[burdar]

I didn't mask anything off before brushing that paint but I did have to add a second coat because there were brush marks all over it. The paint the factory used must have leveled out more. The paint looks pink in the pics but it's not that color in person.

[Hezzel]

Sweet work Burdar ,i like it

[burdar]

Picked up my new leaf springs yesterday. Hopefully I can get them taken apart and stripped this week. They are already rusting between the leaves. I can't believe anyone just bolts these on as is.

[burdar]

The springs are done...they look nice. I spent all afternoon yesterday removing the spring hangers from the original springs. Once I get those cleaned up, the rear axle assembly will go under the car. Hopefully sometime this week.

[burdar]

Well, the car is sitting on its rear suspension for the first time in 14 years. Everything went very smoothly. I just need to switch the swaybar bushings to rubber. The poly bushings are so stiff that I'm afraid the links are going to break.







The Rallye wheels went on until the stock Road Wheels are ready.

[fal308]

Looking good!

[burdar]

The engine is put back together and painted. I set some parts on it for the picture. I'll work this week at getting everything bolted together and on the K-member.

[MLMFLCN]

MINT

[burdar]

I got the steering column done last night. The rebuild went well. It's not very complicated. I just disassembled everything and bead blasted the upper parts. I hand sanded the tube since it wouldn't fit in the blast cabinet. I painted most of the pieces with SEM Trim BLack. The ignition key light, upper and lower mounts and the lower steering shaft got painted with gloss black Rustoleum. I made a new lower seal out of some scrap material from a DMT gasket kit. I still have to clean up the steering wheel.

Before...


After...


Steering coupler and shaft before...


Steering coupler and shaft after...

[Eddie]

Gorgeous Burdar!!

[burdar]

I got the alternator back from Jim Ridge on Wednesday. It looks great. The original alternator was long gone. I had a 1976 casting but I wasn't happy with the way it looked. I was at my father-in-laws house a few years ago when he mensioned he had a couple Chrysler alternators buried on a shelf somewhere. After digging them out, I realised one of them was a square back with a casting date of Sept 72. How did I get that lucky?

[burdar]

The engine assembly is basicaly ready to go in. The only thing not installed is the fuel pump to carb lines and the filter. Fine Lines didn't list a 73 318 in their cataloge. I ended up sending the original lines to them to use for a pattern.

I don't have the original starter restored yet so I have a mini on there for now. I know the belts aren't correct as well as the plug wires. There will be a few things to work on down the road but overall I'm pretty happy with how it looks.

[burdar]

Got the engine in yesterday afternoon. It was tight but it went in. There was only about an 1/8" clearance between the steering box/alternator and the frame rails.

[drewcrane]

That looks nice , and you didnt have to jack the car up to far,

looks really nice

[burdar]

I've seen pictures of people pushing the engine in through the front. Since the lower rad support sits lower then the frame rails, you have to go up higher that way. We really didn't have to go that high by going in the side. I think there was about a 1/4" clearance from the air cleaner stud to the frame. The top of the carb stud was between 36 and 37 inches off the ground when the engine was sitting on the cart.

The shifter pivot was guided into the bushing and the trans x-member was hooked up. The K-member basically located itself after that. It went pretty smoothly.

[dave-r]

Really nice to see this coming together now.

With limited room to the sides I decided to push mine in from the front but removed the intake so I didn't have to lift so high.When dropping the car down over the engine I seem to remember the 2" primary headers on my 440 to be slightly wider than the frame rails so had to rock things about a bit to get in in there. I was a "chicken leg short of a picnic" at the time with my brain thing so don't remember it too well but from the photos it looks like I did OK.

viewtopic.php?p=29595#p29595

[burdar]

The torsion bars are in and the front suspension is all put together. The brakes are installed on the front and the system is bled. Dad and I just finished installing the exhaust last night. The rear valance is back on and the tips are installed.

I had the radiator recored...I'm picking it up Saturday morning.

[burdar]

There havn't been any updates in 2 months because things havn't been going well. This update will be fairly long so bare with me.

The morning of June 9th I picked up the radiator from being re-cored. I spent most of the afternoon installing it and adding fluids. I also put an initial adjustment on the torsion bars, installed some old wheels and set the front end on the ground for the first time.


Since I didn't have a battery for the car yet, I borrowed the one out of my Durango. I hooked it up and checked to make sure everything worked. I've got a couple bad bulbs to replace but everything else worked like it should. At this point the engine compartment was done and I was ready to start the engine.

Before I get to that mess, I want to point out the vacuum hoses in the pic below. Someone over on another site posted the vacuum diagram out of the FSM. According to the manual, the hoses were color coded from the factory. I went to a craft store and bought some paint pens. I stretched the hoses out on my work bench and nailed the ends down so they wouldn't move. Using my finger as a guide, I ran the paint pens down the hoses and applied the stripes. I think they look really good. I searched for colored striped hoses and couldn't find anything. One of the larger vent hoses has a red stripe on it...the EGR valve hoses are colored green, white and yellow.

[burdar]

Now for the bad news. That evening, dad came over to help me get the engine running. We had a hard time getting the fuel pump to prime. I ended up taking the line loose at the carb, squirted gas into the line with an oil can until it wouldn't hold any more. Finally, we got it to fire off and stay running. The cam that's in the engine is a used MP purpleshaft 340 resto cam. I had it in a 360 for a couple hundred miles before replacing it with a MP 484 cam. I wanted to do another break-in just to make sure everything was going to be ok.

As soon as the engine fired, I took it up to 2500 RPM. I instantly knew something was wrong. The engine was missing horribly and the entire car was shaking. The oil pressure was very good and I didn't hear anything out of the ordinary from the engine so I went ahead and ran it for 20 minutes. When the 20 minutes was up I let off the gas. The car backfired through the carb and died. I started it up again and the same thing happened.

I called a friend of mine who had a compression tester. He came over the next weekend and we took some readings. Cylinders 3 and 7 had zero compression. Since the engine didn't run right from the very beginning, I didn't think the cam was to blame. At that point I knew the engine was going to have to come back out.

Of coarse this is when the weather turned extremely hot. I spent a little time each night for three days in the garage getting the engine ready to pull. The engine was dropped off at the machine shop towards the end of June. THey were busy and wouldn't be able to look at it for 3 to 4 weeks.

[burdar]

There were a couple weeks there when I didn't want to do anything. I finally got the desire to work on a few little things. First I installed the trunk weatherstripping. With everything I've read, I thought I'd have issues with the trunk closing and I was right. The lid wasn't even close to closing with the seal installed. I ended up clamping some thin pieces of wood to the seal to compress it. After a week I took the clams off and the lid closed. It still shuts hard but with a little more work to the seal I think it will be ok.


Then I decided to work on the interior panels. I started with the door panel woodgrain inserts. I read where WD-40 would remove the decal so I sprayed one of the inserts with it. Nothing happened. I then tried paint stripper on it. It started to loosen up the woodgrain but it was worthing very slowly. Then I had an idea. I bought my wife one of those handheld steem cleaners awhile back. I plugged that in and let it warm up. That worked perfectly. The decal just pealed right off. The original decals were in OK shape but they were starting to curl at the edges. The replacement decals were a little lighter then the originals but they matched the woodgrain on the dash so I'm happy with it. The black paint around the inserts was in good shape. I didn't have to do anything to one of them. The other side just needed a little touchup.




I used the same SEM paints on the door and rear panels as I did the A-pillar and kick panels. They aren't perfect by any means but they look alot better. New panels are definately on the list but these will do for now. The arm rest pads from Legendary are a joke. I'm not sure what brand they are. I had two choises and chose wrong. In the future I'm going to try to save the original ones. These are just a wooden core wrapped in the wrong grained vinyl.

[burdar]

I got a call from the machine shop after 5 weeks. They wanted me to come in to discuss what they had found. THey did a leakdown test and found cylinders 3 and 7 were leaking 90%. They pulled that cylinder head and found 2 sticky exhaust valves and excessivly cut valve seats. The heads were purchased from Areohead Racing many years ago. That head needed a couple new valves, all new valve seats and new guides. The other head was working OK but I didn't trust it. It would have needed the same work. I decided to bring in the original heads instead of trying to fix those.

A couple days after dropping off the original heads, I went in to see what they found with those. Those heads needed all new valves, guides and one valve seat. Right as I was leaving, the manager said,"Oh, by the way, the intake manifold is cracked." He took be back to see the intake and sure enough. There was a big crack starting in the choke thermostat well and extending all the way over to the EGR valve opening. That was the original intake with the correct casting date. Luckily I had a spare intake that checked out good. The new intake is slightly different but it's close.

I picked up the engine last Tuesday.


Cleaned and painted it on Wednesday.


Dropped it back in on Thursday.


I worked on it Friday night and most of the day on Saturday. After everything was put back together, I installed the new repro green top battery and it fired right off. I was tired so I havn't timed it yet but it runs and sound decent. Here's a quick video I took of it running.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKhYa6QDfc

[drewcrane]

sounds great really purrs like a kitten

[burdar]

The reproduction Polyglas tires arrived last Thursday. I decided to go with white walls since that's what was on the car originally AND you rarely ever see people put those back on. They look kind of fugly without the trim rings. I set a trim ring up to the wheel and they look good. The rings will stay off until after the alignment is done.


I also installed the rear bumper assembly. A member from Moparts sent me a really nice pair of rubber bumper guards. I still need to figure something out for the fronts. Both pairs of front guards I have are all pitted.

[MLMFLCN]

Looking great. Is that the original bumper rechromed, or a new one?

[burdar]

It's an original bumper but not the one the car was born with. The only piece that's original to the car is the inner bumper reinforcement. Everything else was in bad shape. The bumpers were purchased through Tri-City Plating.

[burdar]

The car is getting very close to being done. The front bumper and valance are installed. With the exception of the console top plate, the interior is in as well. The reproduction top plate isn't even close to fitting. The woodgrain is WAY different too. I bought an original plate that just needs new woodgrain. The seats still need to be recovered but that will have to wait until this winter. I want to get a few miles on the car before it snows.





Check out the crushed velvet dad had installed when the original vinyl tore. This a accually the only seat covering I remember the car having. It will be replaced with Legendary seat covers this winter.

[Adrian Worman]

Ta for posting, this car is one of the nicest and most interesting resto jobs I've seen and it looks the bizzo, a credit to ya hard work and determination to make it look factory, bloody well done

[dave-r]

It has become a restoration reference for sure.

[burdar]

I set the front end height on Saturday. Then I started it up, backed it down the driveway and decided to take it around the block. The brakes work good and it seems to drive nice. The alignment is scheduled for Friday. The front/rear glass will be installed on the 1st.

[Adrian Worman]

Ain't that a fantastic feeling? Exciting and stomach knotting at the same time, bet you were really happy and buzzin like crazy when you stepped out of it
...... and did you bore ya family shitless by telling them repeatedly how brilliant your car is