67 Dart 270...Project Old School
I spent Sunday morning tinkering on the Dart. I first moved vehicles around so I wouldn't have to lay in the oil pool sprinkled with assorted wrenches under the Dart. Once I had it situated in the middle of the garage, I jacked up the driver's side and set it down on a jack stand. I then climbed underneath to see what all needed to be done to hook up my speed sensor for my digital speedometer. That was when I began to remember all the things I had neglected to fix in a while.
The most annoying problem I was planning to solve involved when you have the shifter pulled down into first gear and tromp on the gas, the shifter immediately pops into second gear. How is that possible and is that an easy fix? Actually yes it is. On Chrysler 904/727 the kick down lever and the shift lever share the same shaft. The shift lever moves forward towards the front of the car as you shift down through the gears. The kick down lever swings to the back as you tromp the gas to the floor. The bolt in the kick down lever was just barely hitting the shift lever as it swings past.. I simply used a tool to bend the kick down lever up slightly and WHALA no more interference.
Item number 2 on the hit parade was the emergency brake cable. I was never able to hook it up with the factory cable in the car and the cables going to the C-body brakes on the 8 3/4 rear. The cable was about 2" too short. I took some 1" wide flat steel and bent it into a rectangle and welded the seam. I drilled hole through the box on opposite sides. I then bolted the box to the bracket that holds the two brake cables on one side and ran the threaded rod of the brake cable through the other side of the box. I will have to do some testing and adjusting. The E-brake in the Dart is a hand - pull brake.
Finally I got to work on the speed senor. It just screws into the place left by the speedometer cable. It has three wires of which one was a ground. That wire got screwed into the cross member. The other two wires were run following the old speedometer route and used the factory clips. I even ran the wires through the firewall where the old speedometer went in. One wire connects to the digital dash and the other wire is connected to 12V. I got the car down off the jack stand and took it out for a short cruise to see if the speedometer actually had a reading. Surprisingly, the speedometer was reading pretty close. Not surprisingly there was a storm rolling in and it would be raining in 5 minutes. I almost made it around the section before the first sprinkles hit my windshield.