First published in Street Machine’s Australia’s Slickest Commodores magazine #16, 2006

And now, this! Queenslander Gary Gibons bought this VY SS ute brand new with the intention of plopping it onto a coil-sprung Nissan Patrol chassis. He’d previously built a VG (VN) ute with a leaf-sprung Patrol chassis under it, so obviously he thought he was on to a good thing!

Surprisingly, the Holden’s underbody required little chopping for its new role as a 4WD. Instead, the Nissan chassis (bought from a 4WD wrecker) copped most of the mods, with all the factory ‘outrigger’ body mounts lopped off and new ones fabricated to line up with the Commodore’s subframe mounts and rails. Good mate Brad Owens helped out – as he did with Gary’s first 4WD Holden – in Gary’s big backyard shed. The work took an estimated five months of after-hours time, spread over nearly two years, but with the experience he now has with building two 4WD Commodores, Gary reckons he could do another similar conversion in less than two months, working full-time.

A big part of the conversion was making things fit, and at the same time look ‘right’. Gold Coast-based Fabtech – no longer in business – manufactured the front mudguards and the rear wheel-arch flares. There’s not a lot of the original Holden wheelhouses remaining, with Gary fabbing new ‘tubs’ from steel. That’s also why the front guards are one-piece fibreglass replacements: there simply wasn’t enough steel remaining after the SS’s front guards were cut and lifted to fit the 15×10-inch American Racing wheels wrapped in 39.5-inch-tall Super Swamper tyres. Fabtech also made the nose, tail and sills before everything was touched up and colour-coded to the SS’s Hothouse by Buddah, an old 4WD mate. The graphics were applied by Wayne Harrison of Sydney’s Advanced Air Brush.

Not only does the SS ride high on the Nissan chassis, but it’s been lifted further with Rancho and King suspension components installed by Wizard Performance on the Gold Coast. ‘Mr Wizard’, Brent Davies, has been a mate for 18 years and knows his way around under Nissans. Being 10ft tall, most of the underside has been painted in either two-pack black or Hothouse.

There was no question of power: it was the SS’s 5.7-litre Gen III all the way. To mate it to the Nissan’s 4WD transmission, a Mark’s adapter plate was used. Mark’s is well known for sticking just about any engine known to man into just about any 4WD on earth. Due to the unique body/chassis combination, Gary made the engine and transmission mounts himself, moving the gearbox and transfer case forward, and up, by around 100mm to provide engine/firewall clearance. The Patrol’s shift lever required a cut ’n’ shut to pop up in the SS’s console, rather than behind the air-con knobs. New driveshafts were required, too, as was a Toyota HiLux steering shaft section to mate the Commodore steering column to the power-assisted Nissan steering box. The conversion retains the standard Holden radiator and most other engine bay hardware, and it all looks standard apart from the empty holes where the strut tops used to be.

Oh, except for the supercharger. A Harrop positive-displacement blower package, complete with intercooler, takes pride of place above the engine. Harrop’s layout mounts the blower where it can be driven by a longer standard drive belt and retains the throttle body at the front of the engine. Blowers are most often seen on quick street cars, but a bit of positive pressure is good when off-road, too. Michael at Elite Performance installed the blower before Lachlan and the team at ChipTorque on the Gold Coast tuned it.

There’s a strange mix of sensations when sitting in Gary’s SS. Pulling the passenger’s seatbelt on, I’m surrounded by plaid green and black trim, just as comfy as any other late-model SS. As Gary turns the key, the whirring of the starter as it spins the Gen III into its familiar restful idle is all Commodore. But as soon as Gary steps on the clutch and gets the rig under way, the sensations change.

The blower’s torque gives the monster an incredible athleticism as the woooew-woew-wer resonance from the four huge ‘muddies’ builds in the cabin. Corners are hilarious. I instinctively tuck my elbow – resting on the window ledge – back inside the cabin for fear of it scraping on the ground as the long-travel coil spring suspension lets the body lean over by what feels like three metres. Of course, it’s not, but compared to a standard SS, I feel like I’m strapped to the top of a ship’s mast.

One of Gary’s tricks is to get on the throttle halfway through a corner; the engine howls, the rear squats and the inside front wheel lifts about 30cm into the air. A giggle if you’re watching, but not so from inside the first time!

Off-road, too, the SS does the job. At the moment it’s set up for shows like Summernats rather than fair-dinkum off-road ability, but a lower centre of gravity and less blingo rolling stock would give the Nissan-chassised Holden formidable off-road capability. As it is, Gary wasn’t scared to get his rig dusty by churning up and down a few hills for our photo shoot.

Maybe Gary should consider building them for customers, just like the Overlander Kingswoods (see breakout). After all, there’s nothing quite like Australia’s Own.

All Terrain, All Paws

In the 1970s a Tasmanian company created the Holden Kingswood-based Overlander, ‘Australia’s own’ 4WD. In the 1980s there was a mob in New Zealand that converted a Commodore to 4WD – not sure if it was one, or a small production run like the Overlanders – by using the front axle components and transmission from a Mitsubishi L200 4WD ute. We know of two – and there may be more – Commodores built in the 1990s with Nissan ‘Godzilla’ GTR all-wheel-drive running gear, and of course since 2003 there’s been the Holden Adventra wagons and CrossTrac-equipped Crewman and Tonner. But it’s fair to say none have had quite the impact of Gary Gibons’s Hulk.

Gary Gibons
VY SS ute