This one really has my heart in it. It is a road car, is great fun to drive, very reliable and uses bugger all fuel, even when going hard!

Purchased in 2005 from a girl who had it 15 years (Since she was a teenager) but her partner had finally decided she needed a new car and they had to sell it. Also a factor may have been that they already had the new car, yet the new one had to live in the street as they only had 1 garage space and she said the gemi had to be the car in garage space! I was very thankful for this attitude as it was a great beginning for a project, with very little rust. It took some years, but heres the story in pictures.

The car originally had rust along the back of the boot and through it that aligned with the frame. I took these photos after I had replaced the boot with this brown one, so the brown boot was the first step toward repair. There was a bit of damage to the bumper, and a bit of dent in the back, as well as more of a chunk above the left rear wheel (not pictured). These pics are after I had started stripping it for the body and paint work.

At the paint shop they took it back to metal where it was needed, fixed the chunk over the wheel, replaced the front left guard, fixed the boot rust, replaced the fuel cover, and generally made the body perfect.

Then she was under coated and painted ferrari red (goes faster)

a good condition twin cam engine and 5 speed box was sourced, which also happened to have a suitably coloured rocker cover for my car. The engine was seen running but the ECU was not supplied. (Damn that was a mistake, blew out the difficulty and costs way more than I expected!)

I sourced a Kalmaker ecu package, and a fuel surge tank (to later discover that all pumps had seized)

This 2" exhaust was sectioned on to the headers:

And finally I spent a lot of time on the EFI and eventually gave up and spent much more money than planned down at graham west workshops, who to their credit did an awesome job, got all the bugs out of it and I ended up with this.

Whoah! That car is awesome! I wish my Gemini looked as good and went as hard!
Good post!

I bet you have given a few of the local boys a fright. Very nice little sleeper .

Latest mod, front king springs, and double standard anti-sway with back to back d-clamps to attach the second to the first. 2nd also has ends angle grinded off to make room. Result is much improved handling! Couldnt believe how much of a difference the front suspension makes, even to body roll down the back end! Very happy Its also got a cusom +40% heavy duty clutch now, too




Also have a new free delco realtime software lined up for the ecu instead of kalmaker in the coming weeks. Its being developed over at www.delcohacking.net with the intent of being a good cheap solution (only costs are for junkyard efi gear - JE camira in my case, and the realtime board ~$200). It wont really improve anything compared to kalmaker, but efi hacking is another hobby

Yeah, money spent....but check out the product ! Some low profile phatts to top it off maybe? I think the lady you got it off would either be in tears if she saw it, or lining up to by it back off you

Interesting to see what the GT bellett predecesed from, in a round about way. Strange but awsome, Antus

I didn't know you had a gemini, Dave My brother inlaw has a TS sitting in the garden. He wants to sell it, as he bought an impesza 2 years ago. He blew the engine, then refused to sell me the front seats

B.

hey there nice gemini coupe you should have alook at my old gemini coupe chop top which is under my isuzu cars in the gallery.
great job mate, good to see there are a few good gemini's on the road rather than bad ones.

Rick.

is that just a bog stock upopened g200w that you threw in there that makes 100hp?

yep, stock as rock.

Last week I had some trouble with the gem... I thought I had a bad tune on it as I had been experimenting, and it was running really poorly. After about the first 30 seconds of running it'd start running on 3 cylinders. I had It booked in with my mechanic to get a commodore alternator fitted as I wanted an upgrade and the gemi one looked to have a faulty regulator or something - charge volts were only 12.4.

Anyway I decided I couldnt miss my booking, plugged in my backup tune from a memcal that I keep in the glove box to get me out of trouble with my regular efi experiments, and it was still poor. with no other option I hit the road to my mechanic. Half way there the temp started climbing while I was waiting at the lights. When the lights went green It was just above the maximum end of normal. I pulled over, let it cool a bit, checked the coolant. None to be seen. Blah blah blah..

3 hours later I was back there with my trailer and decided to try a cool start. Turned the key and the engine just went 'ker-lunk" and wouldnt turn over. Turned out cylinder 3 was full of coolant and cylinder 4 was full of oil. Uhoh....

So this week my mission has been to get the head off and find out what happened - if It was just a gasket and the head was OK, or if I needed to find a new head or....?

This is what we found... coolant where it wasnt meant to be and a definate head gasket failure between cylinders 3&4. Apparently this is a common fault on g200w engines as there is not much between cyl 1&2 and 3&4.

So, we thought this wasnt too bad, and maybe the engine was good. We checked the head for damage, and found it to be fine. The rings and bores looked pretty good, and I decided that all was well enough that we could probably just clean it all up and use a VRS gasket set I had on hand, and put it back together. So some hours later (we did clean the valves up more after these were taken)...

Thanks to the timing diagrams on the twin cam forums, we got it all aligned properly. And thanks to PR91 Brett, tensioned properly. Shiny links and pully marks right at the top and the bottom, but note the camera angle makes the bottom look a fraction out... its not...

Interesting enough the shiny links seem to move across in relation to the pully marks as the engine turns but the crank and the cams stay in alignment with each other. After about 8? revolutions its all aligned as per the starting point again. As far as we can tell, this is normal.

This is where Brett's knowledge was invaluable, the twin cam tensioner is a weird beast, its actually this thing here on the side of the front of the engine.

And it tensions the chain based on oil pressure. In order to set it, you need to push the shaft in until it locks and install it in the engine. When the engine turns it'll unlock and the shaft will extend and tension the chain, and lock at the point it needs to be at. Its shown here extended, and reset ready for install.