Well, it was time to learn something about cars. I picked up a few mopar magazines, a Chiltons 65-72 Barracuda Challenger book, bought a battery, starter relay, and someone gave me an old test light. I cleaned the car up, looked over what I had, and studied the wiring diagram. Starting at the battery, I went over every wire in the car. That took a lot of long nights and some electrical tape. In the end, I cut off a lot of extra wires that had been added on for who knows what, spliced on a new tail light socket, reconnected the horn relay, jumped across the fried ammeter, shorted the neutral safety pole of the starter relay to ground so that the engine would turn over, and connected the green wire on the electronic ignition as shown in the Chiltons wiring diagram.

I got a new air filter, put some gas in the car, and changed the oil. I found some of those old cardboard oil cans with the metal top and bottom. Different brands, and maybe viscosities, but I used them anyway cause that's what I had. (wish I would've sold them as collectibles now, but oh well.)

Well, I needed and got a new starter, and replaced the neutral safety switch so that I could hook up the starter relay correctly. The neutral safety wiring plug was fried, so I spliced one on from a Plymouth minivan in a junkyard. The guy at the parts counter will tell you it won't interchange because the wires are different colored, but I tried and it fits & functions fine. Now I could get the car to turn over, but it just wouldn't start. I put in a new distributor, cap, rotor, and plugs, but no difference. I fiddled with the dual vs. single ballast resistor quite a bit, and replaced the ECU, no difference. Thoroughly discouraged, it was after 10:00 at night when I got through to year one tech support. The guy there told me to cut the green wire to the ECU and tape it out of the way. I still don't quite understand why you'd have to do something different from what the wiring diagram says, or how he knew what my problem was, but it worked. Finally the car was running.

After a few days looking over the car, checking the trans fluid, tire air, etc., I took it over to the neighbors house about a mile up the road, and up to the local corner store. The key got stuck in the ignition. You could start the car and turn it off, but the key wouldn't come out of the switch. The next night I took the steering column apart to see what was going on. When I got it apart I saw that the spring on the steering column lock was out of place. I put it back together properly and tried it out a few times. When everything looked OK, I put the column back together. It worked for a couple days, then the key got stuck in the switch again. Next I took the column apart again and saw that the spring had come off the steering wheel lock again. Fed up with taking the column apart, I removed the steering wheel lock, bagged and tagged it, and put the column back together. Luckily I didn't have the problem again after that. It wasn't until a couple years later that I learned the problem was actually caused by the missing 70 only column lockout linkage. My problem had nothing to do with the steering wheel lock, that was just coincidence.

Keep in mind that all my car work was done late at night after dark parked in the grass with a trouble light in one hand.

At work we were clearing the property line to build a fence and had piled a lot of brush up to light on fire. The brush pile was behind a building, but a good distance from the building. We started the fire, and it wasn't too long before two firetrucks showed up. A neighbor had seen the smoke above the building and called in that the building was on fire. (The neighbor didn't bother to come tell us about the fire, or they would have seen us standing around it.) So the fireman came back next to the fire with us and helped me push the Challenger out from behind the shed where I kept it so that it would be a little further from the fire. The firemen liked old cars, so we talked cars for a while, then we talked hunting dogs, then they told us that next time we have a fire make sure we're drinking beer. That would make the fire recreational and then they wouldn't be able to fine us or anything like that. They let us off with a warning this time. Good thing, I wasn't old enough to drink beer yet.

The next morning, there was a female peacock in the tree above my car. Someone tried to take a picture of it, but you can't really see her because she's brown, so they gave the picture to me. Here it is. This is the first picture I have of my first car. You can see the charred ground over behind the shed. The car doesn't look to shabby from this far away, but up close it looked like someone washed it with a wire brush.

Tav