On this installment of the Dodge days, I continued work on the trunk/gas tank panel. I did what I said I was going to do with regard to adding wood boards to the panel where they are sandwiched between the sheet metal panel and the top of the gas tank in order to act as a pressure point to hold the tank in place in its cradle. I already secured the wood boards with wood screws earlier so this time I had to drill the six holes to secure the whole panel to the trunk floor. After drilling the six holes, one of which was problematic in that I couldn't pinpoint a clean spot through the floor, I secured the panel with the nuts and bolts. After doing so I then went ahead and burned a few tack welds to the nuts underneath to hold them to the underside of the trunk floor so now I can remove the panel and put it back on without needing another hand to hold a wrench on the bolt.
With the trunk pan done the next thing was to work on the transmission lines. I wouldn't say it was a simple thing but for all intents it was. Since I already had the old lines from the BB setup, all I had to do was work with those. What I did do was route the lines away from the exhaust pipe and starter so as to keep them from getting hot during normal operation. The fittings obviously allowed me to connect them to the 998 transmission which has the same ends as the 727 so there wasn't any special adapting necessary. I carefully bent the tubing until I got to the radiator and trimmed the lines so as to allow for the use of a short piece of rubber hose. I did have to source a new fitting and piece of tubing for the radiator side since the fitting and tube that was in one of the radiator ports was twisted and pretty unusable. Even though these lines were originally in place before, the trimming will not affect future use when I put the BB rig back in the car because I had a trans cooler added which had extra line routed to hook the extra cooler coil to the transmission line circuit. At some point I will probably end up installing a three core aluminum radiator which will negate the use for a trans cooler for all intents, especially since I'll be adding a condenser coil in front of the radiator. The little bit of transmission line I trimmed won't affect the lines' use with the 727 tranny. With the transmission lines in place I then went ahead and hooked up the fuel lines to the fuel pump which was already resting on the inner frame rail and to the carburetor that is temporarily bolted down to the intake. The only thing I had to do was take a piece of scrap tubing and carefully bend it to route it from the point where the fuel pump sits over to the area between the alternator and water pump where it would be out of the way. The tube then bends back to run parallel to the valve cover on the right side of the carburetor and lastly bends up over to the nipple on the carburetor. With the way the tubing is situated, I only needed short pieces of rubber hose to couple the lines to the fuel pump and the carburetor. Quick and easy. The latest thing that was weighing in on me was what to do about the power steering hoses. The problem here was that the PS pump is the pump that went with the truck setup that this engine came from. The steering gearbox that went in the truck uses a different hose end than what is in the Charger. The Charger's PS hose end does not fit on this truck PS pump. The only real option is to have a hybrid hose made. I ended up finding a length of metal tubing with the compression fitting end that will fit the Charger steering gearbox, and luckily I still had the length of PS pressure hose that was attached to the truck PS pump. I took the truck PS hose and the end that fits the Charger gearbox and found a local hydraulic hose company that makes custom hoses. The way they did this setup was actually pretty slick. They cut the end off of the truck hose and trimmed down the tube with the gearbox connection and brazed both ends to a universal fitting on both ends. They then made a new hydraulic rubber hose with opposite ends that can screw to the new brazed tips on the ends I provided. They made a three piece hose set that now allows for proper connection between the Charger gearbox and the truck PS pump. Even if the hose breaks in the future all I have to do is go back to that place and have them make a new hose with those same universal ends to mate up to the special ends. Lastly I had to get a length of rubber hose that fits the nipples on the low pressure side of the power steering system. With that everything on the PS system on the car is hooked up and ready to rock and roll. Lastly was the radiator hose. Since I planned on using the original radiator I had in the car I had to do a little something extra. Since the bottom port on the radiator is on the opposite side from where the port on the engine is, I had to make a custom bottom hose. The top port on the engine at the thermostat port is centrally located where it really didn't matter what side the port comes from on the top of the radiator. I was able to take the original radiator hose that was on the top and connect it to the thermostat port on the engine with no problem. For the bottom hose I ended up taking a long hose that was used on the cooling system for a full size truck I worked on in the past and hooked it up to the bottom port on the radiator. I carefully routed it along the bottom of the radiator then trimmed the hose right where the hose would bend up towards the bottom of the engine. I then took a 90 degree hose bend piece and hooked it to the bottom port on the engine then made a coupling to hook the two up. The coupling was made from a 1 1/4" pipe coupling, whose outer diameter matched the inner diameter of the hoses being used. The only thing extra I had to do was grind off the middle lip that runs the length of the coupling to aid in gripping with a pipe wrench. This was pretty easy and with the middle lips gone on the coupling, that left the outer rings on either end to act as flared ends to ensure a tight seal when the hose clamps were clamped down. I did fill the radiator with water to test for leaks, as would be the case when things go easy, it was too good to be true. Leaks did pop up. One leak popped up from a freeze plug on the left cylinder head, which I easily popped out later at least. The last major leak came from the water pump gasket. Now since I never really did anything with the water pump, I figured that I might as well change the water pump when I pull it to replace the gasket. It sure as hell wouldn't make sense not to and would be anticlimactic to fix the leaky gasket only to find out the water pump is shot. There were a few other smaller leaks that were remedied by tightening the hose clamps at the leak points.
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Over the last few days I've been working on the Dodge, trying to do the number of little things I can manage to do with what I had available or with very little expenditure of money. At the very beginning of the episode I still had to put the exhaust manifold gaskets on so I can then continue on with trying to get the exhaust system put together.
Crazy thing though, since this engine is for all intents an old engine, taking off the exhaust manifolds in the beginning did result in a couple of the bolts breaking off in one of the cylinder heads. While not a super critical thing, it is something that will result in exhaust leaks later on down the road. The bolts that broke were the ones on the very ends, front and back. The other four remained intact so I was able to replace them with grade 8 bolts when I put things back together. Same goes for the other side, those bolts were replaced with grade 8 bolts as well. With the manifolds and gaskets back on I then turned my attention to the rest of the exhaust system. This exhaust system was actually made to go on the 69 mustang a long time ago when I had a 351 V8 in the car. After having pulled the engine from that car I ended up using the exhaust system on the Dodge when I was working on the car several years earlier. Since this system is 2.5" pipe all the way through, I would have to use reducer adapters to scale down the pipe to the 2" diameter that the pipes coming from the exhaust manifold are. The pipes I used as flange pipes were actually flanges in a complete Y-pipe setup from the stock vehicle configuration that the engine was used in. I ended up cutting the flange pipes a few inches after the curves so I would have something to work with. I used grade 8 bolts to attach the flanges to the exhaust manifolds as well. Afterwards I welded on the reducers. In order to get the exhaust system attached I had to go ahead and finish hanging the two sides at the hangers that I had in place when I first hung the pipes. After getting the rear hangers secured I then propped up the pipes with jacks under the mufflers and the front sections of pipe so as to get the pipes lined up with the flange pipes so I could cut the lengths of pipe that would couple the flanges with the rest of the exhaust system. Because this wasn't going to be a straight hookup, I had to be able to fit the pipe to mark how much I would have to cut off as well as the angle I would have to cut the pipe to allow me to weld the pipes at both ends while everything was still propped up as it would be when everything was finished. With the pipes welded in place I was able to remove the jacks and other prop ups so as to confirm that the exhaust system would stay as I secured. Everything looked good front and back without being too tacky. Even when I do put the 440 back in the car, since I'm not going back with headers, the flange pipes that will be used on the 440 exhaust manifolds will probably be of the same diameter. Hell I need to see if the flanges on the 318 will match up to the 440 manifolds since a lot of other components were interchangeable between the SB and BB engines. With the exhaust system in place the next thing I turned to was the parking brake cable junction block, or whatever the hell this thing is called. Its the part that holds the two cables that go to the back wheels and couples them with the single cable going to the front to the parking brake pedal. The mount that holds this extra hardware was no longer mounted as the section of frame rail where this piece was attached to was long gone due to rust. In order to fix this I had to grind a bare spot in the new frame section and grind down the mount surface to bare metal to give me a good surface to weld on. With that I was able to weld the mount in place and secure the parking brake cables where needed with zip ties to keep off of the exhaust pipes as well as to just secure the cables so they were no longer hanging from under the vehicle precariously. With that little side task completed I then turned my attention to the shifter cable.
The shifter cable is already in place but still needed to be hooked up to the "new" transmission. Since this is an aftermarket shifter, it came with different mounts/brackets to secure the cable to the transmission shifter levers on the normal transmissions that were used in the big three domestic car brands back then. Anyway, in order to mount the bracket, which was the Dodge/Chrysler bracket, I had to take two of the transmission oil pan bolts off on the side where the shifter lever is at then use a couple of nuts as spacers between the bracket and the bottom of the oil pan. Since the oil pan has a lip going around the thing, I couldn't flush mount the shifter cable bracket to the transmission. With the spacers in place and a couple of longer bolts used, I had the bracket mounted in place. The next thing was to take the lever off of the 727 transmission and swap it over to the 998 tranny that's currently in the car. Since this stuff is pretty interchangeable, the swap went effortlessly. I also had to put the TV (throttle valve) lever back after swapping out the shifter lever. With the aftermarket lever in place I was able to hook up the cable end to the lever so we can have shifting action with the setup.
On a side note regarding the TV lever. Since the linkage that hooks up to said lever is needed I will have to make this a priority to get hooked up before ever putting the car on the road otherwise the transmission will never shift. Luckily I have the TV linkage from the original TBI setup that this engine/transmission combo came from. Since the carb end of the linkage was actually geared for the TBI unit that was on the engine, I will have to fabricate a new end to securely hook up to the throttle on the carburetor so when the throttle is depressed it will activate the TV lever properly to ensure proper shifting of the transmission. With that out of the way, now we move on to the trunk! The trunk is interesting in the way I redid it due to the fact that I "mustanged" it, made it where the fuel tank mounts in the trunk like a vintage mustang, where it comes out of the trunk and makes up a large portion of the trunk floor, compared to the original way where it is secured under the trunk floor via straps. Since all of this shit rusted away years ago I remade everything using scrap metal and just decided to simulate the mustang style trunk so as to make it easier if I ever had to replace the fuel tank or otherwise do anything that required me to remove the fuel tank (such as welding shit in the back). As a result the fuel tank isn't secured since the Dodge fuel tank doesn't have bolt holes to hold it in place in the opening in the trunk floor, like the mustang fuel tank does. As a result, I have to come up with some sort of way to secure the fuel tank and make it somewhat sealed in the trunk since we don't need water coming into the trunk. My solution for this was to first take a couple of lengths of 3/8" rubber hose I had laying in a pile of "scrap" hose. This was probably some emission hose or something relatively lightweight, not really intended for fuel or hot water. It's just fine for what I was about to do with it. I took the hose lengths and slit them all the way down, allowing them to open up along their lengths. This was to slide the hose over the side edges of the fuel tank seams. This was done to insulate the seam of the fuel tank from vibrations that may cause damage to occur to the tank. My plan to get the fuel tank fully secured will involve making a false floor. I do have to look at the wood that I have around the shop but my initial plan was to go to the scrap pile, cut a piece of sheet metal from one of the old appliance skins I have on the scrap pile. Cut a piece that will fully cover the fuel tank opening with some good overlap. Afterward I would cut a piece of 3/4" plywood and glue it to the bottom of the piece of sheet metal. Reason for the 3/4" ply was because the spacing between the top of the fuel tank and the top of the trunk surface appeared to be approximately 3/4" or so. More on this in a second. With the sheel metal and wood cut I would then glue and use small sheet metal screws to secure the plywood to the sheet metal piece. Lastly I will cut and glue a piece of rubberized PVC sheet over the plywood so when its resting on the top of the fuel tank it'll provide a solid insulated surface where the fuel tank won't bounce around while car is being driven. When the whole piece is placed over the fuel tank it will fit nicely and meet up with the top of the tank. The last thing I will do is drill three holes on either side of the sheet metal piece, through the sheet metal and the trunk floor. I'll then take some nuts and bolts and in no lesser terms secure the sheet metal/wood false floor to the trunk floor using the nut/bolt combos. While this might appear odd, its not. Its because with the nut secured in place using the bolts exactly how I will want them to be, I can then burn a weld onto the nuts to hold them to the bottom of the trunk floor, which will then allow me to remove the bolts, leaving the nuts in place. The trunk floor will be removable while still holding the fuel tank down. Hopefully when trials are put on the car this little system won't mess up and the tank will stay where it belongs and not make a sound.
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May 2023
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