1965 Dodge Coronet 500

I've had this car for a long time. It was a street racer back in the 70's and then a daily driver during the 80's. It sat in my shop for most of the past 20 years. I'm now starting to work on it a bit and hope to have it back on the streets this summer.

I'm spending a little bit of time in the interior cleaning things up. One mistake I made over the past 20 years was ignoring the chrome. I should have polished the chrome once every few years but I didn't and now most of it has small rust pits. So I think I'll need to pull the chrome and have it redone.

nice! the '65s have great lines.

One of my favorite cars on Moparts!

I weighed the car today and found out that it is heavier than I thought. Good news is the weight distribution is pretty good. 51% up front and 49% in the rear. The gas tank is almost empty so if I filled up the tank the car would have a 50/50 weight distribution front to rear. The bad news is that the car is almost 3800 lbs with nobody in it. If I filled up the gas tank the car would weigh over 3800 lbs.

Great build. One of my all time favorite body styles. I love 65 Coronets. Looking forward to following this one.

Isn't gasoline about 6 lbs/gallon? I'd imagine with an extra 12 gallons, it would weigh almost 75 lbs more.

Still cool you'd be able to achieve almost 50/50. How did you do it? Fiberglass body panels?

Curb weight...

Thirty-four hunert OEM...

No fiberglass, the body is all steel. The 50/50 weight is due to having the battery in the trunk as well as having a fairly lightweight engine. Aluminum heads, aluminum intake, aluminum carb, mini starter, aluminum water pump housing, aluminum radiator, etc.

I've driven it a few times and worked on a few bugs. I think I made a mistake by putting an aluminum flywheel in it. The car works great once it is over 2000 rpm but it really doesn't like driving slow. Even with the steep first gear ratio it will start lugging at low speeds. Some of that could be the carb since I have a 1050 on there at the moment. I'll see how much of that lugging problem is solved with the EFI. If that doesn't solve it then I'll have to pull the engine and swap flywheels.

Pulled out the original '69 Dana 60 and now I'm working on installing the new S60. The new rear end has 3.23 gears, helical diff, 35 spline axles, billet pinion yoke and a Doctor Diff rear disc setup.

Also got the Coronet over to the chassis dyno recently. Ran great with the new Holley Sniper setup and it made 485 rwhp. Sounded good and pulled hard.
https://youtu.be/xG3-_YJGdZ8

Cool video, and even cooler car.

Cheers!

The old Coronet got a little ink in Hot Rod recently: https://www.hotrod.com/articles/holley-hyperspark-install-tune/

Picked up a steel hood scoop for the car so this will be one of the winter time projects. I'm still thinking about how to go about mounting it.

Cool project, Andy. I love the '65's. I thought they were a little lighter, as well.

I pulled the 512 inch low deck out and am in the process of building a 426W for the car. I have an original 426W block but I'll use Trick Flow heads and a 4.250 stroke crank to pump it up a bit. Should make 550+ hp.

I've had factory HP manifolds on the car for the past 20 years but I've decided to use headers with the new 426W engine. I bought a set of Schumacher try-y headers but of course they don't fit with the Lakewood bellhousing.

Where is this project currently?

I was thinking the same thing !

The car has been sitting in the corner of the shop for a bit but I'm just about ready to start working on it again. I finished up the Duster project and sold it so now I can rotate back to the Coronet.

After not working on the Coronet for a long time a buddy and I started to put it back together. He has some excellent fab skills so he was able to build the motor mounts that I needed in just a few hours of time. The car has sat for a couple of years since I couldn't ever find the time to fab the motor mounts myself. Once the new mounts were built we were able to start putting other things back together. I'm going with a low mount 90 amp alternator this time as well as the Corvette power steering pump so those two items need to be sorted out. I have it all mocked up and just need a few misc parts to finish off the front drive assembly. At this pace we might be able to fire it up in the next week or two.

My Sniper was dead after sitting for two years without any battery power. Evidently the internal memory inside the Sniper goes blank after a long time without power? I had the backup file on my laptop so I just reloaded it and now it is working again. I needed a custom fitting for the pressure side of the PS system. I took a #6AN adapter and the existing tube over to the local chassis builder and he did a quick modification on the lathe and then tig welded the AN fitting onto the end of the tubing and that gave me what I needed. So we were able to hook up the PS and bleed it. I don't have the engine running yet so we spun the PS pump with an electric drill while turning the steering wheel back and forth. That seemed to burp all of the air out of the system so now I think it is ready for a test drive.

I've had the Coronet out and driving for most of the summer. Had a few little leaks to deal with but no big issue. Had to build a new fuel line since one of the AN fittings kept drooling but that was just a 20 minute task. I took the car in for an alignment and the tech said that he couldn't get the toe adjusted properly because the billet tie rod adjusters from Firm Feel were too long. I ended up ordering a set of billet adjusters from PST and they fit just right. So it went back to the alignment shop for a final adjustment.

The Holley Sniper is running really well. I keep watch on it with a matching Digital Dash from Holley. I can download the program to my laptop and view the history so I can see how the tune is running. The PS system seems to be working really well. Some people complain about noise from these Borgenson boxes but so far I haven't noticed any issues.

I had never heard of that. Glad it's running well now.

Looks like I have a couple of things to work on this winter. The passenger side rear wheel gets hot when I drive the car so I'm thinking the brake caliper on that side is sticking a little bit. I can push the car by hand in the shop so the caliper isn't locked up, but the rotor and the wheel get hot when driving. So something isn't working right.

I also have some sort of electrical issue when starting the engine. The battery voltage dips down into the 7 volt range when I turn the key to start. After a couple of seconds the voltage goes back up to 9 or 10 and then the engine starts to crank. I've check my wiring a couple of times and didn't see an issue so I'm going to crawl under the car and change the starter.

Got the caliper changed and made some wiring upgrades. I also had the dash redone by Red Line Gauge Works. They rebuilt everything and switched the ammeter over to a voltmeter. The clock works now for the first time in 40 years so that is cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64DrLMCLULA

Sounds healthy!

The dash looks great.

I know I'm not the only one who would be interested to hear more of the back story on this vehicle, when did you get it, how things started out and
evolved.

Vaguely recall pictures of it sitting in the background at the beginning of the magazine article journey, the articles weren't specifically about the car
but it was always there somewhere. Pre-shop days.

Maybe it's too much to ask and too much work, but from where I sit....having been acquainted with ya on all these goofy bulletin board platforms since 1991 or whenever it all started, it'd just be cool to see a summary of the changes over time.

i've always loved the coronet Andy, sounds nice and looks great as well. i'm glad it doesn't have pristine shiny paint on it. watched the video and i saw the green steering wheel. i love it even more now!!

That's what might have happened on my friend's incoming project. It has been sitting for about 9 months now without a battery and the Holley sniper seems dead. We'll take a closer look this week after we finish installing the tonneau cover, headache racks, and bumpers on the truck and clear the garage. I Hope PO has a backup file.