abodyjoe
Well-Known Member
need some nice seats in it for road trips. or a b-body. the factory bench in an abody kill me on long drives.
Great ideas, if a lil austere.Anyone else done this or thought about it? What would you do, or have you done?
May not have been an option back in the day but you definitely can put cruise on a manual.
Alan
For my 69 Dart I plan on making it comfortable for long road trips. I plan on a modern hemi and a 6 spd manual.
That sounds about perfect. I’m just collecting parts at this point. I have the T56 and a Gerst front end.My plan as well. With the wide ratio T56 Magnum, a 3.55 rear gear and a 25.7" tall tire, RPM's in every gear are almost a perfect match to the 2015 R/T 5.7/6M I sold. And it was a blast to drive and still got 25+ mpg.
That sounds about perfect. I’m just collecting parts at this point. I have the T56 and a Gerst front end.
Performer Airgap and AVS2 carb. AVS2 has annular boosters for better atomization. Benefit over the TQ is parts are readily available. Like a Rochester, once you get them set up they are not finicky, just drive.what happens when you're broke down on a dirt road at the *** end of hard luck because that TQ needs some gaskets?
dollars to donuts joe jimmy bobs local parts emporium has 1850 gaskets.
Just curious, how did you calibrate the speedometer for the 29” tires?I built this combo in 1977 when I was in graduate school in SoCal. Energy crisis made me want better MPG than the '68 340 provided, so I rebuilt the engine with a 318 cam, ran a SP2P intake with the stock AVS and re-jetted for best economy. Ran a 4 core desert cooler radiator and electric fan. No AC in a Black Cuda! But survived. Ran 2.94 Sure Grip from a truck and 29" tires. Got 24 MPG and drove all over the place. Once drove from SF to Irvine on one take of gas. On fumes, but made it. Drove the car from Long Beach to Vancouver, BC, picked up my brother and drove back on 395 the whole way. Go over 22 with what one might call spirited driving. I was teaching my 16 YO brother how to drive properly! Car was packed with camping gear so fully loaded. FB Cuda's are great road cars.
its easy just need the proper speedo gear for your tire size and diff ratio.Just curious, how did you calibrate the speedometer for the 29” tires?
I built this combo in 1977 when I was in graduate school in SoCal. Energy crisis made me want better MPG than the '68 340 provided, so I rebuilt the engine with a 318 cam, ran a SP2P intake with the stock AVS and re-jetted for best economy. Ran a 4 core desert cooler radiator and electric fan. No AC in a Black Cuda! But survived. Ran 2.94 Sure Grip from a truck and 29" tires. Got 24 MPG and drove all over the place. Once drove from SF to Irvine on one take of gas. On fumes, but made it. Drove the car from Long Beach to Vancouver, BC, picked up my brother and drove back on 395 the whole way. Go over 22 with what one might call spirited driving. I was teaching my 16 YO brother how to drive properly! Car was packed with camping gear so fully loaded. FB Cuda's are great road cars.
@RLF Cuda I'm mostly wondering if you compensated for the tall 29" tires. Pretty tall for passenger tires. What size were they, do you recall?Just curious, how did you calibrate the speedometer for the 29” tires?
@RLF Cuda Yeah, the "Exuberance of Youth". We're lucky more of us aren't dead. lol My BIL had a stock 67 273 Formula S that had tall tires on it. (Unknown long gears.) It was a dog out of the hole, and it couldn't pull the long gears up top. I told him he needed shorter tires, but what did I know? This was in the 70's, and I was a teenage punk. He was about 25, so he "knew more".I was running H70x14's in the back. They were retread tires that had a sticky compound. The original owner of the Cuda back in '68 put them on as they had more traction than the E70x14's that were original. That wasn't hard to have more traction that those either!. But the retreads lased about 20,000 miles of hard driving and never failed me. They were probably one of the reasons I could turn good times with the 340. [email protected] at OCIR. The tires literally filled the wheelwell and touched the inner well if I hit a bump too hard. But I could shift from 2nd to 3rd at just about 100 MPH and got the car up to 145 MPH with them (6500 rpm in 3rd). Maybe not so smart, but I was 19 at the time. This was done on the 91 freeway when it was being built and they opened a section the week before. There was a 2+ mile run with no onramps and I did this at 7:00 in the morning on a Sunday. absolutely no one around back then at that time.
Thanks Jim. I should go through my slides of car shows in the Bay Area to see if there are any good ones of you. I do have this photo of you and my '67 383 FB on Cummins Skyway. I think I shared that before, but it is a good shot of you.
That is a great road that few know about just above Hercules in the North Bay Area.
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