Glad you like it Its taken us a fair bit of work, I bought it cheap only running on 7 cylnders and after quite a few hours on the shed it purrs like a kitten at idle, and roars like a lion on revs

The commodore is what's called a Holden. They're a subsidiary of GM, and over in europe some Holdens (though not this one) are sold as the Vauxhaul. The engine is a de-stroked 308 from way back, with some goodies like fuel injection added. They're what we call barn-door mechanics, that is, they're simple engines, but they perform (relatively) well and they're relatively easy to work on. This one runs on duel fuel (LPG or Petrol) and running on LPG makes it very economical compared to most other cars running petrol.

The Pontiac GTO is actually just a souped up HSV (Holden Special Vehicles - The "Performance" brand of holden) version of the Monaro, they were desgined and built here, and then exported to the states.



Not quite. The "Aussie 5.0" block as its termed over here is the 308 from way back, and was used in various forms from the 308 in the early days (1978) coming in 253, 304 and 308 variants. This went on until the Series 1 VT Commodore (1998) and goodies like bigger cams, fuel injection, computer control (ugh) sequential injection, a stroked 5.7L (355) version, etc were added to the variants over the years. They never did stop using the good old distributor on this engine however. In the VT Commodore Series 2 (1999) and onwards they went on to use the Chev LS1 engine, a 5.7L v8, completely computer controlled engine as used in the Corvettes of the same era.

Edit: Here's a better pic