The Great Pumpkin - '71 Duster

Man, I just can not seem to get this thing done. I have lost the entire summer dicking around with little issues, I am pulling my hair out.

The most recent clusterf@ck with this car involves the cooling system. As I described a few posts back, my radiator has caused me grief from day one and now it is preventing me from moving forward. Regrettably, I have given up on it. It was actually installed and very close to being completed but there were fitment issues I could not get around. In the interest of forward progress, I basically just ordered an entirely new cooling system. I swear though, if these new parts don't work out, I am going to light this car on fire and take up knitting.

So as I described in an earlier post, the problem with the radiator was not with the function, it just wasn't fitting right. I'm not sure where Griffin got their measurements from but their claim of it being a direct fit part was laughable.

I won't go into too much detail about what I tried to do to make it work. Suffice to say I screwed around with it for a long time but nothing seemed to work without some drawback. Maybe it's my fault for not being able to arrive at a good solution but it shouldn't take that much doing. Oh well. On the shelf it goes with the rest of the stuff that didn't work.

The other issue I was having with the cooling setup was with the lower radiator hose. The huge-by-large Clay Smith mechanical fuel pump I have takes up a LOT of real estate on the passenger side and caused interference with the lower hose. To solve the interference, I had the water pump inlet cut, re-clocked and welded back on to move the hose towards the front but the angle wound up being a little too severe. It seemed OK on the engine stand but when it was time to button everything up in the car, it was too close to the belt for comfort. And because the radiator was farther back towards the firewall than normal, the lower rad. hose would have had to be cut very short. A flex hose would have probably worked but at that point, I decided enough was enough and threw in the towel.

With the Griffin rad on the shelf, I hadda find a replacement and I chose to get one from ECP. I ordered their 22" A body radiator with a built-in dual electric fan/shroud combo and their tidy fan controller. I did do a lot of research on these things. Sure, there are some negative reviews including some on this forum but it seemed like an OK product for the money. Is it off shore junk? I dunno. Pretty much everything seems to be made behind the great wall these days, what can you do? They look closer to an OE design than a generic, cross-flow type which I like. Guess we'll see how it all works out soon enough. It can't be any worse than the one I had.

So given that I was changing stuff, I decided to dump some more money into the aftermarket parts business and purchased a Moroso electric water pump setup. Now, I know some guys have misgivings about these things on street cars but I am seeing more of them out there these days which tells me they must be fairly reliable now. I don't drive the car 100 miles a day in traffic so I'm not worried about it taking a dump at some inopportune time any more than I would be concerned about a mechanical water pump. I've actually experienced that situation first hand and it sucked. Parts break or wear out whether they are old-school mechanical or electric, it's the nature of the beast.

There are in fact two nice benefits to ditching the belt-driven pump; it frees up a few ponies and will keep pumping even when the motor is shut off. Wiring appears easy, just acc.-on power and ground.

So beyond the cooling system, some other things have caused me some grief these last few weeks. Putting the driver's side header on is proving to be really difficult. The passenger side went on no problem but the driver's side with the #7 slip tube is a whole other ball 'o wax. I can't seem to thread the small, ground down bolt in next to the #5 cylinder. I have tried multiple methods, all of which end up the same - frustration and cursing. It was in fact tricky to do on the engine stand and on the dyno as well so I'm not surprised. Not buying new ones now so I will have to fight through it.

Making the fuel line from the trans cross member to the fuel pump has also proved to be a hassle but that's my own fault for being a perfectionist. The line runs parallel to the t-bar along the inner frame rail and would be a nice, straight shot to the pump except that the right front brake line is in the way. Routing it around the line causes it to get close to the exhaust so coming up with an elegant solution has been difficult. I've come up with a few versions all of which I scrapped. At this point, I gotta just buckle down and get it in.

This whole project is becoming a sad joke.

More to come. I guess.