The last episode of Carnage saw Scotty finally fire up the freshly rebuilt 318 in his VE Valiant ute, and it sounded oh so sweet.

But while we may have life in the beast, there’s still a long way to go before Scotty can get this thing on the road. The next major step is heading down to the dyno at Maxx Performance for a tune, so this episode is all about getting it ready for that.

The throttle cable was the first major port of call for the dyno prep, because up until now Scotty had just been hand operating the carby. Fitting the bracket for the cable turned into a bit of a marathon when Scotty realised the distributor had to come out to fit it, and in the end the bracket had to be modified and extended to suit the Valiant’s original throttle cable.

While he was down there, he also fixed a leak from the fitting used for the oil pressure gauge, which was a hell of a lot easier with the distributor removed.

With the throttle taken care of, the next job was to sort the kick-down cable for the transmission. This is vital to set the line pressure for the ’box to make sure it doesn’t nuke itself. Annoyingly, the brand new cable that Scotty paid decent money for was binding on the throttle set-up, causing some real headaches.

To add further insult to injury, the shifter cable for the transmission got crushed somewhere in the process of this build. Scotty spent ages fiddling with the cable adjustment to try and make it work, but sadly it’s a bin-and-replace job.

In the next episode, we’ll see Scotty attack these problems and hopefully get the Valiant moving under its own power and onto the dyno. The real question is: how much power will it make? Leave a comment below with your guess!