on the car are fine & I have the right pick for removing them without damaging them so I have reused them now

The gauge cluster in the GTO only has idiot lights for the water temp, oil pressure & the voltage.. I always feel much better with old cars when I know what the water & oil are doing. So I decided to fit a set of auxiliary gauges to the car.





Thing is I don’t want to disconnect the idiot lights either, as I like the idea of a big red light coming on if I lose oil pressure & I’m not looking at the gauge at that exact moment, so the plan is to not remove the original oil & temp sensors but augment them. The intake manifold actually has two tapped holes for sensors, one already has the idiot light one in so I figured that I could just us the other for the gauge.

The existing sender



The blanked off second hole





Connecting the volt gauge was simple enough, now I just need to go find the correct AN fitting adapter that will allow me to keep the oil sender & add a second feed as there is no second blanked off feed for the oil sadly



The clutch in the A/C unit is dead so I’ve decided to rip that whole thing out for now as it so heavy & it takes up a lot of space in the engine bay







I have bought a shiny new replacement, but I need to clean up all the brackets & get some other small bits, so I’ve left it off for now & I’ll fit it again over the winter in time for next summer

My GTO handled like a bag of crap & I don’t mean that in compared to a modern hot hatch or BMW M car, I mean even for a 40 something year old muscle car it handled like crap, the rear made some interesting noises & was very sloppy under power. A quick look showed that the upper control arm bushings where brittle & collapsed & falling apart.







I’ve decided not to just replace the bushes but to replace the whole arm with a set of boxed arms that will support & take the optional rear sway bar that I will buy soon & bolt up



Old vs new



You can see how the old ones have no bracing to take a sway bar bolting to the side of them like the new ones above do, seems with this car the sway bar install is very simple, no dog bone ends or real links just bolts between the two arms.



The process was fairly simple, jack the rear off the ground & take the weight of the diff off the arms then unbolt them & pry them out



Then installation is uber simple too, bolt one end in & then adjust the height of the diff until the other end lines up & slot the bolt in

The next thing to sort was the steering, the steering box is clearly shagged, there is heaps of play in the wheel… you can move the wheel a good 3 inches from side to side with no impact to the direction the wheels face at all. The worm adjuster had already been tightened to its max & it was leaking badly from some seals that I decided to just replace the whole thing with a performance version & I also replaced all the front end parts like tie rod ends etc as the same time.



The box was leaking both from the bottom & was dripping off the end of the steering arm



It was also leaking at the top end where the rag joint is



Getting the steering arm off these old cars is always a lot of fun, smacking parts with hammers or using pullers.. in this case I got lucky & one of the many pullers I had fit up nicely & the arm slide off the output shaft a lot easier than I had any right to expect



When I removed the steering box out of the Challenger I had found some rust behind it as it’s a beautiful spot for mud & crap to live & fester & convert to rust over time… so I was very happy to see that the frame rail behind this box was fine



This car is definitely easier to work on with more room than both the XB & the Challenger, I’ve replaced the steering boxes in all 3 now & this one was by far the easiest to remove once the 3 bolts where undone & so easy to slide the new one in… happy days







The car has been for an alignment now & it handles beautifully… you can let go of the wheel at freeway speeds & she tracks straight & true & the steering is supper responsive, it feels a little heavier than it did but it’s so direct now that I’m happy with that

The rear belts where lap only, so whilst I can appreciate the upgrade to 3 point in the rear I just wish that they had a set where you get to keep the original style buckles



The seat needed to come out for this install obviously & that was a little harder than it should have been, I think the design is such that you were expected to have removed the fronts first so that you had room to get in & manhandle the rear seat base out of if locks not looking forward to the next time I have to remove the rear seat I can tell ya



To install the top mounting of the retractable belt to the parcel shelf needed a good strong bracket, the belt kit that I got from Morris had supplied such a bracket, it’s good quality & the fit was perfect, it bolted to the inner wheel tub section & then allowed the retractable reel bolt to mount through the parcel shelf.. the engineer passing the car reckoned it was one of the better designed brackets that he had seen…. So that’s good I guess (mind you I have had zero rear seat passengers in the car since I bought it)



New 3 point rear belts all installed



The very last job that I tackled was another of those silly little visual things… the radio antenna is a design that doesn’t go flush with the fender & that has been making it a pain in the arse to put a cover over the car as It’s always held up & putting pressure on the antenna which the more observant of you will have noticed is crooked anyway…. So it had to go, lots of forums etc told me that the guard needed to come off to do this & I was not going to pull the guard off so I figured that if I tried really hard & was willing to lose all the skin off my knuckles I could do the swap through the door opening







I won’t embarrass myself by telling you just how long this simple task took… but think of what you would imaging was a long time for such a simple task & then double that & you’re getting close & yes I did lose a lot of skin & blood getting this done. But the new antenna is in & is straight (enough) when up & more importantly is flush when down…





And that’s it…. This thread is up to date now.. I’ve put over 1000 miles on the car since I’ve had it now & on weekends it’s been my daily driver for everything from quick trips to get milk to long country drives… I just love this car, it handles so well (except for how the rear sloshes about a little more than I’d really like during spirited driving on winding roads) & drives so smoothly that it’s just a pleasure to be in on any road in any conditions.

Now of course Winter is coming here, so I do have some more jobs planned for the weekends when the weather is too bad to take her out & I have a break from working on the XB (mega thread update coming on that soon), in no particular order the jobs are:

Fit the new AC system I have on the shelf in the shed
Fix the windows, none of them line up right & I think that the rollers on the rears have collapsed & failed fully
New tires, possibly new wheels not sure on that yet
Fit a rear sway bar
Replace the rear air shocks as they don’t hold air for more than a day

That’s about it for now, I’m sure I’ll find more things I want to fix or update as we go… but for now the plan is no job that takes the car off the road for more than a day, I’m just loving driving her too much for that.

The last thing for me to sort on this was the throttle return spring, the old one was so worn out it wasn’t doing anything at all to actually close out the throttle fully when you lift off







This car never had a manual choke, there is no provision for one in the dash as it sits today either, so I decided that I wanted to fit one as she’s been grumpy to start over the winter on a cold morning after sitting for a week without one. The main thing that I didn’t want to do was drill a hole in the dash so I had to do some thinking to find one I could fit without needing a hole in the dash. I went with a shiny Edelbrock unit



Then I decided to mount it between the first two gauges on my aftermarket gauge holder, you can see the hole punch in the middle of the fingerprint here



Then drill the hole



Installed it actually looks like it belongs there & doesn’t stand out too much



Then just hook up the Carb side, too easy job done

The took the car for a drive the other week to a mates place & about 5 minutes before I got to his place she started shaking like she’d dropped a cylinder & there was a horrible grinding & scraping noise coming from the engine bay.. turns out the water pump shat itself & the bearing that runs the impeller died & that had the fan wobbling about like an appendage in a sock, spraying coolant all over the bay & the hood lining for good measure









That had the old girl coming home on the back of a trailer sadly & then parked up for a week whilst I awaited my new water pump



I decided to go with a high performance light weight alloy version rather than just with an original replacement



You can see just how broken the bearing is in this pic & how much it started to eat the internal backing plate too, good thing I predicted that & ordered a new backing plate too





Once the fan & the belts are off it’s only 8 bolts that hold the water pump on



All done..



No whilst doing this job, I noticed that the harmonic balancer on the front of the crank is wobbling a lot more than I’d like, I wonder if the water pump failing & the fan pulling on it has caused that.. so I have ordered a new one & a new pulley too just in case that’s what’s out of round.. so I’ll get around to replacing them when the parts turn up, I’ll also look at fitting the new A/C setup that I have now that we already had our first back to back 30 deg days last week.. so summer is on the way

I’ve decided to separate the engine & gearbox instead of pulling them out as one, so first job is to disconnect the engine flywheel from the torque convertor





Starter removed & then disconnect the exhaust from the extractors… the extractors can stay on the engine whilst it comes out





Disconnected all the wires & hoses that connect the engine to the car & then hoot up the hoist & yank that big lump out







I’ll clean up the engine bay & repaint the chassis etc whilst I have the engine out



First job was degreasing & cleaning the engine so it wasn’t too filthy to work on as I took it apart

First head off & all the piston tops look the same really, the bores are ok… not too much scoring on them







The bores have never been worked before it’s a virgin block as they say



This head gasket shows no obvious sign of a break, but the water galleries are badly clogged with scale







With the other head off it seems that one piston has been getting steam cleaned… so think I’ve found the offending cylinder





Again though the head gasket seems perfect…



I’m now thinking that the heads may be cracked (the Pontiac 400’s are known for this as a weakness) or it’s such a fine gasket failure that it’s not obvious to me naked eye