Few weeks ago, I spent Saturday the morning getting all the fluids put in the car & the battery charged up to get ready to fire it up & break in the cam.





Got the cam broke in but had a bad oil leak which turned out to be me putting the rear main seal in backwards just on the cap 1/2.

Pulled it back out to address the rear main seal, didn't think the 1st oil change would be done in this fashion.

Really glad I went with the fenderwell headers. The ability to get them out of the way easily when pulling the motor really makes accessing to the bell housing bolts a breeze & allows easy access to the starter.

Drove the car for the first time, about a mile, around the section to the back side of our land to stick it in the shop last night so I could put the Challenger in the garage before the hail storm.

Drives good & nothing unexpected happened but it was just a mile.

https://youtu.be/QPvqXyXF378

Pulled the axles & third member out to see what was in there. I knew it had the better of the 8 3/4" third member, the 742 case which from Mopar comes with a clutch type sure grip unit but could have been a peg leg & someone added a sure grip. Lukily it turned out to be the stock 742 clutch type & it looks all fresh & rebuilt & I checked it with a dial indicator & it's good. I did the initial count of the tire rev vs driveline revs & thought it was 4.10:1 & that's exactly what it turned out to be.



Put the rear end back together & it's ready to go. The thing is super clean underneath, not sure what they painted it with but it's a glossy black from below the firewall back to the rear valance.

Its running but now it's got a slight water leak which I followed up to be a cracked block



I'll be pulling the motor at later, I put straight water in for now & it's just barely got a drip. The machine shop I used does the stitching technique for repairs like that & I'll be doing that to it.

This is the style repair I'll have done.

http://r-f.com/lock_n_stitch_repair.asp

Amazing what just polishing on the painted black parts of the interior can do. When wiping the dust/dirt off, it seems it is not going to shine up but with some aggressive polishing it just comes back to life.





The finned hood trim was gone & with everything else I had to buy I decided to go cheap on these so I bought some $25 pitted up swap meet ones. Figured I could paint them black & hit the high spots & around the edges with thinner & it may hide the pits. It worked out to look pretty good for cheap. Now to polish out the hood.



Since the car was backed in for rear ended work I finally got around to polishing out the decklid, roof, pass quarter/door. Found & got the bottom decklid trim on finally too. Chomping at the bit for the seats so I can really drive it.



Quite a change from when it rolled off the trailer.

Too bad the new a-arm bushings that were already in the car are standard bushings. I need the offset bushings to try & get positive caster & with me having the higher front end ride height I need all the offset I can get.

The thing does have all new frontend parts in guessing from the when they reshot the under undercarriage.

Love it, looks like a fun ride when done. Great Daily Driver.

Took some time but I got the seats back & he did an awesome job. No wrinkles & the material/pattern matches the originals I dropped off perfectly. Had to figure out how the rear fold down seat went together. I didn't disassemble it & its kind of an odd setup.

Thrashed on the car this past Friday night to get the front end back together & pulled the trans mount off due to a little leak from behind the mount & various other small issues. Ran over early Sat morning to get the seats I posted above, bolted the front seats up & got it road worthy just in time to get to the muffler shop 20 miles away just before thier cut-off time.

Exhaust is ran for now & sounds good. Kind of a quick & dirty / cheap way to mount it. I really like how it turned out & I was able to use the front seat bolt on the front side & slipped a bolt thru an existing hole on the torque box for mounting after the muffler.

Eventually I will run it from the backside, hidden on the collector just upstream of the collector flange. Run it inside & all the way out the back as a normal set-up. I'll run some butterfly electric dumps & you won't see any of it but the 1" thick butterfly dump.

Took the Barracuda out & about around town this past Saturday just tinkering with the timing, trans shift points & carb. It's running really good, pulls good and all. But after checking out stuff tonight it seems my crack has grown. I'm going to take my other 383 I have up to the machine shop Monday & just have him prep it & I will just swap all my stuff out & into it.



Little dirt road to the shop.


I cleaned the old crack with brake kleen 2 weeks ago to get all the blue engine paint off then since it pretty much is non-visible as bare metal I used a white paint pen to outline it. Seems the whole side of the block was weak from a water freeze at some point in the past. Glad I decided to drive it a little before pulling it & getting it repaired.