Against All Oddities: Your Commodore is Cursed, Mate

From the get-go, my affinity for Australian vehicles has fueled adventures rife with missteps and drama.

The first Aussie vehicle I ever owned, a 1989 EA-series Ford Falcon purchased during a study abroad semester, was abandoned in my university’s “car park” after a friend and I slept in it in the outback for three months. In my first attempt at Oz car ownership in America, another buddy of mine and I drove cross-country in a 1984 Ford Falcon ute that we bought sight unseen. We broke down 42 times. Yes, forty-two. Then when I bought VL Commodore #1 in Melbourne, it was promptly stolen, along with all of my belongings. After that, I negotiated for a Valiant ute from a cattle rancher in Tasmania, after test-driving it 50 feet. I immediately piloted it five hours to the port on mostly gravel roads, before sleeping through the last disembarkation call at Port Melbourne and literally missing the boat.

Stupid cars, stupid decisions.

Today’s problem: my white, 1988 Holden VL Commodore.

Questionable decisions concerning this car started with its purchase in 2014. Hot off the heels of losing my first Commodore, I was on my way back from a distracting weekend at the Bathurst 1000. I was in a hurry to find a replacement Holden to fill the Commodore-sized hole in my rented shipping container. (I’ll connect these dots in a future article.) I answered a classified ad, claiming a location on the wrong side of Melbourne, for a car that was listed far too cheap to be legit.

Why did it all this seem fishy, you ask? Well, for starters, the Commodore’s owner was in prison on drug charges. (My relationship with VL Holdens is apparently tied to criminality in all possible universes.) Besides the owner’s legal issues, the car itself had problems, and the criminal’s dad (who was selling the car) was a mechanic stumped by the Holden’s issues.

Other than all that, things looked great.

I showed up at the mechanic’s place of business more or less resigned to buying this monument to professional and parental struggle, as long as it was for pennies on the dollar. I drove it away, along with a Rubbermaid bin of accompanying speed parts, for $900.

I eventually got the car to the port of Melbourne and parked it next to a pile of bailed cotton, which was waiting for export. A few weeks later, the car arrived at my then-place-of-official-residence: Charleston, South Carolina. There, my only dry storage was, at that moment, occupied by a disassembled AMC Javelin. I made the choice to leave the rust-vulnerable Commodore in the parking lot at work, next to my turbocharged Plymouth Voyager and Peugeot 405 Mi16. With the salt air licking up from the marshes behind the Bosch plant in North Charleston, my poor Commodore’s window frames took the brunt of the corrosion. At some point, I should have put on my thinking cap and found indoor storage somewhere.

(I’m still looking for that damn thinking cap. It’ll turn up someday.)

Rather than addressing the rust holes, I decided that digging through the bins of go-fast parts that came with the car was a higher-order priority. Paydirt! A turbocharger, a 3.9:1 spool differential, and 29 spine axles. I swapped in the spool diff and ditched my comfortable 3.25 ratio.

From that point on, the car was a complete burnout machine. It would go sideways at every opportunity, seemingly prompted by subconscious thought. The fun stopped when it was time to pull into parking spaces, though; the binding and releasing driveline joints, splines, and gear slop reverberated throughout the cabin. Even outside the cockpit, the sounds of crunching gears and chirping rubber made it impossible to go anywhere without attracting unwanted attention.

Prior to moving to Germany, circa 2017, I figured it was finally time to address the bodywork. I pulled out the front and rear glass, formed and welded in all of the requisite replacement metal, and sent the car to the body shop. Where it sat. Outside. With the glass barely sitting in the car. Oh, and for novelty’s sake, the body shop took off the gas cap and lost it.

When the car came back, it did look fantastic, but the interior was practically a brownfield site. After several evenings of, brushing and blowing out dust from every crevice inside its cerulean blue interior, I finally got it clean. The glass guy came over to install my newly imported windshield, but I had neglected to include all of the fasteners for the interior and exterior window trim, which normally get bonded in place with the glass. At least it was shiny, dry, clean, and no one in America would notice that it had the wrong window molding on it. Only me. From the interior view, only I would notice the pillar trim and headliner whose loose edges had no home.

Following my return from living in Germany, a few years later, I figured it would be a good idea to install the rest of the turbo kit. I kicked off this exercise by adding some adjustability to the ECU. This involved modifying the only stock VL Commodore ECU in North America. I painstakingly de- and re-soldered the EEPROM chip with a calibratable unit from Nistune. In and of itself, this not necessarily a bad decision, but I can’t say that it improved the car much overall. After all, there were so many other things on the to-do list.

Why not place an order with a parts depot in Australia and get all the missing window trim? Why not go back to gm9bolt.com to find a real limited-slip diff for it and ditch this stupid locker? Why not repair the ailing wiring harness whose temperature sensor connectors have lost their spring clips? Dunno. Needs a turbo, though!

Things got worse. In my most recent stroke of mismanagement, I left my only pair of keys in the ignition, with my spare on the same ring. It was related to a break-in that resulted in the perpetrators actually being caught (by me) and handed a court date, so I can’t tell the full story in the way I want to tell it. (Yet.) Long story short, my keys are gone and it is now a matter for the judicial system to resolve. The car is stuck in the garage collecting dust.

Once again, enter my dear friend Thomas.

Pulling the trigger on the order I should’ve made several years ago, I purchased the window trims along with ignition and door lock barrels and keys. Given that I’ve had absolutely no time to do anything other than buy things for the car, I asked Thomas if he could take on this job as a form of monthly rent for his membership at the foundry/storage collective. Naturally, he took it on. Noting the extreme care that needed to be taken with brittle, irreplaceable plastics with punitive replacement shipping costs, Thomas carefully disassembled everything and laid it all out on the workbench. He got about as far as removing the barrel assembly when notions of what to do became fuzzy.

Being a prepared sort of guy, Thomas sought advice directly from the land built on sheep’s back. He later showed me a call log of no fewer than 10 attempts to reach various mechanics… in Australia.

After being directed to kick rocks by the first shop, the second stated, “It’s not my problem to solve issues on the other side of the world, mate.”

Finally, by about the eighth ring, Thomas reached an enthusiastic old fellow who just couldn’t wrap his head around a VL Commodore located in America. After buttering him up and joking about the prospect of swapping four-bolt-main Chevrolet 350 motors for Barra Ford Falcon engines, the old guy warmed up to the idea of helping us out. He eventually hit the limits of recollection and yelled out his door to a neighbor, who promptly rushed over to take the handset. Thomas caught the neighbor up: “Guy in another former British colony has VL, purchased from criminal, after his first one was stolen. Another criminal came and stole the keys, now he needs Aussie help putting it back together.”

It was his national duty to assist, Thomas argued.

I had added a relatively tight timeline on top of all this work. After all, I had an Australian friend visiting and I wanted to give him a ride, plus drive the car to work. (No pressure, Thomas.) At about 4:30 in the morning on a Monday, he texted me telling me that the issue had been tackled. I arrived at the foundry on the way to work, ready to rock ‘n’ roll, only to realize that I had once again fallen victim… to myself.

It was finally time to deal with the ramifications of having filled the entire cooling system with water and then departed the country for three years. The rusty thermostat housing that I had previously removed was still lying next to the replacement on the back seat. Self, it looks like you’ve screwed me again.

Sigh. I do love this car, even if it’s the perpetual victim of my poor decision-making. Now that I have even less time to work on it, given the new baby, maybe that’s… a good thing? The only way to end this vicious cycle of bad Aussie car choices is to remove myself from the equation and turn the work over to someone else for a while. Tight suspension? New turbo? Tuned? Limited-slip? Keys? Thomas seems like the right bloke for the job.