First published in the December 2007 issue of Street Machine

Twenty years is a fair amount of time. Just think about it: 20 years ago we didn’t have mobile phones, DVD movies, email or the internet. But Jason O’Leary has owned his EH that long and not just stuck in the corner of the shed. He’s had it on the road and cruising most of the time.

Jason bought the EH when he was 16 and he had already started buying Street Machine for inspiration. After seeing a red EH in the magazine he knew he had to own one so he bought this from a friend of his father.

“It was pretty ordinary,” Jason says, “faded green paint and rust in all the usual places. I got it when I was still on my Ls and then, when I got my Ps, I pulled it off the road to rebuild it.”

The EH had been someone else’s plaything and its 202-cube six-pack and Aussie four-speed were supported by an HR front end.

Over the course of three years Jason and his father Clem stripped the sedan back to bare metal and rebuilt it exactly the way Jason wanted. The inside copped a retrim in VL Calais beige velour, which was easy to get in those days, while the six-pot was given a slight warm-over and disc brakes were fitted all ’round. Jason and Clem did all the work until the time came to paint it and that’s where they ran into trouble. The spray job ended up with a lot of crap in the paint because it wasn’t sprayed in a booth.

“We stripped it right back again and then we took it to a spray booth to be sprayed properly — and in two weeks the paint had all blistered,” Jason recalls.

Because the paint was a new type, the paint company’s propeller-heads came out, checked the car and took some scrapings away. The tests revealed that the painter had oil in his air lines.

So did they get another job free of charge? Nope — according to Jason the guy didn’t want to know: “He said: ‘Take me to court.’”

Jason didn’t bother wasting his money on lawyers; he spent it with a better paint shop. Clearly that was money well spent because 18 years later the car’s still wearing the same ink.

Over the years Jason has carried out lots of little upgrades to keep the car looking fresh and the pay-off shows in the 150-odd trophies he’s accumulated. Among the tinware are Grand Champion wins at the 1993 EH All State Run and again this year (2007).

“Every couple of years I do something different to keep it looking new,” he says. Stuff like the 15in Center Line pintail wheels he fitted around six years ago, or the one-piece bumpers he crafted, painted and fitted “years ago when the billet look was in”. He even fitted a pair of bucket seats out of a Toyota Celica for a different look and feel. The original EH Premier buckets weren’t that comfortable on a long cruise but finding the VL Calais trim to cover the Celica buckets proved to be more difficult 15 years after the first trim job. Eventually he tracked down some material from Melbourne — just enough to do the inserts, according to Jason.

More recently he embarked on his most ambitious upgrade yet — squeezing a 5.7-litre Gen III donk and six-speed gearbox up front.

“For years I wanted to put an injected five-litre in it but by the time I got around to it a lot of other people had already done it,” he says. “Then, when the Gen III came out, I thought I’d put one of those in because not many people have done that.”

Over the past 10 years the Gen III engine has proven itself to be a superior performer and even internally stock engines have pulled some awesome numbers at the strip — in Commodores. Shove those cubes into a relatively lightweight EH sedan and you’re going to have a ride that accelerates like a rocket sled.

Jason bought a crate motor direct from Holden, along with a low-mileage six-speed. The engine came with a loom and factory computer and Jason says he was able to specify the 300kW program for the ECU.

To hear Jason tell the story, the job of fitting the Gen III somewhere it was never intended to go wasn’t as hard as you’d think. Not everything went their way though; Jason says they had to modify the HR crossmember a little and fit another sump which caused its own set of dramas. They bought a sump that was supposed to do the job but it turned out to be a crap casting and porous as hell. Of course they didn’t discover the sump’s sponge-like qualities until they filled the engine with oil.

Plenty of help from good mate Luke Johnson (Two Good, Aug ’07) made a difference with how the conversion went. Luke’s been a huge help, especially since Jason’s been working away in Queensland so much in the past couple of years. He was working in the mines and more recently moved to construction of the new desalination plant on the Gold Coast. That meant flying back on weekends to work on the car with Luke, who was also doing a fair chunk of work in between. Luke spent hours fabricating the stainless headers, full stainless exhaust, intake pipes and even fitted the VY Monaro dash. Now that’s a top mate!

Amazingly, nothing on the inner guards or the firewall was harmed during the conversion.

“We positioned the engine forward enough that we didn’t have to modify the firewall,” Jason says.

Jason enjoys the full support of his wife Jennine who has no problem with the time and money spent on the EH. That’s because she drives it hard too, competing in and winning numerous driving events at the EH All State Runs. Jennine usually beats Jason’s times — and most of the other blokes as well as.

For now Jason just wants to cruise it but in the future he’s thinking about more improvements, especially to the underside where he’s previously kept things plain. Now that there’s a polished stainless twin system under there, he wants to show it off.

“My next job is to strip everything back underneath and make it more for show,” he says.

With the up-top stuff the guys have done a great job and you can see from the pictures that the Gen III installation is a neat fit. The engineer gave it his tick of approval too.

“He didn’t have a problem,” Jason says. “A lot of people wouldn’t let you go above five litres but he had no problem signing it off.”

JASON O’LEARY
1964 EH HOLDEN

THANKS
Jennine and kids Ashleigh and Josh for support on lonely weekends without me; Dad Clem who worked with me every weekend for three years during the first build and also with the latest conversion. Jay and Gavin for all their help; Luke Johnson for the stainless extractors, complete exhaust and Monaro dash cluster; Jim, Sideshow Performance Wiring.