Well here it is January and the 73 duster is gone. We replaced it with a 74 Duster 318*904*8-1/4 car that we got for a song and it has a Title. This Duster isn’t as unmolested as the 73, but the fact that it is a factory V-8 car with front discs made it a no brainer for us to restore.
The car is missing the hood and has a cracked windshield, but the rest of the glass and the body is there, and the bumpers are clean with very little pitting( gotta take those big black bumper extensions off, they look really odd to me) In the engine bay is the stock 318 sitting there with the intake an valve covers removed. The 904, drive shaft and rear are all intact. The car is sitting on rallies on the front and cop car wheels on the back.
Inside the cluster is gone, and somewhere along the way these funky non folding bucket seats got bolted in front. I guess they came out of a 4 door. The back seat is nice and a lot of the interior trim panels are decent and can be restored stained and refinished . The floors are good except for the very front of the passenger front.
I also found an 84 360 out of a pickup with a dump body, TQ and all. It’s a nice runner but it’s real dirty. I was contemplating cleaning it up and running it the way it is with a new carb, but that’s a long way off, and the more I think about it, it would be stupid not to at least pull the heads off, take a look at the cylinder walls and pistons, and install a mild cam. What should I do to the heads while they are off besides plug the smog pump ports?
Is it better to do the pan and pickup before the top of the motor gets done or after? And we were wondering, how many horsepower did the 360 Ma put in the 74 a-bodies make from the factory?
We want to run the car with a very stock look under the hood, so we are looking for some 360 a-body manifolds. I have been told the manifolds from the 318 in the car are way too small for the 360. Also going to try to run the stock iron intake on the motor, but we are going to hide a nice new small Holley or Eddy carb under that stock snorkel air cleaner housing.
Well that’s it for now going to keep on pulling stuff off the car and de-greasing the 360 a few hours per weekend and in a few years we’ll hope to have a nice ride down to the cruise night car shows……
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