Love the Conan style music in that commercial! hah

Nice !! . . . After I had gotten my 76 RR, I also ended up getting a 76 RR (minus the flares, but had the decals) that was spec'd out same as your car. My buddy ended up with that . . . we took both cars to Mopars at the strip one year, both got 22mpg all day long ! LOL . . .

Here’s a similar one though a Dodge, even has T Tops!
https://www.oswegoautosales.com/details/used-1978-dodge-aspen/80886411
Not that far out of my way if anyone wants me to check it out.

Sure go check it out at near 16k, 145k miles on a repaint and pigged up a bit..... was a much better car before the flip at 4k. Yep, yall in the loop.

yah thats what i have seen on other posts , you think some one would take a shot at 3D printing some

I've had a few F, M & J's over the years. Not a B body but were good cars.

Yes, end caps are horrible, but workable.

I would love to find a nice survivor for a good price, I'd even be happy with a 4 door or wagon...

I've picked up several F bodies over the years from a few hundred to a few thousand. They used to be a very budget friendly way to get into the Mopar hobby and used to be easy to find nearly anywhere. They respond well to all the traditional small block mods. My last one was an '80 with a '78 front clip. Ran low 12s in Denver.

Unfortunately, prices on these have gone up too and any one you can find that is decently good shape is $10k+ I've seen some Super Coupes and Kit Cars in $20k asking range.

Never paid to much attention to J and M market. Not sure how it looks these days, but I'm sure they are spendy, when you can find them.

As far as M's go just depends on which ones. You can still find some real nice Fifth Ave's since they were mostly owned by older responsible people and cared for. Finding a decent AHB is a different story and when you do they have definitely gone up in price due to availability.

I've had quite a few F, M, & J body cars in my past. They didn't survive around here very well. The rust killed the front fenders and lower rear quarters. The interior head lining fell down after a couple of winter/summer cycles, and the end caps around the taillights self destructed after a few years. Many Mopars guys would overlook stuff like that, but the general public wasn't so forgiving. The value of them as a used car dropped like a rock long before the cars were 10 years old. Once the public lost interest, repairing them for anything more then as a cheap beater, sent many to junk yards for pretty simple parts breakage. Even to try to part them out was a pretty sorry adventure. The hard parts that remained good were not desirable for the hard core Mopar guys (no one wanted a 318, 904 lock up trans, or a 8 1/4 with 2:94, 2:76, or worse yet a 2:45 rear gear), and the bodies with screwed up or missing trim pieces made made of unabtainium made them pretty undesirable for guys that might fix up old cars as car shows.
Pretty much everything that was needed for a car to survive as a survivor, didn't last long enough to get them through the amount of time needed for them to be around long enough for the aftermarket to pick up on the the parts that were needed.

It really is too bad. They were pretty good cars during that time period, which really isn't saying much, only a very few select car models have made it though that time frame.

"It ran much better". You couldn't undersell that point any more if you tried, LOL.

FMJs have two problems: they've been overlooked forever and there is near-zero aftermarket support. You need to be very skilled, very patient, and very committed to the task. I've owned six M-bodies (including the above-mentioned car) and two J-bodies (Mirada and Imperial) and they are a great platform for a build that just doesn't have the aftermarket backing of other platforms. My late-B Charger has more options.

I have a 79 Diplomat coupe I am working on. Need a trunk lid for it if anyone knows of one out there. They are cool looking under appreciated cars in my opinion especially the 77-79 coupes with the swept quarters and boat tail deck lid. I might be biased though as the one I am working on was my first car in 1988.

On the plus side being overlooked is what kept prices affordable for so long with them. The other plus is that unlike other makes that varied things by body style and generation at least the mechanical side of mopars never changed much so there are countless things you can do drivetrain wise. But for everything else time is taking a toll and anything body related can be tough especially in the northern rust areas.

F,M,and J's not created equal. I know the some of those had much worse bumper issues than later M bodies for example. The bumper fills got better too as did end fills. Same on R Bodies. They had some quality issues that were much better on M's. The '88 and '89 M's at the end of their run were pretty darn good. Still 80's cars and there weren't any big three that were much better. M's got more galvanized steel in '85 and pretty darn durable. Only thing missing was EFI and there was plenty of problems with that and many preferred carbs.

I have a '80 Mirada that I bought back in 2001 that I swapped a 360 and and 8 3/4 into .I ran it with an a 727 for years but finally got the 4 speed installed in 2017 or so.

The problem with the M body was the simple fact they were 4 door cars. These days, its much easier to convince a young driver that a 4 door car could ever be a performance car. Back then, 4 door cars were grandpa & grandma cars, real performance cars HAD to be 2 door cars. A 4 door could be a "sleeper" which was fun for a while, but not something you wanted to keep, and certainly not something you enter car shows with.
I bought my son a very nice 87 5th Ave for his 1st car, around 1998. It had a few tweaks and could run pretty hard, but he hated that car, even though it was a great car. His friends made fun of him for driving grandpa's car (even though nothing any of them had could run with it even while it was hauling 4 big guys).

At the time, all of the 2 door F & J Mopar car line up had poor trim pieces, huge overstuffed sofa style seats, and nothing performance rated. Both the 318 and the 360 were pretty wimpy power plants in factory trim, and poor rear gear choices and lock up transmissions that were locking up at 25 mph sure didn't help. The closest thing to a performance car was the B body Charger, if it had a big block. Sadly the big block wasn't on the option list for either an F or a J body car, that probably would have changed everything.
A couple pictures.
pic 1 My F body dirt track car. in this pic, the car was 3 weeks old, and junk. This was the good side! A guy came up along in left side and caught the front bumper as he was going past me. Him just catching the front bumper caused the driver side front frame rail to pull 4" away from the transmission crossmember. That was the time I decided I wasn't cut out to be a race car driver. The 1st week out I blew up the 318 (strictly stock class), the 2nd week it got squished between two big boats, then the 3rd week the chassis pulled apart. As for my cloths, I'd just got off work from my factory maintenance at a forge shop, my cloths pretty much looked like this at the end of every day. The time frame would have been around 1983. That 76 Road Runner was already a bad rust bucket, the guy gave it to me to race.
pic 2, My other toy at the time. This pic was probably taken at the 82 Mopar Nationals.

M bodies were available as 2 doors thru 81.

this was my build, sold 3 years back or so. I loved the build and the result, love the looks of the car that's why i built it. But I just didn't like driving the car. Seat position overall just didn't fit my style, I am really a pre 70 B Body guy. or older hot rod. i cant put my finger on what it was. anyway

I remember following your build . . . great result !!! . . . funny how the "driving" part of it, makes all the difference. I totally loved my 74 Duster360 - restored it in 84 and drove it for over 100k miles !!! . . . In that time, also had my 1970 - 300Hurst cars, the F body, M body, . . .gotta say, even though the F & M were only 318 cars, they were GREAT drivers for me ! . . .

The truth is almost every single time I drive my four door M body (89 AHB) I get a comment, thumbs up or something, and it's almost always from someone in teens or early twenties!!!! It's the strangest thing but it's the truth. Totally not what I would expect but this has been the case the last five years or so! And no, I they are not being facetious, lol I can tell the difference.