The topless adventures of Cuda Al
A couple years ago I purchased this car from Max Heim ( @mvh )
Not even four week later I'm on the road to Oregon with the car, overall the car performed good, a little anemic on the hills. This car draws far more attention than my fastback, lots of waves and thumbs up, you can't get gas without people coming over to check the car out.
The car has a slant six that Max put in and had good luck with, with not notable power issues. When I got the car and drove it home it struggled to climb some of the bigger hills. We looked at a few things and the vacuum advance wasn't working, that turned out to be a compound problem, bad advance and it wasn't getting vacuum from the carb. Even though it had PerTronix in it we chose to change it out to a Mopar distributor and box. With that we saw improvement but still struggled on some hills.
I didn't want to try and chase down the power issue and that just confirmed the plan to go with a V8 upgrade. Two weeks after getting the car I was able to track down a 340, complete. My friend and I went the three hour drive to look at it, he took time to mic the crank, bores etc. and verify everything was there and serviceable. The block was already machined to 0.030, the X heads were untouched. It came with everything for the most part intake to pan. Correct exhaust manifolds and intake, windage tray and hardware, timing cover and one valve cover were from a much later year. On the way home we dropped the block and heads off at the machine shop, the block needed to be honed to cleanup some very minor surface rust and the heads a full build.
In talking with another friend he had small block 727, free, will need to be rebuilt.
Now the parts hunt is on, throttle/kickdown linkage was sourced.
8-3/4 SBP 3.23:1 open rear was acquired drum to drum, serviced and ready to assemble. Not even two months into this and a V8 k-member was located and power coated.
More to follow.
Alan
A couple years ago I purchased this car from Max Heim ( @mvh )
Not even four week later I'm on the road to Oregon with the car, overall the car performed good, a little anemic on the hills. This car draws far more attention than my fastback, lots of waves and thumbs up, you can't get gas without people coming over to check the car out.
The car has a slant six that Max put in and had good luck with, with not notable power issues. When I got the car and drove it home it struggled to climb some of the bigger hills. We looked at a few things and the vacuum advance wasn't working, that turned out to be a compound problem, bad advance and it wasn't getting vacuum from the carb. Even though it had PerTronix in it we chose to change it out to a Mopar distributor and box. With that we saw improvement but still struggled on some hills.
I didn't want to try and chase down the power issue and that just confirmed the plan to go with a V8 upgrade. Two weeks after getting the car I was able to track down a 340, complete. My friend and I went the three hour drive to look at it, he took time to mic the crank, bores etc. and verify everything was there and serviceable. The block was already machined to 0.030, the X heads were untouched. It came with everything for the most part intake to pan. Correct exhaust manifolds and intake, windage tray and hardware, timing cover and one valve cover were from a much later year. On the way home we dropped the block and heads off at the machine shop, the block needed to be honed to cleanup some very minor surface rust and the heads a full build.
In talking with another friend he had small block 727, free, will need to be rebuilt.
Now the parts hunt is on, throttle/kickdown linkage was sourced.
8-3/4 SBP 3.23:1 open rear was acquired drum to drum, serviced and ready to assemble. Not even two months into this and a V8 k-member was located and power coated.
More to follow.
Alan