CWC is Campbell, Wyant and Cannon. Just another specialist supplier to the Vehicle Manufacturers, and they were more than likely consulted for many casting applications by GM. I'm pretty sure many GMH V8 camshafts have CWC on them.

http://www.cwctextron.com/history.html

https://www.kautex.de/en...ve/cwc-textron-castings

I'm not surprised Ford used an outsource for the alloy heads. As I said GM did the same for L88 heads and ZL1 blocks, plus all their alloy intakes - all from Winters. GMH used outside sources for their alloy Holden engine bits, not sure who yet. Possibly CAC whom GMH owned around 50% of.

Inlet manifold (Comalco).
http://trove.nla.gov.au/...&versionId=43720386
Door hinges for GMH by Comalco.
http://nla.gov.au/nla.ob...earch/comalco%20casting
HK steering box (Comalco).
http://nla.gov.au/nla.ob...earch/comalco%20casting

The old cast-iron V8 was one of the only factors that allowed Holden to survive the later part of the 80s prior to VN, and deserves a lot of respect for that.
The Nissan 6 was costing them dearly, due to the exchange rate problems between the AU$ the Japanese Yen.

The V8s were still profitable - their development costs had been amortised over thousands of previous engines, and the small amount spent on ULP development would have been recouped quickly too.
With lower spec VL Commodore 6s costing GMH money, only the higher spec models & V8s made money for them.
There's only so many Calais you can sell, hence the focus on the V8, and the V8 specials (like the Opera House) that were heavily promoted.
This also created some memorable ads - like the VL towing the yacht past the yank-tank in the desert, and pulling an aeroplane out of a hanger (later copied by VW for the Tourag).

Despite the whole "V8 til 98" campaign, Holden had already killed off the idea of the V8 with the release of the VL - as evidenced by the altered floorpan & trans tunnel - preventing the V8 from fitting with sufficient (legal) clearance. Had Brocky not persisted with developing the V8 for the VL, which Holden reluctantly agreed to - requiring significant structural changes around it's October '86 release, then the VL may well have caused enough red ink to prevent Holden even getting to the VN.
Remember too, that they had a number of years in the mid 80s where the books showed a terrible picture of doom & gloom, with rumours at the time that GM would pull the plug, so the pressure on Holden to survive was brutally intense.

The reason the first VNs were so coarse, and ran effectively a FWD version of the 3800, was because the RB30 was supposed to continue into VN, but the financial burden was so great, Holden rushed the V6 ahead of schedule to release it in July/August '88 and relieve that pain.

I know a fellow who was involved in the Port Melbourne plant upgrade for the EFI V8 line, and he is adamant that Holden did all their own cast-iron casting & machining. Sand-cast & die-cast aluminium was commonly given to outside suppliers, and I was personally involved with a company manufacturing pressure die-cast alloy EFI 5L components in the 1990s.

Holden can rightly lay claim to having some of the best design & development engineers in the world, and the parts they have produced over the last 50+ years is a testament to that.

I believe that if Holden had been allowed a free reign they would have produced world class cars for the last 50 years. Unfortunately GM seemed determined to not let Australia show them up. The best way to stop that happening was to control everything they produced. There were glimpses of the potential with cars like the Commodore based Monaro and the non event GTRX Torana. Not to mention VE Commodore and other cars no doubt.
To say they were not capable is an insult to Australian ingenuity and determination really.

All this BS about world class cars nowadays, shit the FX was a world class car by far in it's day and not only the world but especially for Australia.
Nothing was wrong with our truly Holden cars ever.

I have never seen a CWC cam come out of a original Holden engine, the CWC cams are a quality billet cam that you buy when you are looking to build a good engine and not using some shit regrind crap that originally came out of the engine.

You would of seen the CWC casting on cams that were not stock production engines.

I said i'd seen plenty of GMH V8 camshafts with CWC on them. I didn't say they were originals.

Yes but in 1969 you could not go 350 stroke.

What I meant by pistons is that the piston skirt design and as in that design also the pin height as a package working together.
They did not use the thin width rings back in the day as we do nowadays and they have now got a handle on the piston skirt design as well nowadays.
It was a big thing back in the days of 1960's 70's to get a piston design for long life and oil control and the rod ratio to work well with that piston as such.

As a product in producing mass engines cheaply and long lasting being number one priority you could not make it into a 350 back in the day that Fred designed it for.

A lot of people I know did stroke the old 308 but only one type worked well of about 330ci the rest were crap for power but some good for towing, because of the rod ratio and only some of the pistons that could be used made it bodgie setup.

A lot of people used the chev 327 piston in the normal stroke 308 but it was crap because it just sat to low down in the bore, so they only lost power by using them.
So many people would say that the 308 was a crap engine to bomb up in the early days.

Your 5.6L is something that they made in 1986 tec has moved along in them 20 years.

I think that crank of yours was cast especially for the job, but in the days before you had to use other cranks out of other engines and machine them to fit.
You could not just go cast a crank up for the job like so.

Once one starts talking about specialty engines that's another subject on it's own, I was on about production engines as to Fred and his creation.

Make me wonder why Holden did not just use your type of crank for the 5.7L

I know guys that were stroking 308's in the 80's. They used a forged or cast 350 crank modified to fit, which involved building a different thrust journal (like a Cleveland in the centre bearing I think it was done). As the crank is 3/4" longer they used a TH to trimatic spacer and moved the starter motor backwards. Just used SBC rods with 377 (400 crank in 4" bore block) pistons. In a HT-HG it didn't make any difference, you just used SBC in same car tailshaft, gearbox crossmember etc as the back of the crank in this combination was sitting exactly where a SBC one does. In a HQ onwards everything had to be moved back 3/4" as in these the SBC is pushed forward so the back of the GMH and SBC engines are in alignment.

Those offset ground strokers had plenty of pistons available depending upon what rods were used. Normally you used 350 pistons with SJ327 rods and decked the block about 50 thou. If you used stock stroke 308 you used 327 pistons and decked the block about 50 thou. Blokes who were building hipo stuff always decked the blocks anyway to near to zero deck height, so even with normal 308 pistons you'd take 15-20 thou off anyway, so no great problem with another 20-30.

I like the 5.7L Holden engine better than the Gen 3 any day as it had much more low down torque. alloy heard would of saved it and we could of had a 5.0L as well.

OHC V8 would of been no good as they loose bottom end torque and all them timing chains are just crap.