THE FAMILY Siber

MAT BONE’S IDEA OF A SIMPLE FAMILY CRUISER IS A BIT WILDER THAN MOST, WITH 434CI OF BLOWN CHEVY POWERING HIS HK WAGON

- KIAN HEAGNEY

THE phrase ‘the build snowballed’ is one that gets thrown around by car tragics on the regular, but let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment: There’s no such thing as a simple project. For Mat Bone, what was supposed to be just an engine swap on a tidy HK wagon quickly turned into an all-out job, but I’m sure you’d agree the end result was worth it.

“I bought the car when it popped up in Melbourne because it was a together and driveable Kingswood wagon, running a 307,” Mat says. “So I picked it up and I was going to put a stroked small-block Chevy in it.”

Mat ended up getting his hands on the 434ci Dart Chevy block currently at home in the wagon, but it needed some help. “It was damaged when we got it, so I took it to James Melmoth at Melway Competition Engines to get it to where I wanted,” he says.

The Dart copped an Eagle crank, H-beam rods and JE pistons, a custom-grind MCE cam package and a pair of AFR 245 heads for easy breathing. Topping off the whole shebang is the BDS 8/71 blower, fed by 2000cc injectors slotted inside the sneaky Joe Blo hat that pokes its way out of the bonnet. The MicroTech ECU was tuned for both E85 and pump 98, with E85 yielding not only more ponies, but also better reliability. “It runs cooler on E85, so that was the main reason for having ethanol; not so much the power,” Mat says. “I was keen for 1000hp, but on the engine dyno it made 965hp and ran spot-on, so I was happy with that; that’s how it stayed.”