On episode 40 of Roadkill
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MotorTranscript
00:00 This time on Roadkill, the soul of the General Mayhem gets a new lease on life.
00:05 That was awesome.
00:11 That was awesome.
00:13 [Music]
00:34 Before we get into this episode of Roadkill, cast your mind back to when we built the General Mayhem,
00:40 our '68 Charger that we stuffed with a 440 out of a motorhome.
00:44 Now I'll reveal right now that, courtesy of our sponsorship of Dodge,
00:48 yup, the General Mayhem is now going to get repowered with a 707-horsepower Hellcat Hemi.
00:55 And that leaves me with a spare 440 and 727 sitting around,
00:59 because, yup, we yanked this thing out of the Charger,
01:02 but now we're going to load it into the bed of my buddy's truck
01:05 and head up around Bakersfield, California and give this 440 new life for the third time.
01:11 [Music]
01:17 We're here north of Bakersfield, California at my friend Steve Dulcich's farm.
01:21 You can see over there he makes grapes happen, and he turns grapes into raisins.
01:25 But he's also a big-time Mopar guy. He's also the editor of Engine Masters magazine,
01:29 and I've known him for a long, long time.
01:31 We've traded a bunch of cars around here and there, and we finally settled on this one 1970 Plymouth Duster
01:36 that's going to be mine, and we're going to take the engine and transmission out of the General Mayhem
01:40 and plop it into that Duster and drive away probably in a day or two.
01:44 Man, the Plymouth Duster is like my go-to muscle car.
01:48 I learned how to drive a stick in one of these things back in the '80s,
01:51 and since then I've owned eight of them, including this one.
01:55 This model is a 1970, the first year of the Plymouth Valiant Duster.
01:59 This one's a six-cylinder car.
02:01 You know, I've had better Dusters, I've had worse,
02:04 but I haven't had a whole lot that actually run and drive, and that's what I've got to do here.
02:08 The problem is this car has been sitting here on the farm for at least five years.
02:13 I haven't even seen it in that long, and Finnegan has never seen it.
02:17 There it is. Is it everything you remember?
02:20 It's a little worse than I remembered, actually.
02:22 Yeah, I don't think so.
02:23 A little more surface rust.
02:24 It's got windows, though. That's huge for us.
02:27 This is good. Oh, it's got rat action, too.
02:30 Look, the rats have been pulling out the stuffing.
02:32 Well, that's the headliner.
02:33 Look at the door panels. Don't concentrate on the negative.
02:36 This thing's-- the bench seat's in perfect condition.
02:39 I hope you got a shop vac. Jesus.
02:42 Look at all the mold. That's moss!
02:44 That's a difference.
02:45 Talk about-- yeah.
02:46 That's gross.
02:47 Moss. It's natural. Come on, man.
02:50 If we didn't arrive here soon, this car was going to return to the earth.
02:53 I think this thing's pretty good, actually.
02:55 It's straight.
02:57 It's as straight as a die. I mean, this thing runs like a top.
03:00 Well, it did, if it had a motor, maybe.
03:02 Oh, did you dent this?
03:04 I don't-- I don't know. I think you did.
03:07 I don't remember that.
03:08 Can you fix that for me while we're here?
03:09 Yeah.
03:10 Because that's not good.
03:11 Yeah, I don't know.
03:12 There's the hood latch on one of these.
03:13 Do you remember how to open the hood on that, Freiberg?
03:15 Oh, yeah.
03:16 You know how many dusters I've had?
03:19 Oh, there you go.
03:20 You know how to open the hood, yeah.
03:21 See? That's the key.
03:22 Yeah, I was wondering if you'd have the technique down.
03:25 Oh, wow.
03:26 Hey, it has a transmission.
03:27 Power steering.
03:28 Yep.
03:29 Manual brakes.
03:30 It's set up perfectly.
03:31 This is every bit as good as I recall.
03:33 I think it's too good for you for a burger.
03:35 I think it is.
03:36 Look at that grill.
03:37 The grill is nice.
03:38 I should have swiped that before you saw it.
03:39 Did you buy this thing initially, or did I?
03:41 No, I bought that, and I traded you a dart over there for a set of heads.
03:47 Oh, that's right.
03:48 And I was going to trade you this for that charger.
03:51 But I bought the charger because you had it on Craig's list.
03:55 Right.
03:56 So I ended up with both of your cars.
03:57 After all that, I gave you a '71 Challenger.
03:59 Is it a '70?
04:00 Well, I know you took care of me.
04:01 I did take care of you.
04:02 So, I mean, yeah, we're even.
04:03 We're even.
04:04 I am so confused.
04:05 Which car are we even working on now?
04:07 This one.
04:08 I don't have a clue what's going on right now.
04:10 I guess the end result is we're going to drag this out with a tractor right now,
04:13 and we're going to get it running using the running gear out of the General Mayhem,
04:17 which, as you remember, is all used motorhome parts.
04:21 Hey, look at that.
04:22 It rolls.
04:24 Today's Tuesday.
04:25 We've got the rest of the week to work on it.
04:27 Basically, I just want to get this car running and driving.
04:29 If I can actually get it to the point where it moves up and down the street under its own power,
04:33 we might go to the drag strip.
04:35 But basically, I just need to do burnouts.
04:37 I did a little bit of a poll on our Facebook page asking people whether we should do,
04:41 like, a pro-stock look-alike drag car out of the duster or make it more of a daily driver.
04:45 And surprisingly enough, people wanted to see a daily driver.
04:48 So the crop duster, named for Dulcich's farm here,
04:52 is going to end up hopefully as a perfectly daily drivable big block A-body.
04:58 [music]
05:08 This is a rare moment in Roadkill.
05:10 We are inside of a shop with most of the tools we need to do the job.
05:13 Still, we'll manage to take forever to do this.
05:16 Here's another duster on the property, and this thing has a really good story.
05:19 This is actually a pretty famous project car in Car Craft magazine.
05:23 It was just called the Orange Duster.
05:25 People just knew it as that. They still ask about it.
05:27 Well, like 13 years ago, I sold it to Dulcich because I needed to get an engagement ring for my now wife.
05:35 I know what you're thinking. Yep.
05:37 Well, but he's let the thing just sit here and pretty much rot.
05:40 It had a 360 in it and a four-speed. And what did this thing run, like 12.70s at Bakersfield?
05:44 It was pretty good. But now that it's been sitting here forever, I'm going to shamelessly part it out.
05:48 I'm going to pull the 8.75 out of this thing so that we can throw it into the new duster.
05:52 Because as you can see, the new duster is far more critical to finish than this one with a fresh, shiny Steve Dulcich paint job.
05:58 Why don't we just put the motor in this one then, too?
06:01 Because that would make too much sense.
06:03 Oh. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
06:05 [music]
06:11 That is all junk.
06:13 Flimsy leaf springs, tiny 10-inch brakes, 7.25-inch with who knows, probably a 323 or worse. Garbage.
06:22 The motor here is a Mopar Big Block, a 440 out of a 77 motor home.
06:27 Now, the trick here is that a Big Block was never available in a duster from the factory.
06:32 So installing it is going to be a bit of a trick.
06:34 And we need more power.
06:36 This thing was rated at 185 flywheel horsepower.
06:40 And we're going to fix that throwing on a bunch of speed parts out of Dulcich's stock,
06:44 including a used set of Edelbrock CNC-ported cylinder heads.
06:48 We're going to throw a camshaft in the thing.
06:50 We've got an Edelbrock air gap intake and a Holley 750 carburetor.
06:53 We've only worked like half a day today, and we're virtually done.
06:56 We're going to slam these heads on, then we've got to pull the whole front dress off,
06:59 slap a camshaft in it, put it together, and we're going to have it in the car this evening.
07:03 In time for steak.
07:05 At Arby's. At the gas station. At midnight.
07:11 In the end, we did the math and found out that this thing is only going to have 8.0 to 1 compression,
07:18 which is officially not good.
07:21 We also changed out the camshaft.
07:23 We originally thought we were going to install a Hughes grind,
07:25 but when Dulcich spotted his old Iskei SuperCam
07:29 that was in his charger in his high school years more than 25 years ago,
07:33 he knew that was the bump stick we had to have for good luck.
07:37 It's only 6.30 at night, and I think we're going to leave soon,
07:39 because we've made so much progress.
07:41 We've added aluminum heads to the general Mayhem motor,
07:45 which is now going in the crop duster,
07:47 and because we didn't clean off the dirt fish mud,
07:50 the whole engine looks aluminum.
07:52 Dirty aluminum, but aluminum.
07:54 We'll be done by tomorrow night.
07:58 [music]
08:00 Our goal here is to do everything as cheaply as possible
08:12 by using everything that we can off of the charger,
08:15 and that includes this 26-inch radiator that's way bigger than the 22 that was available in the duster.
08:22 We measured it up, and the radiator was going to hit the hood,
08:25 so it was time to break out the big guns.
08:28 Oh, that moved a lot.
08:30 Oh, that's low.
08:34 Ooh, that was a close one.
08:42 Oh, yeah.
08:44 Oh, like butter.
08:45 You're getting good.
08:46 You should see it.
08:47 One more, one more.
08:48 Famous last words.
08:50 How does it look, Fryburger?
08:53 It looks carefully massaged.
08:54 Oh, yeah.
08:55 Yeah, it's practically brinched in.
08:57 It is.
08:58 These are TTI headers, which is like the best.
09:02 Watch this glaring endorsement.
09:04 These are actually 1 3/4-inch engine swap headers just for putting the big block in the A-body.
09:08 This header actually fits a B and E-body also, but the miracle is that it fits the A-body.
09:12 So it turns out the headers don't fit after all,
09:16 which I would have known if I'd read either the website or the instructions for these things.
09:21 The problem is is that the high-deck big block 440 does not work when you try and use power steering,
09:27 which was a luxury I was not willing to give up for this particular duster.
09:31 So let the mayhem begin.
09:33 This is going to get ugly.
09:35 Plenty of flow for a motorhome now.
09:49 Don't come over here.
09:51 I feel like the village blacksmith.
09:56 Beautiful.
10:00 What happened to this header?
10:03 Dude, you've got to be kidding me.
10:06 I paid $700 for these.
10:09 Dulcich will give me $20 for them now.
10:11 This was about the time I needed to break the news to Finnegan and Dulcich
10:15 that no matter how many times you bash the header with a hammer,
10:18 it doesn't help when you don't hit it in the right place.
10:22 So Dulcich is going to have to fix it with fire.
10:25 [Music]
10:45 I fully intend to destroy your header, Fryburger.
10:47 I think we're past that point.
10:49 Yeah, you're probably right.
10:50 If you ordered the right header, I wouldn't have to save you.
10:54 [Music]
11:02 The earmuffs on fire has to be perfectly done.
11:04 If you owe me a new pair of earmuffs.
11:06 Wow, it's like alcohol fire. It's burning.
11:09 Yeah, once the earmuffs go up.
11:11 Yeah, you can't stop them.
11:12 No, it's like a nuclear power plant disaster.
11:16 Yeah, we'll go ahead and just keep that from burning the water hose
11:19 because then it might pop and put the fire out.
11:21 Yeah, that wouldn't be a shame.
11:23 Is there any part you're unhappy with?
11:26 Oh, the whole thing.
11:27 Really?
11:28 Yeah.
11:29 I can split that right there and then re-weld it and take that little dimple out of it.
11:33 That's that dimple that's going to kill the 12 horsepower that we need.
11:36 Yeah.
11:37 [Siren]
11:46 I think I'm done.
11:49 Neat.
11:50 How's that, Fryburger?
11:51 Yeah.
11:53 It's mint.
11:54 It turns out that reading the directions is in fact more convenient
11:58 than pulling the engine in and out like five times.
12:01 Because if I'd read them, I would have discovered that the Schumacher Creative Services engine mount kit
12:06 says clearly you've got to use a Mopar C-body oil pan with their kit.
12:12 Amazingly, Dulcich had one in stock.
12:15 And then we had to pull out the engine again
12:18 because the instructions also say that you need to cut out a portion of the crossmember
12:22 to clear the external oil pump on the big block.
12:27 But once we got all that done, the accessories finally began to fall into place.
12:32 We got the radiator on it, the intake manifold, the carburetor.
12:35 We were starting to feel good.
12:36 [Music]
12:47 Now it's the morning of "engine should have been running already" day,
12:50 but we've still got some stuff to do.
12:52 We installed all our MSD ignition, including a 6AL box under the battery,
12:56 new distributor, coil, and wires.
12:58 We also have a new Adoptima battery.
13:01 Yeah, that's an Optima that we've adopted from another owner.
13:04 What happens is guys send these batteries back for warranty to Optima.
13:09 Optima checks them.
13:10 There's nothing wrong with them, and so they send them to Roadkill.
13:14 We are about to start working on the exhaust system.
13:18 We've got the old pipes from the General Mayhem here that don't exactly line up.
13:24 And then one of our headers is pointing right into the crossmember for the transmission,
13:28 so we're cutting the collector apart.
13:31 We're going to weld this whoop-de-doo right into it, cut that again,
13:35 and we'll make it work one way or another.
13:38 [Music]
13:43 Well, it's not hitting. Awesome.
13:46 Now we've got to recut it and weld another bend to it, effectively making it an S,
13:52 so that we can try to connect the rest of the exhaust pipes,
13:54 which we scavenged from the General Mayhem.
13:57 [Music]
14:03 The priority on Roadkill is never to actually get the engine running.
14:06 It's to do things like exhaust, cosmetics, making the spark plug wires perfect,
14:12 whether the engine actually runs is really insignificant.
14:15 It's all about the noise and style.
14:17 It's all about the accessories.
14:19 [Music]
14:23 Well, the exhaust system took all day long,
14:26 but the upside is we're finally ready to bring the 440 to life.
14:30 We're about to fire it up for the very first time,
14:32 and the thing is you really want to get it to just snap, fire right up,
14:35 because we have to break in a hydraulic flat-cap at camshaft.
14:38 You have to mate the surface of the lifter to the lobe on the camshaft
14:42 by running the thing up at varying high RPM for about 20 minutes.
14:46 These things are notorious for going flat,
14:49 meaning that wear surface just eats itself alive.
14:52 This is a cross-your-fingers moment right here.
14:55 We'll probably screw it up.
14:57 [Engine starting]
15:02 Man, we fired up the 440, and it was all smiles from three completely worn-out dudes.
15:07 And we should probably be concerned that the header was glowing red
15:11 while we were breaking in the camshaft,
15:13 but that's not really important right now.
15:15 What's important is win.
15:17 [Music]
15:21 It's Friday morning.
15:22 This thing is supposed to be running and driving by now, and it's not,
15:24 so that's when we start parting out the nice car here.
15:27 Now, you might ask yourself,
15:28 why would we be building the clapped-out old white duster
15:31 instead of the perfectly good nice orange duster?
15:33 See, the problem is as soon as you paint something
15:35 and have expectations of it being nice,
15:37 the whole project just pretty much falls apart at that point.
15:40 This has been sitting here for almost 10 years
15:42 because Dulcich wants to do it right.
15:44 He doesn't want to slam it together in a week like the white one.
15:47 And so, naturally, since he has no plans to actually work on it and make it perfect,
15:50 we're going to part it out.
15:51 We're going to take the rear end out of this thing,
15:53 and I have a feeling the gas tank's going to be coming out of it pretty soon, too.
15:56 [Music]
16:00 Could have stolen the exhaust off this car.
16:03 We're idiots.
16:04 [Gunshot]
16:06 The rear axle that we took out of the white duster is a Mopar 7 1/4,
16:10 which is fragile like glass.
16:12 This new rear end is a Mopar 8 3/4,
16:15 which is the diameter of the ring gear,
16:17 and these things are pretty beefy,
16:18 and this particular one has 410 gears,
16:21 a SureGrip,
16:22 and Caltrax bars for traction devices on the leaf springs.
16:26 Last night, while no one was paying attention,
16:28 Dulcich and I put the disc brakes on it
16:30 because even Roadkill is not irresponsible enough
16:32 to put a big block into an A-body with the stock 10-inch front drum brakes,
16:36 which are really bad.
16:38 We used a kit from CPP.
16:40 It's basically later model Mopar stuff,
16:43 like calipers off mid-'70s cars,
16:46 and it uses a B-body spindle.
16:47 The thing is that the upper ball joint is different for those,
16:50 and so they also give you a new stamped upper control arm
16:53 that drops right into the A-body,
16:54 but uses the B-body type ball joint to adapt the whole thing.
16:57 Almost the last thing I think we have to do is the drive shaft.
17:01 I've got the shaft that came out of the General Mayhem '68 Charger,
17:05 and it's longer wheelbase than this car,
17:07 so it needs to be shorter,
17:08 even though the spline on the transmission and the yoke at the back are identical.
17:12 So we're just going to measure it up,
17:14 chop this drive shaft in half,
17:15 shorten it up,
17:16 weld it back together,
17:18 and it'll be balanced perfectly.
17:21 [music]
17:23 Here's something you really do not want to do at home,
17:33 and you really don't want to have Finnegan and Dulcich do it for you either,
17:36 because watch this.
17:37 They're going to cut up this drive shaft,
17:39 shorten it,
17:40 grind it,
17:41 weld it back together,
17:42 and do a lot of praying that it is going to survive.
17:44 [music]
17:47 [tires screeching]
17:49 I'm genuinely excited to see when we put this back together.
17:55 A, does it shake the car apart?
17:57 And B, does it end up going right through the floorboards of the car
18:00 during the first, you know, hole shot?
18:02 With David driving.
18:04 Imagine this.
18:05 The drive shaft also took all day to do.
18:07 We're a full day behind now,
18:09 so we wrapped it up by throwing the hood back on the car,
18:11 tested in some wheels and tires,
18:13 we did our own home wheel alignment,
18:15 and finally, it was time for some sleep.
18:17 [music]
18:22 Today's weird.
18:35 It's like opposite day.
18:37 Instead of laying on the ground,
18:39 wiring, plumbing, welding,
18:41 I'm standing here watching Dulcich prep a trunk to paint it.
18:45 I don't know what is wrong with Dulcich's little brain
18:48 when he looks at this duster and goes,
18:50 "I can't live with myself because it has a brown deck lid."
18:53 So we watched him paint the thing
18:55 before we finally pushed the car outside,
18:57 ready for burnouts!
18:59 But no.
19:00 Even on Roadkill, it's the laziness that'll bite you.
19:03 I'd had a brand new year one gas tank
19:05 ready to install in this thing for a week,
19:07 and I didn't do it.
19:09 And when we finally got the car outside,
19:11 the carburetor clogged up with a bunch of varnish.
19:13 And so there we were, lying on our backs
19:15 in the middle of the street with gas running down our armpits,
19:17 and we threw in that new gas tank,
19:19 and finally, the moment you've all been waiting for.
19:22 [engine revving]
19:26 [engine revving]
19:28 [engine revving]
19:30 [engine revving]
19:32 [engine revving]
19:34 [engine revving]
19:36 [engine revving]
19:38 [engine revving]
19:40 [engine revving]
19:42 [engine revving]
19:44 Normally, burnouts are a good enough way
19:46 to end an episode of Roadkill,
19:48 but there's more wind to be had this time.
19:50 We're gonna roll this thing down
19:52 to the chassis dyno at West Tech Performance.
19:54 [engine revving]
19:56 [engine revving]
19:58 [engine revving]
20:00 [engine revving]
20:02 Survey says
20:04 356 rear-wheel horsepower
20:06 and 419 pound-feet of torque
20:08 at the tire.
20:10 But even better than that,
20:12 next we're gonna take it to the drag strip.
20:14 See this?
20:16 That's a TorqueFlight automatic transmission extension housing.
20:18 It's not supposed to be quick release.
20:20 [laughs]
20:22 We got the special two-piece deal, right?
20:24 After the dyno day,
20:26 we discovered that our hideously unbalanced
20:28 driveshaft broke this.
20:30 So it went back up to Steve's place for a whole bunch of
20:32 fixes. He solved this, fixed the
20:34 driveshaft, and finally transformed
20:36 the Duster into the '80s street race
20:38 look, the icon that I was looking for
20:40 with a six-pack scoop. We got Kragers on it
20:42 now. We got M&Hs we're gonna hook up.
20:44 And finally, we're at the drag strip to see what it's gonna run.
20:46 What's your guess? I'm hoping
20:48 it's gonna be in the 12 somewhere.
20:50 And I also hope it makes it down to track
20:52 in one piece. That's all I'm hoping for.
20:54 I aligned this with a tape measure and
20:56 bubble level, so it may be a little
20:58 shaky at the top. I should make you
21:00 ride. I would.
21:02 [engine revving]
21:04 [engine revving]
21:18 [engine revving]
21:20 [engine revving]
21:24 [engine revving]
21:42 [engine revving]
21:44 Whoa! Dude!
21:54 I gotta tell you, this episode was a lot
21:56 of really grueling wrenching.
21:58 I pretty much killed Dulcich and Finnegan,
22:00 not to mention the video crew.
22:02 But I don't care, because I've got a time slip
22:04 that says 12.39
22:06 at 113 miles
22:08 an hour. That is not
22:10 bad for what we pulled off here.
22:12 Especially when you consider that the short block
22:14 is stock motorhome
22:16 garbage. And forgive me a little bit
22:18 of bench racing, but I will tell you this thing
22:20 could use a little bit more of work on the
22:22 carburetor. It needs a better torque converter,
22:24 and it will go in the 11s.
22:26 I've had a whole lot of dusters, but I
22:28 think this is finally the one.
22:30 This car looks exactly
22:32 like every street race car that I ran
22:34 against in the 80s. Finnegan
22:36 says that this car is gonna go right back
22:38 to Dulcich's farm and rot for
22:40 another 5-7 years. And I admit
22:42 that would be my norm, but I'm gonna
22:44 do everything I can to prove him wrong.
22:46 I really want to drive this car.
22:48 And maybe you'll find out if I can live
22:50 up to that on a future episode of
22:52 Roadkill.
22:54 We need you petting the cat.
23:00 Holding it like Dr. Evil.
23:02 I like this.
23:04 [music]
23:06 [music]
23:08 [music]
23:10 (upbeat music)
23:12 (upbeat music)
23:15 (upbeat music)
23:17 (upbeat music)
23:20 (upbeat music)
23:26 (whistling)
23:38 (upbeat music)