Another 1972 dart swinger

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MOA

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Location
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I got this car about 4 years ago. I'm the second owner. It had some front end damage that was repaired, one repaint.

Came with a 318/904 7-1/4 rear end.
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It's a long story. I'll be back....
 
I get this thing for 2800. It's a good price, very little rust to deal with. Little rock ca. High Desert. Dash pad is gone, nothing left. Even though it was in a carport, hot as hell.

Number one priority is no rust, no body work. It needs a little bodywork, fair enough.
 
how do we reply with 4 thumbs up for no rust or body work! and $2800 to boot! closest one here is $6000 and is listed as "solid".
celebrating your great find with you and watching your progress.Bob
 
The trans, rear end, brakes steering and suspension all works but has 118k miles on it. Heads and carb need a rebuild.
The plan is to rebuild the heads, put a four barrel on it with headers, re ring it, new cam and timing chain and drive it around while working on one thing at a time. That's not how things went.

Here's what it looks like when you run old gas thru your engine.
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Timing chain is badly worn, the oil drip tab bolt does not have a hole thru the bolt holding it on, it does now. I would say not having the hole accelerated wear, just my opinion.
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I do a home port job and take the heads to a machine shop.

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Looks good, right? Well,yes and no.

I buy all new rockers and pushrods, install the heads and notice some of the rockers have no preload, hmm.
Measure across the valve tips and have .008 variance in valve height. So I take the heads back off and back to the machine shop it goes, they replace one of the valves, correct valve height and take .010 off the heads to make sure they're flat.

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That discolored valve didn't bother me since I didn't expect to get more than 25k miles out of it. Planned on building another engine while using up those 25k miles. Again, that's not how thing turned out.
 
I pulled the engine completely apart, everything looks good, bearings are good, rings are pretty nasty, cleaned up the pistons, spent a lot of time cleaning out the ring grooves, got a ridge reemer and proceeded to clean up the cylinders. Got a little deep on the ridge reem, or looks like it's not far enough down the hole to cause a problem, not really sure. Keep in mind, I've never done this before, any of it. I have built a few things, turbo hayabusa, but never a car engine.

I get that all done, reemed, ball honed and re installed, new cam is in, new cam chain, heads are back on. Ok, great. No, not great, I still have a couple lifters with no preload. That's not going to work because it will, in a short amount of time, break the retainer clips on the lifters.
 
So, I start looking into how to correct the preload problem, I've zero preload on a couple lifters and max of .080 preload on one. So, the preload amount is all over the place. Machine shop says measure them all, use whatever length each one needs. I go thru the process of documenting all that using a wire welding tip cleaner that has 20 different wire sizes. Bend each tip at 45 deg so I can get between the retainer and the top of the lifter, measure each one and document it. I think this is absolute BS. Don't like it at all. Project stalls while I figure out what to do. Considering adjustable rocker arms, I don't want to spend a lot of money on this because it's a temporary engine I expect to pull out not too far down the road. I have a 360 and a 340 block sitting here.
The new pushrods will not be used, starting to throw money away here, of which I have very little of.
 
At this point, the ridge reem I did is bugging me, it went too deep into the cylinder wall and I'm not sure if it's down far enough to make the ring expand and contract every time the piston goes up and down. This only happened on one cylinder but it's bugging me.

That ring will break in short order if it's expanding and contacting every stroke.
Maybe I worry about this stuff too much?

Nope, can't run it like that.

So, off to the machine shop to do a complete rebuild of the engine.

To be continued....
 
Since things have escalated, the trans needs to be rebuilt too.
The rear end needs to be replaced. I find a guy in NJ that will build me what I want. An 8-3/4 sure grip clutch style narrowed, spring perches moved in and disc brakes, 3:55 ratio.

Take the trans to pro trans in Lancaster ca. He does the build and changes out the planetary gear so first gear will be a 3:98 ratio. People have said that ratio is wrong, he's been doing transmissions for 50 years, I'm not going to argue with him about it. Change the converter to 2200 stall.

Now that I've changed out the rear end with large bolt pattern in the rear, I'll need to swap out the front too.

It already has disc brakes in the front but I can't convert them over to the large bolt pattern, or don't know where to find the parts to do so.

Scrap all that and buy all the parts for disc brakes, sand blast and powder coat lower control arms, reinforce and tighten up clearances. K frame gets the same treatment with some additional welds to stiffen it up a little.

This car is getting sub frame connectors and hellwig anti sway bars front and rear, and Bilstein RCD shocks.

I wanted the tubular upper control arms with offset bushings, they didn't have them in stock and sent the tubular control arms with heim joints instead, at no extra cost. That's great but I don't think they Will last very long because I'm in the high desert with dusty environment. That's why I wanted the other ones. We will see.
 
Here's what the dash pad looked like, before and after.
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Replacing the dash pad wasn't easy but not impossible.
 
I'll be jumping around a bit, chronological order would be a bit tedious.

The car needed new rear springs, I ordered HD 5 leaf 1" lower than stock
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I didn't want to go with 18" wheels but kinda had no choice. 18" wheels will give me better tire selection over 17", 17" was minimum for the anti sway bar since the Bullitt wheels have near 6" of backspace. I like the style of the Bullitt wheels with only the outer lip being polished.
Tires front and rear are 18/35/265 Nitto 555 G2, I can easily get a 275 in there, 285 with some trimming and shimming. 10.2" of rubber meets the road. I had some help from guys around here figuring out tire size, better to start off too small than too big, tires aren't going to last very long anyways.

Not enough interest, pulling the plug on this.
 
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