Been a while

So the automotive front has changed a bit around here, cars and truck have come and gone and the whole flavor of the place is different. The S10 is still around, the Chevy was C4C'd to by my lovely new bride a Forester, and even the project cars have ebbed and flowed a bit the past year.

The location for my auto adventures has changed as well, now no longer in the south I have to deal with weather and such in MN. Trade-off was well worth it, though, no matter how cold it gets: Coming home to my lovely wife is always better than any old car project.

The one downfall to the move is a scaling back of the shop facilities. No longer is the a 6-car garage with 220 and air tools, now everything has to be done in a 2-car garage. I'm not sure which is more difficult, not ever having the wild assortment of tools available to you or having them but not having the room to set them up?

Why is this scaling down important, anyway? It's forced me (with some prodding from aforementioned lovely wife) to focus on one project at a time. Naturally my automotive ADD clashes with this rigid approach to getting something actually done, but I know I'll be the better for it. Not that it's totally stopped me from trying to do more than one thing at a time, but there simply isn't room for more than a couple.

So, what's first up? Let's just say it's mighty cute in baby blue.....

So, the '85 Dodge crew cab used to move me back to SD after the Navy, the one involved in the deer accident at 70mph on the Ohio turnpike while pulling a 35' trailer, is finally getting rehabilitated this month.

Being an '85, the biggest engine Dodge had available to them was the mighty 360 V-8, not a bad motor for a 1/2 ton pickup but woefully inadequate for a crew-cab dually 1-ton. When I made the first trip to SD in it it was also obvious that the particular 360 in the truck was well past it's prime, so it was swapped out with one my father had just removed from one of his trucks and it made the next two trips on that motor. Shortly after the last trip the engine was sold off, and the truck has been sitting sans engine for the last few years.

The obviously easy answer would have been to install the rebuilt 440 I had from my previous '85 Dodge crew-cab and just run it. That probably would have happened if I had not run across the truck I always wanted to have, a 1970 Dodge crew-cab Camper Special, already equipped with a big-block 383. So the 440 has been working it's way into the '70, and the '85 continued to languish.

Then I located a motor claimed to be low mileage that seemed a perfect fit for the truck, a 413 Dodge industrial motor form a mobile home. This motor was dropped into the '85 only to slap me in the face with exhaust manifolds too wide to clear the frame. Since the industrial motors have a unique set of heads exclusive to them, and the manifold bolt pattern is different, regular manifolds couldn't be swapped on without swapping out everything above the short block.

So it sat for over a year with the motor sitting in place and not hooked up until early this month. Since the layout in the '70 is completely different with the solid front axle as opposed to the '85's IFS, the frame on that truck will accommodate the wider manifolds of the industrial motor. Sure the heads aren't the best possible ones for flow, but they are better then the '64 413 wedge ones that were on the 440, so it shouldn't effect performance on that motor too much, except for maybe lowering the compression ratio just a bit, which would be a good thing. (The pistons in the 440 motor were set-up for 9.75:1 or so, which was just a bit too much during long pulls when warmed up on bad gas.) The regular big block heads would then be installed on the 413, raising it's compression just a bit from the 7.5:1 or so it has, and both trucks should be heading down the highway under their own power next week.

The first part of the change is already done, the 413 heads have been installed on the 440 and everything hooked up. Ran into a snag with the oil pan sump needing to be in the front to clear the exhaust y-pipe, and the sump pickup being a bit long with the adapter fitting the machine shop installed in the block. The new pick-up is shortened and rethreaded, though, so the oil pan is on and the manifolds are hooked up, so we're a couple of belts and a lower rad hose away from the motor firing up. The regular heads needed new exhaust valves and some hardened seats installed, but they are back from the machine shop and look great, so that will be going together next weekend.

So, anyone need a newly big-block equipped '85 Dodge?

Back to roots

So, the '59 Rekord has come and gone. Turns out a good friend of mine in Ohio wanted it as a project as well, and I suspect she would be better at following through with it than I would. So we have now traded projects, Rekord in exchange for a 1970 Opel Kadett wagon, and in the broze color I remember so well at that.

You see, my first longterm car was a bronze Opel Kadett wagon. I drove it around for parts of the last couple of years of High School and up through college until I joined the Navy. That car and I had some epic stories together, ranging from the frozen Wisconsin trip off to college to the trip with no brakes through KS, OK, and TX.

This one is off to the same sort of start, actually, and while it's a little scary it sort of seems to fit. See, on the way back from Ohio with the car I was stopped just shy of the border by Ohio's finest. Some line about a tip that "there was going to be a white truck pulling a junky car full of drugs" and next thing I know there's a K-9 unit circling the truck. No worries, I've never done any drugs and I'm sure my friend hasn't, so there shouldn't be anything to find.

That is until the dog goes nuts over the boxes of parts that came with the car in the back of the truck.

Next thing I know I'm being patted down and standing in the falling snow next to the truck while the police cars are piling up behind the truck and officers are thoroughly combing through every box. What a way to start a new relationship, right?

Luckily nothing was found, and I was sent on my way, but there were a couple of moments there wher I wondered how I was going to explain the situation at work. Not that it would really surprise anyone, I don't think, it would just get filed away as another one of those car stories....

New Toy

So, I just bought me a new toy. It's a 1959 Opel Rekord Olympia. Here it is in the driveway:





Cool dash with a bar-graph speedometer.



Seats even look pretty good, and are as comfortable as a couch.

Trying out some video, or Riding the Stupid Tube

Let's see if some video works.

Me on the Manta Ray "stupid tube," a flying inner tube.

More random pictures

Just some fun pics, to move them off my computer.

My Mini Cooper, with my Friendship 2 Sidecar on top.

The same Friendship 2 Sidecar pretending to be mounted to my Katana:


My old Opel GT:

Random Car Pics (all mine)

Some decently high resolution pics of some of the fun car projects I'll be working on eventually:

1948 American Lafrance 700-series pumper truck. This is going to be my tow truck for taking cars to and from shows, some day.


1970 Opel Kadett 1.1L sedan. No idea what I'm going to do with this one, though not ruling out jacking it 18" in the air on a pair of Suzuki Samurai axles.


1975 Opel 1900 (Ascona) Sportwagon. This one's getting a Manta nose and probably panel sides, still on the fence about the drivetrain.

The Mopar connection

While I was burning through imported cars faster than shoes in High School the one constant around the farm was an old Dodge truck. Seldom the same Dodge truck, as my dad was going through them faster even than I was with cars, but there was always at least one truck around to do those farm things that need to be done. As a general rule Dad stuck to the '61-'71 Sweptline vintage of trucks, but once in a while we would move up to one of the '72-'82 body-style for a while.

We ran the gambit with these trucks: long and short bed, standard, club, and crew cabs, step-sides or not, the entire line of engines and transmissions. Dad tended to gravitate to short-box, step-side trucks whereas I tended to prefer long beds myself. Almost universally the trucks belonged to my Dad, but there were a couple that he never drove that were for the most part "my" trucks. This was way back before the Cummins motors were put in Dodge trucks too, back when the 360 was the biggest motor they had available after the government bailout, back when it was not even a tiny bit cool to be driving a Dodge.

The history with the Dodge trucks goes way back, well before I got my own first car. At 11 Dad and I towed home one particular '60's short box truck with some weird modifications. Seems the previous owner had swapped in a Dart rear axle for the taller, more highway oriented gearing, but it was really too narrow for the truck. Besides looking a bit funny, wheels all tucked in and such, the tires would rub the inner edges of the fender wells if you put any sort of load in the back. Looking back the axle must have been a Chrysler 8 3/4, which would have been a pretty hard to come by axle for a Dart, worth some $ now, but then all I knew was that it didn't work right in the truck and that Dad wanted to swap the truck axle back lamented losing the gear ratio from the Dart axle which he actually preferred.

At the time Dad was working an evening shift, 3-11:30 pm or so, and I hardly ever saw him while in school. The truck he was actually driving at the time was a '69 Crew-cab Camper Special with a short box, one that I had helped him swap motors on years before and which I currently now own the cab from some 20 years later. At the time it was not particularly reliable, though I forget the specifics. After one weekend of wrenching on the driver truck just to keep it going, listening to Dad bemoan how he wished the other truck was running, I decided it was time to do something about it.

I proceeded to remove the Dart axle from underneath the back of that truck. Turns out the truck axle I was putting back in was also a Chrysler 8 3/4, but everyone had told Dad that the trucks used coarse and the Darts used fine splines on the axles so the differentials couldn't be swapped. (It might have been the other way around, it was well over 20 years ago after-all.) Once they were both out, though, it's a pretty simple matter to swap spider gears, and with a manual around I was able to check clearances and bolt it all back together just the way Dad wished it had been done. It went back together and to the best of my knowledge the rear end was never an issue again with that truck.

That was one of the very first major operations I did on an automobile by myself. Since then I've swapped out scores of axles, more motors and transmissions than I could begin to count, and done pretty much everything that can be done to a car. It was that differential, that Mopar differential, that started the snowball rolling though. I still have a soft spot for the old Dodges, and have my own Crew-cab Camper Special, but at least now they're sort of cool.


(My father still owns this truck, in 1994 I drove it from SD to Houston, TX towing a trailer to fetch a car and had not a single bit of trouble. It doesn't look like much, but I could hop in it tomorrow and drive it anywhere.)