Sheldon's

1960 FB Holden

Station Wagon

That's me behind the wheel of my old FB station wagon.

I once owned this old 1960 FB Holden Station Wagon.

I'd previously been an "EH Man" who had also had this 'thing' for FB's & EK's. I'd often thought to myself "hmmm... one day in the future if I ever sell the EH I might just have to get myself an FB or an EK..."

So in 1994 when I got back from two years travelling around the world I was "Holdenless" and the itch to buy another old Holden really started to get to me! I looked up the paper and looked around but I didn't wanna spend too much. So I bought this FB station wagon from a stringy-haired semi-scagged out bloke in Annandale. BAD MOVE! Always judge a used car based on it's owner! But at the time I was weak and not thinking straight - I really NEEDED to own a Holden! I was having "column-shift withdrawal" symptoms, made all the more real when I went for the test drive. During the test drive I decided that it was 'my duty' to save this poor old beautiful car from the clutches of this uncaring insensitive wanker, before it was too late!

The way I seem to recall it, this bloke had bought the car as a fairly straight one-owner car, in good original condition, from an old guy in Stanmore who had just retired from driving. He then he set about slowly destroying this wonderful beast. He was a muso so he'd trashed the interior of the poor old FB by using and abusing it to cart all his band equipment around from gig to gig.

A lot of my time was initially spent just getting the poor FB back into what I thought of as 'acceptable order', repairing things that simply should not have been able to stuff up.

Me and the FB station wagon again.

I'd frequently find myself cursing the previous owner every time I'd have to fix yet another thing that'd been destroyed either through neglect or just plain dimwittedness. He'd often made my situation worse by unthinkingly throwing away the entire faulty assembly, not realising that replacements were sometimes just about impossible to get. Or often he'd simply just not bothered to get around to properly fixing the real causes of these problems, making it worse with a lot of his bodgy 'quick fixes'.

Classic case-in-point: the horn didn't work. The guy had dismantled the steering wheel for whatever reason and then stupidly lost all the bits and pieces that made up the horn assembly. To get through rego he'd then decided to drill a hole under the dash and wire up the horn to a dodgy push-button switch. Vandalism! All the running around I had to do to get all the missing parts together to get that horn-bar to work again was quite a project. But I did it! Those parts are rarer than rocking-horse shit, I had to scour The Trading Post and run all over Sydney. And the job of getting the interior light to work again was fiddly too - the guy had told me that after some gig a roadie had blindly rammed a speaker stack in through the tailgate, totally flattening the entire interior light assembly in the roof lining. Luckily the hood lining had somehow survived. That was also a bigger effort to fix than it should have been, but again I eventually fixed it. All those sorts of things he'd trashed - some people just don't deserve to own great cars like these!

The classic Aussie scene: countryside, a dirt road, and an old Holden that will never say die! On the road from Berridale to Nimmitabel NSW

All this bodginess really began to really get on my nerves (you shoulda heard the bad f***en language!), but I pressed on trying to put things right. The frail rear window rubber was leaking due to the abusive treatment; the seats were worn and torn, and a 'hippy rug' had been thrown over them as a kind of too-cool seat-cover; the diff made a terrible whining noise and definitely needed a few banana skins... The fuel pump must have died at some stage but the previous owner, instead of simply getting a reconditioning kit from Rare Spares and replacing the worn diaphragm, had instead installed this bloody annoying, noisy, dinky little electric fuel pump which forever made this horrible "buzz!" noise - aaaaagh!

Fortunately, once I solved a lot of these hassles the FB became a great automobile for cruising in. Not a bad old beast at all, it had virtually no rust, and of course it still had the old classic 138ci grey engine soldiering along (a reconditioned one though), with all the original gear, the vacuum-operated windscreen wipers, no bonnet lock... That's the original paint you see in these photos - not bad hey? Testimony to the strength of those old Holdens was the fact that it'd been mechanically tough enough to survive the previous owner's insensitive thrashing. Well, the engine was a replacement engine from Higginbottom reconditioners (I had to organise to have the new engine number officially transferred on to the rego), installed because the guy had somehow 'blown up' the original workhorse. But nevertheless the car was enduring quite well, as the pictures show.

As I now well know, all old Holdens have crook water pumps; whenever you buy an old Holden it's the first thing you should replace. I found this out the hard way when the poor old FB boiled over for about half an hour just south of Cooma!

Once I had things running 'reliably' I took the car on a trip down south, which was the only 'big trip' I ever took the FB on. A Dutch friend came out from Holland and we took the FB on a sight-seeing drive around the south-east of NSW. The only dinkum way to show someone from overseas the Aussie countryside is in a Holden of course! It turns out that the photos of that trip are the only colour photos that I ever took of the old FB, and they are the pictures featured on the webpage here. I also took some good black & white photos (but wish now I'd used colour).

Then the water-pump blew when we were down past Cooma. This car was slowly turning into a nightmare, fixing all these little things, they just kept adding up and I was getting frustrated, dreaming about getting another beautiful EH like I'd had before. I just couldn't believe the way anyone could have neglected such a nice car like this so badly. But I kept my cool - the car finished the trip fine in the end. At least whenever something goes bung on one of these cars it's pretty easy to diagnose and fix by yourself.

Yeah, despite all those initial little hassles, the car was a legend. Eventually I ironed out most of them and got some good reliable use out of the old girl. Even though I never completely finished fixing it up, that light-blue FB had a certain charisma and so much potential that it would have been worth persevering with. It was eventually a really reliable old car that was great to just go cruising in.

But other forces ended up changing things - my employer got bought out by a big multi-national, and in the wash up I decided to quit and go off travelling yet again. Eventually the novelty of the FB wore off around rego time in late 1995.

The old Holdens are pretty much at home on the dirt tracks of NSW. In this pic the FB is in bushland around Meroo Point, south of Ulladulla.

I was in Germany at that time and had just made yet another on-the-spot change in my travel plans which meant that I was gonna stay away for at least another year. With the FB due for rego I felt really bad about leaving it 'unfinished' and sitting in my parents' garage back home in Australia so I arranged to have it sold, to get it out of my parents' way. I reckon that it went for a song too! My mother said that the phone lit up red hot with calls from all around Australia once the ad went in. The first person who called rushed around and snapped it up, but the calls kept coming for weeks.

In the end, after the stuttering start, that FB turned out to be really a lot of fun to own! I eventually got my money's worth simply from the fun of driving it around and having a great time in it. To all my friends it was the ultimate party-mobile. The very day I bought it (a Saturday) I drove around to all my mates houses, and one-by-one they all piled in until we had about seven people in the car, and then we decided on a whim to go out on the town in it. It was that sort of cool vehicle...

Seeing it slowly starting to straighten out and become a good car due to my effort was a real pleasure. A real cruisin' car, particularly down at the beach. I guess it fitted right into that 'cool' beach culture, it was the epitomy of the classic Australian "waxhead mobile". With surfboards inside it would look like something straight out of "Puberty Blues". Cooool babe...

Well at least I can rest easy thinking that I was just in time to help save and resurrect a true Aussie icon, this poor old FB, from the brink of hitting the scrap heap. I occasionally see my old FB still going strong, driving around the streets of southern Sydney with its new owner at the wheel. Lately it looks like the new owner is preparing to have it resprayed. I hope that this means that the old bus will come up looking like a million bucks again. It deserves it!

I don't regret selling it though. The car I've got now, my EK, is much much cooler, simply a better car all round, not a thing wrong with it. But somehow legend of the FB party-mobile will forever live on! That car was truly a legend!