MuuMuu101's 68 Dart, A Learning Process...

MuuMuu101 said
I just rotated it 2-3 times with the breaker bar. It depends on how you classify easy vs. hard. I'd say it wasn't easy, but it wasn't hard. Some effort had to be made, but not all. I didn't notice any high spots.

All of the plugs were black. I'm going to order new ones. I don't have an AFR gauge, but I do know that my engine was running rich due to a manual choke cable I had not opening the carb completely for a year. I removed that almost a month ago.

Any recommendations on starters or water pumps? I noticed starter prices are all over the place $72 from a no-name on Amazon, $110~ for parts store, and $200+ for "high performance" ones on Summit.

Ok. Well, there should be some resistance to turning it still, so as long as nothing jumps out at you as being weird it's probably ok.

This is the water pump I use on my 340, no problems with it yet. I've heard good things about the FlowCooler ones too, but I haven't run one.
GMB High Performance Water Pumps 120-1070P

As for the starter, mine is just a stock replacement for a Dakota. I forget the exact info on it, I think it was around $70. Someone on here listed this one in another thread, Starter For Mini Mopar Dodge Plymouth 318 360 Chrysler Cordoba 5.9L 128000-5270 615311352399 | eBay . I don't know myself what supposed to be so great about the ones that are $200 or more.

If you're changing the water pump you'll get a good look at all the fluids anyway, so that will help in trying to figure out what happened. The plugs should have cleared up if it was the choke problem that was solved a month ago, so, you're still running rich but that's probably not part of the problem unless it was washing down the cylinders, and it sounds like it was running ok before so it's probably not a big deal. Something to address, but not part of the most recent issues. So that can wait, you want to try to avoid replacing a whole bunch of stuff at the same time. Just stick to the stuff you know is broken, and go from there. That way you have the problem narrowed down, instead of just throwing a ton of new parts at it all at once and not finding out what actually fixed it.