house property sold before 5 years

this time on road kill the soul of thegeneral mayhem gets a new lease on life that was awesome before we get into this episode ofroadkill cast your mind back to when we built the general mayhem our 68 charger that we stuffed with a 440out of a motor home now i'll reveal right now that courtesyof our sponsorship of dodge yup the general mayhem is now going toget repowered with a 707 horsepower hellcat hammy and that leaves me with aspare 440 727 sitting around

cuz yup we yank this thing outta thecharger but now we're gonna load into the bed of my buddies truck and head up around bakersfield california andgive this 440 new life for the third time we're here north of bakersfield california myfriend steve dulcich farm you can see over there he makes grapes happen and he turns grapes into raisinsbut he's also a big-time mopar guy also the editor of engine masters magazine and i've knownfor a long long time

we've traded a bunch of cars around hereand there and we finally settled on this one 1970 plymouth duster that'sgonna be mine and we're gonna take the engine transmission and the generalmayhem and plop it in that duster and driveaway probably in a day or two man the plymouth duster is like my go tomuscle car i learned how to drive a stick in one ofthese things back in the eighties and since then i've owned eight of them including this one this model the1970 the first year of the plymouth valiantduster this was a six cylinder car

you know i've had better dusters i'vehad worse but i haven't had a whole lot that actually run and drive and that's what i've gotta do here theproblem is this car has been sitting here on the farm for at least five years i haven't evenseen it not long and finnegan has never seen it there it is that everything you rememberit a little worse than i remembered actually no i don't think so moresurface rust it's got windows though that's that's huge for us this is goodit's mint

it's got rat action to look the ratsbeen pulling up the stuffing well that's the headliner look at thedoor panels on constraint on the negative well the bench seat inperfect condition i hope you got a shop vac jesus look at all the mold that's moss there's a difference yeah that's gross it's moss it's natural come on man if we didn'tarrive here soon this car was going to return to the earth

i think the things pretty good actuallyit straight it's a straight as a dia thisthing runs like a top well it did if it had a motor maybe did you dent this i don't know i think you did idon't remember that can you fix that for me while we're here yeah cuz thats not good yeah i don't know where's the hood latch on one of these do you remember how to open the hood on thatfreiburger you know how many dusters i've had now there you go see you know how to open the hood that's the key

i was wondering if you to have the technique down wow and theres a transmission power steering yep manual breaks set up perfectly this isevery bit as good as i recall i think is too good for you freiburgerthink it is look at that grill the grill is nice i should of swiped that before you saw it did you buy this thing initially or didi no i bought that and i traded you a dart over there forset heads oh that's right now was gonna trade youthis know that charger but i bought the charger because youhad it on craigslist right so i ended up

with both your cars after all that i gave you a 71challengers at a seventy yeah i know you took car of me yeah but we're even i am so confused which car we're even working on this one i don't have a clue what's going on rightnow i guess the end result is we're gonnadrag this out with a tractor right now and we're gonna get it running using therunning gear outta the general mayhem which as heremember all used motor home parts hey look at that it rolls

today's tuesday we've got the rest week to work on it basically i just want to get this car running and driving if i can actually getting to the pointwhere moves up and down the street under its own power we might go to the drag strip basicallyi just need to do burnouts i'd a little bit of a poll on ourfacebook page asking people whether we should do like a pro stock look like drag car theduster or make it more the daily driver and surprisingly enough people wanted tosee a daily driver so

the crop duster named for dulcich's farmhere is gonna end up hopefully has aperfectly daily drivable big block a body it is a rare moment in roadkill we're inside of a shop with most of the tools they need to do thejob still we'll manage take forever to do this here's anotherduster on the property in this thing has a really good story this is actually a pretty famous projectcar in car craft magazine it was just called the orange dusterpeople does know is that they still ask

about it well like thirteen years ago i sold it to dulcich because i needed to get an engagement ring for my now wife i know what you're thinking yep well but he's like the thing just sithere and pretty much rot it had a 360 and a four-speed and one other thing i like 1270 thebakersfield it was pretty good but now that it's been sitting hereforever i'm gonna shamelessly parted out i'm gonna pull the 18th recorder

out of this thing so that we can throwit into the new duster because as you can see the new dusters far more critical to finish than thisone with a fresh shiny steve dulcich's paint job why don't we just but the motor in this one then too because that would make too much sense yeah yeah that is all junk flimsy leaf springs tiny ten-inch breaks seven and a quarterinch with who knows prolly 323

worst garbage the motor here as amopark big block a 440 out of a 77 motorhome now the trick here is that a big blockwith never available in a duster from the factory so installing it is going tobe a bit of a trick and we need more power this thing wasrated at a hundred and 85 flywheel horsepower and we're gonnafix that throwing on a bunch of speed partspart out of dulcich's stock including a used set of edelbrockcnc ported cylinder heads were gonna throw a camshaft in the thing

we got a edelbrock air gap intake anda holley 750 carburetor we've only work like half a day today and we're virtually done we're gonna slam these heads on then we gotta pull up front dress off slap a camshaft in a put together andwe're having in the car this evening in time for steak at arbys at the gas station at midnight in the endwe did the math and found out that this thing is only gonna have 8.01 compression which isofficially not good we also changed out thecamshaft we originally thought we were

gonna install hughes grind but when dulcich spotted his old itssuper cam that was in his charger and high schoolyears more than 25 years ago he knew that was the bump stick we hadto have for good luck it's only 630 at night and i think we're gonnaleave soon it's we've made so much progress we've added aluminum heads to the general mayhem motor which is now going in a crop duster and becausewe didn't clean off the dirt fish mud the whole engine looks aluminum dirty aluminum

but aluminum none the less we'll be done by tomorrow night our goal here is to do everything ascheaply as possible by using everything that we can offer the chargerand that includes this 26-inch radiator that some way biggerthan the 22 who that was available in the duster we measured it up and the radiator wasgonna hit the hood so it was time to break out the big guns whoa that moved a lot

sorry that was a close one your getting good one more one more famous last words how does it look freiburger it lookscarefully massaged oh yeah it's practically pinched in it is these are tti headers which is like the best watch this glaring endorsementthese are actually one and three quarter inch engine swap headers just forputting a big block in the a body thus

header actually fits a b&e body alsobut the miracle is that it fits the a body so it turns out the headers don't fitafter all which i would have known if i readeither the website or the instructions for these thingsthe problem is is that the high dec big block 440 does not work when youtry and use power steering which was a luxury i was not willing togive up for this particular duster so let the mayhem begin this is gonnaget ugly plenty of flow

for a motor home now don't come overhere i feel like the village blacksmith beautiful what happened to this header dude you gotta be kidding me i paid seven hundred dollarsfor these dulcich will give me 20 bucks for them nowthis is about the time i need a break the news to finnegan and dulcich that no matter howmany times you bash the head with a hammer

it doesn't help when you don't hit it inthe right place so dulcich is just gonna have to fix it withfire i fully intend to destroy your header freiburger i think we're pass that point yeah right your ordered the right header i wouldn't have save you the ear muffs on fire has to be perfectly done the oh man you hear your love loudlike alcohol fire burning once the ear muffs go up yeah

stop them no its like if like a nuclear powerplant disaster yeah just go head and keep that just keep from burning for burning the water hose cus then when i pop it'll put the fire out yeah that would be a shame is there any parts your unhappy with the whole thing really i can split that right there and then re weld it take that that dimple out of it it's that dimple is what's gonna kill the 12 horsepower that we need yeah

i think i'm done how's that freiburger mint it turns out that you're reading thedirections is in fact more convenient than pulling the engine in an out like five times cus if i'd read them i would have discovered that the schumacher creative services engine mount kit says clearly you've gotto use a mopar c body oil pan with their kit amazingly dulcich had one in stock

and then we had to pull out the engineagain because the instructions also say thatyou need to cut out a portion of the across member to clear the external oil pump on thebig block but once we got all that done at theaccessories finally began to fall into place we gotthe radiator on at the intake manifold the carburetor we're starting to feel good now it's the morning of engineshould have been running already day

but we still got some stuff to do weinstalled all our msd ignition including 6la box under the batterynew distributor coil and wires we also have a new adoptima batteryyeah that's a optima that we adopted from another owner whathappens is guys send these batteries back forwarranty to optima optima checks something there's nothing wrong with them and so they send them to roadkill we are about to start working on the exhaust systemwe've got the old pipes from the general mayhem here they dont exactlylineup

then one of our headers is pointingright into crossmember the transmission so we'recutting the clicker part we're going to weld this whoop-te-do right into it cut that again we'll make it work one way or the other awesome now we got to re cut it the weld another bend to it practically making it into an s so wecan try to connect the rest to the exhaust pipes which is scavenged from the general mayhem the priority on roadkill is to neveractually get the engine running its to do things like exhaust cosmetics

making spark plug wires perfect when theengine actually runs is really insignificant all about the noise and style it's allabout the accessories well the exhaust system took all daylong but the upside is we're finally ready tobring the 440 to life we're about to fire it up for the very firsttime the thing is you really want to get its just snapped fire right up because wehave to break in a hydraulic flat tappet camshaft you have to mate the surface of the lifter to the lobe on the camshaft by

running the thing up at varying high rpm for about 20minutes these things are notorious for going flat meaningthat where surface just itself alive this is a cross yourfingers moment here will probably screw it up man we fired up the 440 and it was all smiles from 3 completely worn out dude and we should probably be concerned that the header was glowing red while we were breaking in the cam shaftbut that's not really important right now what's important is win

it's friday morning this thing supposed to be running anddriving by now and it's not so that's when we start parting out the nice carhere now you might ask yourself why would webe building the clock out old white duster instead of the perfectly goodnice orange duster see the problem is as soon as you paintsomething and have expectations of it being nice the whole project is pretty much fallsapart at that point this has been sitting here for almost 10 years becausedulcich wants to do it right

he doesn't want to slam it together in aweek like the white one and so naturally since he has no plans to actually work onit make it perfect we're gonna part it out we're going to take the rearend out at this thing and i've a feeling the gas tanks gonna be coming out prettysoon too we could've stolen the exhaust off this car we're idiots the rear axle that we took out of the white duster is a mopar sevenand a quarter which is fragile like glass

this a new rear end is a ballpark 8and three quarter which is the diameter the ring gear and these things are pretty beefy andthis particular one has 4:10 gears a sure grip and cal tracks bars fortraction devices on the lead springs last night while no one was payingattention dulcich and i put the disc brakes on it because even road kill is not be irresponsible enough to put a big block in a body with the stock 10 inch frontdrum brakes which are really bad we used to kit fromcpp it's basically later model mopar stuff

like calipers off mid-seventies cars and it uses a b body spindle the things that the upper ball joint is different forthose and so they also give you a new stamped upper control arm that droppedright into a body but uses the b body type ball jointed to adapt the whole thing almost the last thing i think we have todo is the drive shaft i've got the shaft that came out thegeneral mayhem 68 charger and its longer wheelbase in this car soit needs to be shorter even though the spline on thetransmission and the yoke of the back are identical

so we're just gonna measure it up chopthis drive shaft in half shorten it up weld it back togetherand it'll be balanced perfectly here's something you really do not want todo at home and you really don't want to have finnegan and dulcich do it for you either cuz watch this they're gonna cut up thisdrive shaft shorten it grind it weld it back together and do a lot of praying that it is goingto survive i'm genuinely excited to see when we put this back together a. does it shake

the car apart b. does it end up going right through thefloorboards in the car during the first hold shot with david driving imagine this the drive shaft also took all day to do we're a full day behind now so we wrapped it up by throwing the hood back on the car testing some wheels and tires we did our own home wheel alignment and finally it was time for some sleep to day is weird it's like opposite day instead of laying on the ground wiring plumbing welding

i'm standing here watching dulcich prep a trunk to paint it i don't know what is wrong with dulcich's little brain when helooks at this duster and goes i can't live with myself because it hasa brown deck lid so we watched him paint the thing beforewe finally push the car outside ready for burnouts but no even on roadkill it's the laziness that'll bite you i'dhad a brand new year one gas tank ready to install in this thing for a week and i didn't do it and when we finallygot the car outside the carburetor clogged up with a bunchof varnish and so there we were lying on

our backs in the middle of the streetwith gas running down armpits and we threw in that new gas tank and finally the moment you've all beenwaiting for normally burnouts are a good enoughway to end an episode of roadkill but there's more win to be had this timewe're gonna roll this thing down to the chassis dyno at westech performance survey says 356 rear wheel horsepower and 419 pound-feet of torque at the tire

but even better than that next we'regoing to take it to the drag strip see this that's the torqueflite automatic transmission extension housing it's not supposed to be quick release we got the special to piece deal right after the dyno day we discovered thatare hideously unbalanced drive shaft broke this sowhat back up to steve's place for a whole buncha fixes he solved this fix the drive shaft and finallytransform the duster into the eighties street race look the icon that i waslooking for with a six pack scoop we got cragars on it now we got m&h's were gonna hook up and finally with

the drag strip to see what it's gonnarun what's your guess i'm hoping it's going to be in the twelves somewhere say it out loud and i also hope thatmakes a down the track in one piece i'm hoping for in a straight i aligned us with a tapemeasure and that bubble level so it maybe a little i shaky at the top ishould make you ride i would whoa dude i gottatell you this episode was a lot of

really grueling wrenching i pretty muchkilled dulcich and finnegan not to mention the video crew but i don't care because i'm gonna timeslip says 12 39 at a hundred and thirty miles an hour that its not bad for what we pulled off here especially when you consider that the short block is stock motor home garbage and forgive me a little bit a benchracing but i will tell you this thing could use a little bit more work on thecarburetor it needs a better torque

converter and it will go on the 11's i've had a wholelotta dusters but i think this is finally the one thiscar looks exactly like every street race car thati ran against in the eighties finnegan says that this car is gonna goright back to dulcich's farm and rot for another five to seven years and iadmit that would be my norm but i'm gonna do everything i can toprove them wrong i really want to drive this car and maybe you'll find out if i can liveup to that on a future episode

of roadkill holding it like doctor evil up