EVERYONE loves a good parts windfall, and this episode of Carnage sees Scotty unboxing a whole bunch of goodies to put towards the rebirth of his dad’s old VE Valiant ute.

The big news is that Scotty has had a change of heart with the refresh of the 318ci small-block going into the VE. The original plan was to skim the block, heads and intake manifold to bring the compression ratio up without changing the pistons. The main reason for that was that getting new pistons proved tricky at first. Happily, after some more digging Scotty found the last set of KB pistons suitable for what he needed, and nabbed them straight away from Summit Racing. This’ll save Top Torque a whole bunch of time machining, and will also make the heads and block of the 318 more useable for future projects.

Next, Scotty headed just up the road from our workshop to our good friends at Eagle Auto Parts. They’re one of the best in the business for performance parts for builds like this, and sorted Scotty out with a new timing cover, pushrod checkers, Welch plug kit, dizzy hold-down clamp, sump bolts, plug leads and a lot of other little things needed for a build like this.

For cooling, Scotty went straight to the best, with the legends at Aussie Desert Cooler sorting us out with a custom-made radiator and twin thermo fans to keep the 318 cool on the long road trip from Melbourne to Willowbank in Queensland.

Stop is just as important as go, and unfortunately the VE ute has drums all ’round. Luckily, the VE Valiant wagon that Scotty has been restoring has a disc front end, so he whipped those off and sourced some new calipers from Valiant Spares, meaning he’ll have some hope of pulling this ute up after (hopefully) running a 12-second pass.

The 318 is currently with Top Torque having the bottom end sorted out, so in the coming episodes we’ll get the engine back and then embark on a mad thrash to get this thing running, registered and up to Queensland by 25 July for Mopar Sunday. Stay tuned!