Getting a '73 Swinger Back on the Road

[Keystone]

I bought this car 5 years ago as my first venture into the old car world. I never intended to do a restoration on it, but it definitely needed more work than I was expecting to get it back into proper condition. I worked on it here and there as I had time and eventually was able to start using it as a nice day driver.

I have another ’73 that’s about to get a /6 -> V8 swap, so I’m thinking it’s about time to sell this one and let someone else have some fun with it. This thread is to document what I did with it in the time I had it. Even though it’s a look back on what I did, I’ll try to post everything in a chronological order.

The back story on the car is I bought it off a college kid who had it for a few years. He was working at a garage over the summers and enlisted the help of one of the mechanics to do an engine rebuild, from an email he sent:

The block and heads were built in 1987. There is a number on the side of the block near the oil filter that indicates so. I can't tell you much else about it. It was a spare motor that came with the dart. The motor in the dart was tired and had a noisy valve train, and it didn't make any oil pressure.

The build was done at a shop that I was working at this past summer. A master mechanic did all the machining/valve work and I did most of the assembling. Everything was done properly and all bolts torqued to manufacture's spec. It is bored .040 over, crank cut 0.010 It has a mild cam, 4 angle valve job on the heads and mild porting.

These are the pictures he shared with me after I bought it from him.

These are a few pictures from the ad, so basically how it looked when I bought it.

One of the very first thing I did with it was to remove those ugly blocks on the front bumper. It cleaned up the looks at least a little bit.

Inside of the trunk is next...

 

[Keystone]

One of the first things I noticed with the car was that the trunk was quite rusty. Nothing eaten through, but it definitely needed to be cleaned up.

I used a rust converter then went over it with POR15

The area under the weather stripping had some rust, so I took care of that too. You start with something that seems small and it has a strange way of growing into a bigger job.

Since I got that far I might as well to do the lid.

Need 2 more pictures...

 

[Keystone]

And finally, since I'm that far I might as well paint it all. And surprise, surprise, matching the paint code doesn't really work when you have 50 year old paint. Oh well, at least it's pretty.

 

[Keystone]

When I was prepping the trunk for paint, I actually crawled in there to better reach some areas, and I saw what looked like fiberglass resin at the base of the rear window. Investigating a little further I started tearing into some spots on the “primered” roof that looked suspect. Turns out the vinyl top had gone bad and been left like that for who knows how long. All around the rear window was rust. Not good.

This began the long process of finding sheet metal from doner cars. I tried for a while to come up with an entire roof skin, but I couldn't find anything that was even close to local. I wound up doing it in 4 sections, the piece above the window, the 2 lower C-pillar pieces, and part of the Dutchman panel.

 

[Keystone]

My original intent was to try and have the seems go below the trim pieces to save as much of the original paint as possible.

Once all the welding was done, I sprayed the entire roof with an epoxy sealer.

Then proceeded to body filler, and eventually primer and paint

 

[Dartfreak75]

For your first venture you are doing an amazing job! That's some top notch body work. Great job im following! I love the color btw!

 

[Keystone]

For your first venture you are doing an amazing job! That's some top notch body work. Great job im following! I love the color btw!

Thank you! It's been a real learning process for sure, but even if I only get a couple hours a week to be out in the garage, it's very much quality time for me.
And I have some pictures I took after I was able to bring the paint back to life. It really came out nice. I've got to head out now, but I should be getting those up soon.

 

[408 swinger]

Great job and good looking car! I'm a sucker for the "beak" cars.

 

[Dartfreak75]

Thank you! It's been a real learning process for sure, but even if I only get a couple hours a week to be out in the garage, it's very much quality time for me.
And I have some pictures I took after I was able to bring the paint back to life. It really came out nice. I've got to head out now, but I should be getting those up soon.

I understand completely. Sometimes for me all I have is 30 mins after work here and there to work on it and ill take those 30 mins every time.

 

[Keystone]

Going back and looking at the dates on the pictures, it took me almost 2 years to get that part of the project completed. During that time I distracted myself from the slow pace of bodywork by doing a few other things the car needed.

I liked the wheels that were on the car and even though they’re only 14 inchers, I thought they looked good enough to keep. I cleaned them up and repainted the black areas

Next up was the leaf springs. They were sagging badly and someone thought the way to correct that was to add longer shackles to the back.

The front was a similar situation where his “fix” for the worn out torsion bars was to crank up the adjusters and when that still didn’t cut it, he got a set of front tires with a taller sidewall. They’d rub when the steering wheel was turned full lock, but the cheapo headers would still scrape the ground when you went over a dip in the road. I changed those out too, but didn’t take any pictures of that. The bottom line there is, don’t rely on band-aid fixes; when parts are worn out, replace them.

 

[Keystone]

Moving on with the body, it was time to take care of the floor pans. They were pretty good in the back

But up front they were a mess

I decided to go with these, since the smaller size seemed like it would be easier to work with

I spent the extra time to drill out the spot welds to get the new pans installed in a fashion as close to the way they were from the factory

Here it is with the weld through primer applied, and the pan with holes drilled for the plug welds

 

[Keystone]

Final test fitting and welded in

Passenger side was the same process

I while I was in there I cleaned up any surface rust and put some paint over that as well

Since most of the sound deadening/insulation was missing, except for the section over the trans hump, I made some up using corrugated cardboard and a material from the hardware store called “Peel and Seal”. I know it’s not ideal, but I figure it’s better than just the carpet.

 

[Keystone]

Speaking of the carpet, that reminded me… The previous owner did spend the money for new carpet, but he must have had some trouble getting it to lay down properly because at several spots he screwed it into the floor using self-drilling sheet metal screws. Because you know, that’s how it’s done, right? I went around with a light under the car to locate all of those holes and then welded them closed. I’m really not sure what he was thinking there.

Finally, I replaced the wiper pivot seals to stop the water ingress.

That's it for until the next update.

 

[66340SEDAN]

Looking good, nice job!

 

[Keystone]

I thought I did the seats before the floors, but from the pictures it was obviously the other way around. Anyway, I wanted to replace the worn out bench seat. If this was a higher value vehicle I would have paid the money to have it recovered, but I couldn’t justify the price of that, especially for a pain bench that didn’t even have the center arm rest.

I checked out a local junkyard to see what the had and came across a set of cloth buckets from a Scion TC for $70 for the pair. First thing I did was strip off the unnecessary pieces

The driver’s side was very straight forward. I cut up some box tube and welded/bolted that to the bottom of the seat rails. I drilled holes into the box tube and welded in bolts at either end that would protrude though the floor and then made up some reinforcing pieces (basically big washers) to add some strength to the sheet metal.

 

[Keystone]

The issue I ran into on the passenger side is that the space between the tunnel is actually narrower by about 2 inches.

There's also an odd hump under the right hand seat rail that is not only taller, but it's at a different angle.

I had to get a little creative with how to make the bracketry on that one, but it worked out.

Finished result

And most importantly, our Boxer dog approves

 

[Keystone]

I came across a member only an hour from here selling an A-Body 8-1/4 rear axle for a fair price, and I was able to get it before anyone else grabbed it. Here’s bringing it home

He did tell me that there was some pitting on the ring and pinion, apparently because he had it stored in an uninsulated shed, so in the winter months it would get cold overnight, then on a clear sunny day the shed would warm up and the parts not submerged in gear oil would get condensation. So yeah, it was a little rusty. This is one of the backing plates, which I didn’t’ use

The inside wasn’t a whole lot better, so I went ahead and changed out the outer bearings and put in new seals. I found there was also some pitting on the axles where the seals would ride, so I used something called a Speedi-Sleeve to cover up that area.

I removed the original 7-1/4 and swapped over all the brake hardware, which bolted up perfectly

Here it is all cleaned up, painted and with new brake lines

And installed in the car (this pic was taken later, after I replaced the gas tank, which I'll get to soon)

I removed the rusty spots on the ring and pinion as best I could with some emory cloth, but it is a little noisier than I hoped. In hindsight I should have spent the time to learn how to install new gears, set the backlash and pre-load and all of that, but I really wanted to get it in the car to see how much better it is having a Sure Grip and also to go from the 2.76 ratio to 3.21 and yes, it’s way better.

 

[Keystone]

Next up was fixing some of the exhaust leaks the car was suffering from. I tried with no success to snug of the header bolts. You could really hear it leaking right at the heads and it was bad enough you could even occasionally smell it while driving.

Luckily I didn’t order new gaskets before I unbolted the headers to take a look at what was going on. He must have made an attempt at putting in better gaskets because the ones in there were a multi-layer aluminum style.

What he didn’t realize is that it wasn’t the gaskets that were the problem. The heads from the 80’s engines have ports for the air injection just below the exhaust ports. When you no longer have the air injection, you have to close those up, otherwise they blow exhaust right out under the header flange, which is exactly what was happening

The bad part of this job was that it was no longer, unblolt the headers and pull them back just enough to slide new gaskets in. In order to tap the air injection ports for the setscrews that would plug them up, I had to completely remove the cheapo headers to have enough room to get the tap and handle in there. The passenger side was bad, but the driver’s side was downright awful. All that work for a few tiny setscrews, but it’s done now.

Moving on I replaced the lower control arm and tie rod on the passenger side because the boots were destroyed. Pretty straightforward job

Of course you may be asking “why didn’t you do the driver’s side as well?” That’s because the previous owner already did that side. Maybe he was going to get to the other side eventually? I have no idea, but again, it’s done now.

 

[Keystone]

Continuing on with the same theme, the brake booster had been replaced, but he left the leaky master cylinder. I had let it go initially, but now that the roof and floors were fixed and I was starting to drive the car to work out the bugs, it was time to take care of that.

I never cared for the looks of the rusty, oily iron style units, so I picked one up from the junkyard off of a 90’s Dakota. It was simple enough to make up an adapter plate

This is installed. The pedal effort is a bit less but I like the looks of these better and they're noticeably lighter, so that's a plus

I had been suspicious of the gas tank being rusty inside for a while, and anticipating changing my Slant 6 car over to fuel injection when I did the /6 -> V8 swap, I pulled the new looking tank from that car and put it in this one. Removing the old tank, it was surprising how clean the metal above the tank was

The old tank wasn't as bad as I was expecting, but it definitely had some rust inside, so it’s probably good I swapped it out

And again, it's from my Slant 6 car, which was painted orange, hence the color of the over-spray on it. You really don't notice it unless you look underneath, so it didn't bother me enough to do anything about

 

[Keystone]

Not too long after I bought the car I came across a used Holley 4 barrel for a reasonable price. I was told it ran well, but I figured I’d go ahead and rebuild it. Here’s how it looked before tear down

I've disassembled and cleaned small engine and motorcycle carbs before, but this was my first time rebuilding an automotive carb, so I proceeded slowly and took lots of pictures

 

[Keystone]

This is everything disassembled and cleaned

And finally all back together with new parts from the Holley kit

Swapping out the 2 barrel BBD wasn’t too difficult. Here’s how it looked before I began

And with the intake manifold removed, it was nice and clean in there

I thought this would be a good time to replace the long length of rubber hose coming up from the fuel pump with steel line

Here’s how it turned out

I bought the correct throttle bracket for it, and was able to modify the 2bbl kickdown linkage to get it all to work

Starting it up I ran into a hickup where it was only running on one side of the dual plane. I posted a question about that and got some very helpful advice from the great members here on what to look for. Turns out I had one of the gaskets on incorrectly (or perhaps used the wrong gasket, since there were a few different ones in the kit). With that corrected, it ran beautifully. I'll see if I can find that thread and post a link.

Found it: Holley Flooding Engine and Spewing Gas

 

[Keystone]

At this point I was starting to be able to drive the car a bit and it was time to get it aligned. The ball joints in the upper control arms had already been replaced, which left the pivot bushings.

When I took my Slant car in for alignment at a local shop, where someone still knows how to do them by hand (in other words without a computer controlled alignment rack) he told me he wasn’t able to get enough camber. On that car I put in a set of tubular UCAs but on this one I wanted to try the offset bushings because it seemed like a more economical way of achieving the same result. I used the Moog K7103 bushings and was able to get it aligned successfully.

When the UCAs were out, I took a look in the channels and was happy to see that other than some rust on the surface, they are 100% intact

 

[Keystone]

The next problem I dealt with was, after the 4 barrel swap, it wouldn’t rev over 4000 rpm. It was like that with the 2bbl, but I figured it was starving for fuel. Nope. When the previous owner rebuilt the engine, he kept the rotators that were on the exhaust valves (it was an 80’s truck engine). My thinking here was that it was having an issue with valve float, so I put better valve springs and retainers on it, but again that didn’t fix the problem. Here’s a thread I started asking for help in that issue.

noob valve spring question

What did fix it was changing the ignition over to an HEI setup. In the process I checked out the bulkhead connectors and after a quick cleanup, they were in good shape

One problem I did find was the engine harness connector had a pretty badly burned up terminal

The rest of the connector and terminals looked fine, so I moved that wire over to a pair of bullet style terminals

On my last trip t the junkyard I found an HEI module, an E-coil, and the integrated bracket

For the swap there’s a small amount of wiring that needs to be done. The dark blue and brown wires from the underhood harness get spliced together

This is where I decided to mount the components. Oh, and I found out that 5-pin style module won’t work, so I had to go an buy a 4-pin type

Everything worked great. The car started quicker and even seemed to idle a little smother. What really made me happy is that it would no longer start to breakup at 4000 rpm.

I drove it like this through the spring and summer of last year and one day about a mile from home it shutoff. I coasted into a parking lot and diagnosed a no spark condition. Stupid NAPA module was dead. I’m not sure if it was just a low quality part or if the heat from the headers did it in. I relocated the heat sink over to the driver’s side fender and left the coil near the original location. It’s been good so far but now I keep a spare module in the glove box just in case.

 

[Keystone]

The last thing I did ignition/electric related was to put in a distributor advance limiter plate. I bought one of these FBO kits and installed it as per their recommendations

I wasn't sure what the difference in the springs was, so I sent an email and they were nice enough to give me a quick reply:

Hello,

I recently purchased one of your Mopar Distributor Limiter Plates and a Spring Kit though B3 Racing. When I spoke to Mike to place the order, he recommended starting with the middle weight spring. What I didn't realize is that the stock springs in the distributor are different. One is heavy and one is light.
As a starting point, do I replace just the light spring, just the heavy spring, or both?

And their reply:

"You should use the two black springs in your kit on this. You will be replacing both springs, the stock usually comes with two different springs that is normal."

Finally it was time to see what I could do with the paint. I love the color, but it had definitely seen better day

My local autobody supply place recommended a aluminum oxide cutting compound, which worked amazingly well

I also removed the door-ding guards along the sides. Looks way better without them

Somewhere along the line I also picked up a replacement grill because the original one had a piece knocked out of it and I gave it the blacked out treatment. I know some people frown on this, but I think the beaker cars really need it to help the aesthetics of the nose

 

[pa340dart]

Really nice work