Custom Made Engines Are The Ultimate Engineering Flex

Engine swaps are so common in street machining culture that we barely bat an eyelid when we see a Barra or LS in someone’s project car - hell, we even cut out the middle man by shortlisting Five GM Crate Engines that you can buy right now in Oz, or this insane Merucry quad cam LS7 V8 stuffed inside a Pontiac? 

But when it comes to repowering your project car, some mad hatters take it one step further. In the deep, dark hallows of the mind of a mechanical maniac, there exists a tiny percentage of people with the skills to screw together their own engines - not just rebuild a Holden V8 engine that they bought off marketplace, we’re talking about mixing and matching manufacturers blocks and heads, and sometimes even casting their own custom components to build fully bespoke engines.

We’ve shortlisted a few of the wildest custom donks that we could find:

WILSON CHEVY V4

In the early 70s, Father and son duo Chet and Jerry Wilson chopped a small block Chevy in half to produce the Wilson V4 - a 196 cube four cylinder engine that made 300hp, for use in their Midget race car. The heads were modified 8 cylinder units and the duo could allegedly chop up cast iron heads for those on a budget, or lop Brodix alloy units in half for those chasing some extra grunt. The pint-sized Chevy boasted a custom cast crank and cam to make it all work - some even allegedly made it to Australian shores.

FRANKENSTEIN 202

The humble Holden six banger has had a raft of cylinder head mods thrown at it over the years - everything from custom cast twin cam conversions to Hemi-style heads, Toyota JZ heads and even those from an old Ford crossflow motor, but the one that’ll really get the comments section lighting up is this Barra-headed 202ci engine. As you’d expect, it’s far from a straight bolt up proposition and has required a stack of custom machining, including reversing the cylinder head which will no doubt require custom cams. It’s topped off with a very slick six carb’ manifold.

HAL W16 

Steve Kalfa from MKAL Automotive had been teasing pictures of two LS7 engines meshed together to form a monster W16 for years before the covers finally came off in 2020 and it was revealed that the monster naturally aspirated engine could be destined for Paul Halstead’s reimagination of the famous Giocattolo marque. The HAL W16 runs Higgins cylinder heads and a distinctive Edelbrock cross-ram intake manifold, and is connected to an Albins transaxle through a custom transfer case that connected the two cranks to make a claimed 1400hp.