Rocket Restorations has been campaigning a 1967 Plymouth Fury in the 24 Hours of Lemons for 5 years but the car got wrecked last year and we decided to build a new car with a little less weight (well if you call dropping almost 1,000 pounds a little). The car started out as a 225 Slant 6 with a factory 4 speed, we ended up dropping in a 170 slant 6 for multiple reasons.

For those who don't know what the 24 Hours of Lemons is you have to buy, build and enter a car for only $500. This does not include safety which encompasses cage, seat, wheels, tires, brakes, ball joints, fuel cell, etc. Will go through areas where we spent money and did not spend money.

We have a ton of time into this thing with a bunch of fabrication. We will be showing what we did with the build over the next week with pictures. We are not aware of anybody else trying what we did, still can't believe we pulled it off. If anybody is going to Vegas, Spring Fling or the Spring Fling track day the car will be at both. Stay tuned for more.

And be sure to read the thread in the General Forum.

https://board.moparts.org/ubbthreads/show...e=0#Post7139693

There's been at least a few rear wheel drive Chrysler pieces entered in Lemons and Chump races. The first I was aware of was presumably yours. Five years is a pretty darn good run considering the premise.
Then the next one that I know of actually making making it to a start was probably Frieberger's junkie Fury. This year has a slant six powered E30 that ran at Carolina and the LeMonster this past weekend in California.

No way they are gonna let that fly as a $500 car, they will crush it at 1/2 time

When I was there in a ford escort they made us find some in comparable condition around $500 that was pretty hard even with a salvage title... gonna be impossible to do that with a barracuda that nice, I would pay tripple that for one like it right now.

First off let me address the $500 issue, everybody who looks at the car says "it can't be worth $500" and "it will be crushed." Well Lemons doesn't crush cars anymore, it's still in the rules but they haven't done it in two years so that is a moot point. We won Index of Effluency (the highest award in Lemons and is for doing the best with the least worthy race car imaginable) in our first race and that should tell you what the organizers thought about the car. As for the $500 value we'll get into that in a minute. Here is our Facebook fan page if anyone wants to read way more than you probably will ever want to about the car:

https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Team-Oly-Express/207144609354407

So on to purchase price. We got the Barracuda given to us (I know, I know, you don't believe us). Let us explain, it was given to us as long as we did some work for the owner on his Valiant Wagon and gave him a bunch of the parts back off the thing including the rear bumper, hood, grill, front bucket seats, and the rocker moldings. We ended up having about three hours into working on this car (changing out hood, rear bumper, grill and changing the wiper pivot seals at $60 an hour) so we have $180 plus $10 for the wiper pivot seal kit into our initial purchase price of the car. The car was listed on CL locally for 6 months by the owner at $1k and nobody bought it. Will go into why on the next post.

The owner thought by turning it into a race car it would be going to a better fate than parting it out.

Now onto why this was a $500 car that was given to us. In a word it was BEAT. It spent a lot of time in the Midwest (it had Kansas plates come with it) and everywhere we looked we found either rust or bondo. Here are some pictures showing the damage:

Here is what we found when we took out the front suspension, the front frame rail was completely rusted out.



We had to cut the 1/4's and flare them for wheel clearance and this was what was under the decent looking paint, galvanized panels brazes on covered in a 1/2 inch of bondo.



Here is the back of the front frame rail.



1/4 panel extension that has galvanized tin pop riveted in place with lots of undercoating over it to hide the work.

It's hard to see in this photo but the car had a hard rear end hit at some point and both frame rails are kinked pretty bad at the top in the wheel house.



When we got it here it barely ran, the carb leaked like crazy and the oil idiot light came on at idle. This one looked good from 30 feet but the beauty was only skin deep.

Next chapter will be what do you do with rusty frame rails on a Barracuda race car?

I'd race it!

The reshaped rear wheel arch looks great. It gives the car a much better look compared to the stodgy original design.

Like I said on the other post great car. I bet the /6 runs forever.
Anybody in the Md/Va/Pa area want to do one? I'll buy the car.

O.T. How about this?
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/1966-Plym...=item231b784b66

It's getting very hard to get into a Lemons race, they had over 400 people apply for the Sears Point race and 170 cars made it. I guarantee if you have a Valiant you will get in.

Russ at Fabtech in Portland did our cage, the guy is a master. It's all fabricated and adds a ton of stiffness to the car. PM me if you want his contact info.

id love to do this but im not sure i would spend the ten grand on the cage work and about five grang on safety gear for a so called 500$car. even if i could afford it.

Agreed. Even if you had it all done, that is only a couple grand worth of cage work. Do it yourself and its only a couple hundred. Safety gear, well, I'd prefer to stack the odds in my favor regardless of cost. The organizers tend to agree which is why it is not included in the cost of the car. Even then, I'd venture a guess to say no more than a couple of grand to include the helmet and possibly a firesuit.

When you talk about $500 cars, you have to spend some time looking at the details in accounting of it all - what you buy and sell off the car itself, what is average market value of used pieces you have on it, etc. Sure, if you went out and bought all brand new pieces of all the parts on any of those cars, you could easily rack up $5000, but that's not how its done.

For the build of the car we have about $3k into it and the race was also about $3k, so $6k total for the first race, the next ones will be cheaper since we do not have to build the car again. It's cheap racing but cheap racing is still expensive.

As tempting as it was to pop rivet galvanized tin and undercoat the frame rails we opted for a better route, an entire B-Body front end!

Since we were going to recycle pretty much everything from the old 67 Fury Lemons car we brain stormed what was the best way to get the taller C-Body spindle in the car so we could use the 12 inch by 1 1/4 inch rotor with the Viper 4 piston brembo calipers. The entire front end of the car is B-Body, the frame rails, K-Member, all the suspension, shock towers, everything but the spindle. This was not an easy swap, A LOT of stuff had to be modified welded to make this work. The frame rails go all the way back to the torsion bar crossmember and we z'd the front of the rails where the bumper brackets mount so we could keep the stock front bumper and front end. Here is a shot with everything cut out and we are about to put in the B-Body rails.