70 duster: updating, and a no-dough pro-touring makeover

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I had a couple Dusters many years ago with that style spoiler, I loved them back in the day but today I think a "new" version would look better. I plan on making a modern steel version for my build along the same lines you were thinking... lower, layed back and longer....good luck
 

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wanna make me a copy out of glass?
im really leaning towards a no with this one. just needed the feeedback from other eyes, as ive got 200 bucks in thsi one. hate loosing money like that.
 
wanna make me a copy out of glass?
im really leaning towards a no with this one. just needed the feeedback from other eyes, as ive got 200 bucks in thsi one. hate loosing money like that.

Aah, If I only had either one of those cars still it would be a definate maybe...the first car had a front spoiler also and I sold it in 1985 to buy the Orange one (that was F3 Green when I bought it) and sold it in 1994.
 
i was thinking of the one youre planning on making for yours.
im really digging your build. would love to see pics of yopur k-frame when dennys done.
 
i was thinking of the one youre planning on making for yours.
im really digging your build. would love to see pics of yopur k-frame when dennys done.

Well you shouldn't have to wait much longer, Dennys planning on a trip tomorrow.....pics will follow
 
so ive had a little change of heart over the last few weeks. i watched the movie courageous with my wife, and really got to thinking and praying about where my priorities have been lately.
the answer was, not where they should be. ive neen far too focused on work, my hobbies, my finances, etc. not the real purpose of this car, or my calling, or my family.
so im sitting it aside for the summer for the most part. the working on it, that is.
i bought my new tremec trans, am finishing up my intake, and sitting them on the shelf for this winter.

this summer im going to focus on my family. end of story.
the plans for the car, since this is a car forum are this:
keep it neat and clean.
drive the piss outta it.
repeat.

my goal by the end of summer is to double the milage number the odometer currently reads. with my daughter, wife, or friends along for most of those miles.

i spent a weekend or two getting the car detailed (buffed, waxed, glazed, polished, armoralled, vacuumed, degreased, etcc. iven did back to black on all the weatherstrippings). first time the car has really had anything more than a quickie cleaning and waxing since i built it. it came out GREAT!.

first show in a few years (power parking) is this coming weekend. going with my dad, a good friend of mine and his dad, and possibly my wife and daughter.

heres pics of the car. parts pics will be up later this summer, as well as an ongoing documentary about what im doing WITH the car instead of what im doing to the car. and i have also decided once and for all that the spoiled is not going on the car. just doesnt fit very well.
next two build steps, assuming that nothing breaks this summer, is 5 speed and EFI.

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that wa after two 12 hour days of cleaning. did not get the wheels yet. they need to be compuunded and cleaned real good. gonna do that one night this week after the family goes to bed.
 
I swear this is one of the coolest Dusters I have seen in years! I just love it, so clean looking! Skip the spoiler...our Dusters look great and have awesome lines without them. Everytime I look at your car, I second guess my desicion to two tone mine. Doesnt help that Viper red is my favorite color! Keep up the good work, and more importantly enjoy your freshly renewed priorities, drive the wheels off it!
 
Glad to hear the movie spoke to your heart. Nothing wrong with the car hobby but you will never regret putting family first.
 
That is the right attitude. Store up treasures in heaven where moth and rust can't touch it. Cars wear out, engoy them while you can, but don't put too much stock in them. Besides, your posessions own you, not the other way around.

Car looks great, by the way.
 
so the wife and i actually entered a car show. i know, shocking that i parked it and sat out a lawn chair.


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but it was for a good cause!!! this was a charity show to keep the bible classes being taught at a local high school. they get no state funding, just what they can raise. my wife and i, my friend Dallas and his wife, Dustin and his fiancée, and Dallas's dad and cousin were there. good times were had by all. except for my wife, who got really cold. she holed up in the back seat after the Judges came by and worked on puzzles.


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as the only classic mopar, and one of 3, i brought home a trophy. probably felt bad for me due to being in ford and Chevy country....


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we then spent a while as a group at the waffle house. good times. very good times.


also, figured id throw up some pictures of recent parts purchases for the upcoming winter.

1200 tremec 3550 with 600 miles on it and a steeda triax shifter

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and a purchase that i just HAD to make. it was 55 shipped, which was too much, but Ive been looking for another one of these shift knobs religiously for the last 5 years since i lost my last one in the accident with the black Dakota. this is the only one Ive found for sale at any price. Ive only found one other in all that time, and that was in one of the cars at UTI. the shifter stick came with the knob. maybe ill use it with the tremec if it works out.

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its been nice this week, so Ive been driving my car for work. roughly 50-60 miles a day.

the AC has stopped working. needs to be fixed. gonna take it to a local shop and see if they can check the freon charge. it will work and blow fairly cold if you jump the binary switch, but not without doing that. so its either a bad switch, or low freon.


Michael
 
Good job helping to keep God in the school.

I'd like to find a shifter with an 8 ball on it. Might just have to fab one.
 
Cool Duster.

I bought new radiator and now i need upper radiator hose. Your hose looks like what i need. Is that stock Duster hose what you have?
 
Good job helping to keep God in the school.

I'd like to find a shifter with an 8 ball on it. Might just have to fab one.

Yeah, hurray for violating constitution and worsening the education system
 
Michael,

I'd forgotten how much I liked your car, haven't looked back at the thread in awhile.

Hope the summer went well and you enjoyed your family. Keep up the good work!
 
Michael has a great thread going here. This is just a suggestion since I'm not a mod or anything, but I hope it won't turn into something unpleasant. I hope anyone who wants to argue will take it elsewhere.
 
You are right and I apologize to the thread owner and promise to play nice.

Mike
 
thanks.

dunno if ill still do the vette brakes. the car has yet to run out of brakes on me, no matter how hard i beat it. and if i keep my current setup, i can still run my steelies. which reminds me, i need to figure out the tire sizes again to put new skins on them....


and i would apprecieate that this thread does not turn into a debate about the constitution vs private and state rights, etc. well keep that for the private forum, and in which case ill probably participate in that one.

this thread is intended to be about repurposing and previously finished car, and a real-world log of the results as i spend time with my friends and family with the car.


there have really been no updates. i could try to blam,e circumstances, but i tend not to try to lay the blame on other places other than me.
at the beginning of summer, i blew out my knee. its given me trouble off and on over the years, but my daughter and i were playing in the living room and i heard it go POP. wound up getting a boatload of PT and not being able to drive stick for a few months. its finally geting back to normal. as i was in recovery for the knee, i managed to trip a 40 amp breaker with my heart. wound up with a mild heart attack, which pretty much killed the rest of the summer worth of working on the car and cruising.

now, im starting to get back into the swing of things. have gotten the red car driving again, thouigh i am having charging system oddities. which led me to take my freshly restored neon ACR on vacation this past weekend instead of the red car like i had planned.

the only red car updates i really have is that i got my EFI manifold finished welded, my TB adapter bought, a new tpo me set of injectors, and a new pair of front tires. apparently -2/5 degrees of camber kills them on this thing.....

on the short term to do list is find the charging problem, clean it up from extended storage, change the oil, and realign it to something a bit more sane. this winter i plan to do my five speed and EFI swapping, but ive got to get caught up at both jobs and my personal fleet first. gotta rehabv the scoobie, sell the camry, rehab my brithers trans am so he can sell it, service the truck, and change an exhaust manifold in the ACR.

build thread for the ACR
http://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/neon-acr-coupe-2012-challengedd-build/50461/page1/
 
So the previous total was 6776.15.



For this update, I will not include the new set of tires I put on, as those are now a wear item.

40 for the throttle body adapter

45 for some welding

11 for the pilot bearing

Sacrificial tranny cross member was free



New total is 6872.15



So as I said in my last update, I’ve been laid out most of the summer. At the beginning of summer, before I blew out my knee, I went down to run to the old south. My best friend and I were there most of the day, just hanging out. I unfortunately didn’t have the money to enter, but it was nice to be there with so many of the PT guys, especially at my home track of Carolina Motorsports Park. Definitely an attendable event next year. Dustin drove most of the way down, just because.

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on the way back, I had a couple of bone jarring impacts due to south Carolinas wonderful roads, and a set of railroad tracks that the city forgot to mark as under repair.

These impacts, coupled with excessive inside shoulder wear, broke belts in both front tires.

My local tire guy, Freemans tire and wheel, stood behind his tires even despite the excessive wear and the fact that he KNOWS I autocross/beat on this car. Was able to give me the replacements at his cost. I will recommend him to anyone within driving distance.

The tires were pretty badly worn, and the picture kind of sort of shows how they’re abnormally shaped. It was MUCH more dramatic in person. And really kind of cool to see.....



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Due to the tire wear, I’ve decided to go back to a little more sane alignment settings. Also hopefully going to make it stick a little better in the process. While I’m at it, I need to finally get my front sway bar mounts that I bought a long time ago installed. Pretty far down on the list of priorities in my life at the moment, though, if I have to be honest.



After blowing out my knee, and then the heart attack (electrically induced. I’m only 30...) the car sat with the new front tires on for a few months. No cover, dirty, etc. it was also having hot start problems and hesitation problems on the way to and from CMP, so I decided that one of my next focuses should be the EFI conversion and five speed swap. The EFI conversion will be much more than just that, as I’m also swapping to a hydraulic roller for less maintenance and more manifold vacuum, rewiring the car, and doing a little gauge cluster work in the process. The 5 speed swap will include new carpets and removing the 4 speed hump for better leg room, as well as reworking my seat brackets and installing additional chassis bracing.



None of this happened due to me being laid up, and then building my daily driven ACR. I paid my welding instructor 45 to finish my intake for me, and scored a magnum to 4bbl throttle body adapter off of dakotar/t.com for 40 bucks. One of my corvette buddies also gave me a set of LS1 injectors left over from his c5 race car for my swap.



When we welded in the bungs, we did some quick and dirty math for the height to install them at, said screw it, and build a very rough jig with a piece of angle iron and a pair of c-clamps. we set the full length bungs on the angle iron that was clamped to the head mating surface, and welded them in. in the process, we made some lumps on the inside of the bungs where the O-rings sit, as well as effectively blocked the entire port.



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I worked a little bit before the power outlet tried to kill me on getting the bungs cut to length. Never made much progress. In the last week, I have though. Wound up drilling a hole through the portion of the bung sticking into the runner, then using a spiral cutter bit in my dremel to cut through it. This gets the majority out. Then, using a carbide burr and plenty of WD-40, I ground the remaining stump flat with the intake port roof. Finished it up with some sanding rolls from harbor freight.

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to take care of the lumps in the O-ring side, I very slowly and carefully ground them down with a tiny little sandpaper roll on the dremel, then finished it with a 120 grit sanding roll in the drill to make it round again. Worked like a charm.



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our method of setting the installed height of the injectors was not scientific, or even that well thought out, but by sheer dumb luck, the injector is almost flush with the roof of the intake port, and angled right at the backside of the valve.

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Now I only have 7 more to do, then some massive port work on the rest of the manifold. I want to knife edge the plenum to runner walls, port the plenum to carb flange, and port match further into the port than the 1/4 inch or so that I had done previously. ill then go on to porting and polishing the magnum throttle body unless I find a cheap 1000CFM 4bbl one before then.



On the tremec swap, I actually have been using the archive from moparts for my reference.

http://www.moparts.org/Tech/Archive/clutch/25.html

Asking some questions, the guy that did it in the 440 cuda PM'd me, and I met him over in charlotte to look at how he did it. Very nice guy, and I spent a few hours talking with him. He even gave me a free trannny cross member to cut up. I believe that I will do my t-bar cross member a bit differently than he did by sectioning in extra material to the factory stamping. I will also further reinforce that area with torque boxes, and spar from the sub frame connectors to just next to the t-bar anchors.



So that’s about where I stand at the moment.

We, as a family, drove the car to the millingport corn maze for my birthday last Sunday. Had a very good time there, and my 3.5 year old got to be the line leader for the maze (led me and mommy around for a couple of hours. it was a HOOT! I’d recommend y'all to travel over here and go to it next year. For 7 bucks a head, its 4 hours of good, quality, family friendly entertainment.)



Brother Dustin and I have also instituted what we call "fun car Fridays". We’re driving our pleasure cars on Fridays to work and then out and about afterwards. He went to a cruise night tonight that I had to pass on, due to trying to get a customer’s 02 Trans am finished up. But for the last month or so, I’ve been driving mine every Friday. Sometimes to the site in Lexington, where I make sure to get smiley's bbq (id recommend the skin sandwich. its artery clogging manna from heaven), sometimes to concord, sometimes just around Albemarle, sometimes to charlotte. Have a good time getting looks from people, getting compliments, and leaving work at full throttle. Still really have to fix the carb, or get to the EFI. Hasn’t fixed itself since the start of summer....



So anyway, that’s the update guys. I’m grateful to be able to give on.
 
It's funny I spend way too much time on this FABO site. Yet once in awhile I still find really cool threads like this one. Hard to believe I haven't seen it before in the last couple years.

Dig the car and the modifications you are doing.
 
going autocrossing saturday. finally installing my sway bar monts from LAST DECEMBER!! on friday.

were racing at z-max in concord, nc ifanones interested.
 
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