Birth of the Blue Missile

Since I happen to still be up I'll post part three:

Once I was in the drivers seat I knew I wanted more of everything, Power and flash. Jimmy then introduced me to his mechanic Tommy who was the spitting image of Duane Allman.

For those of you who don’t know, the Allman Bros’ mother, until a number of years ago, lived in a small community just north of Miami Beach called Surfside where they grew up. Where you could on occasion hear the Allman Joys play concerts at the Surfside community center, what a time it was in South Florida.

As it happens Tommy was a mopar man also. He had a sublime green van with a punched out bigblock in it. Now when I say he could pull wheelies with his van, He could pull wheelies! I personally did not get to experience them but after E-mailing Larry the text of the story he added this:

“The time I met him (Tommy) he took me for a ride in that ’61 van with the 3 speed manual shifter on the dash, an uncovered blueprinted 426 Hemi sat 6” from my left leg, that had a carburetor as big as my 1.6 liter VW engine, he popped a wheelie, that in a flash, I was looking at the nice South Florida midday sun!.” L.W.

I do remember Larry returning from that experience (it was a beer run I think) him jumping out of the van as Tommy pulled it under the carport. Larry’s eyes were rather big and he would have been pale if he weren’t already. Let me describe him. Larry was six feet tall slender build very light skin with typical freckles of someone with naturally fire red hair. That hair was to the middle of his back and as wide as his shoulders and very wavy. A red headed Robert Plant comes to mind. His hair was of such note that when we would use the elevator at the condo, women standing behind him used to stroke it and tell him how nice it was. This was very disturbing to him for he was naturally very shy, and the women were his grand mother’s age.

Tommy suggested that I take the Thermoquad off along with the manifold and replace them with an Edelbrock highrise and a Holley. So we put on a LD340 and a 3310 with vac secondaries. Wow what a difference. Larry and I then put a set of Hooker headers on, it just kept getting better. Now the headers that I put on are basically the same as the ones you can get today. They did hang low but South Florida is flat and speed bumps were not invented yet, so the ground clearance was not as big a deal as it is today.

At that time I was attending a junior college, because my party major at U.M. was discontinued along with underwater basket weaving. (I really did not take well to the big university system where there were three hundred students to a class in the lecture hall and you were not allowed to ask questions. I was used to small classes at the academy and a working relationship with my teachers.) One day while leaving the parking lot I was trying to get in line to turn left and there was someone letting me into line. A lady turning into parking lot entrance road actually tried to get in front of me, and ended up hitting my drivers side front fender. She also hit a couple of cars that were in the right lane waiting to turn right. I was almost in the line and she just wasn’t paying attention or didn’t care.. This made little sense because it was two lanes in each direction, and she was the only coming in at the time. She had plenty of room behind me to enter the parking lot go figure. Florida was and is a no fault state, so she got the ticket. She was unhurt but did try to sue me because her clarinet case slid across the seat and hit her in the thigh. Too many people looking for a free ride, sound familiar? Sorry, I forgot, not this thread.

I was insured to the hilt and took the car back to the dealership to be repaired. The service manager told me they could fix it good as new. It was only the sheet metal, no frame damage because the accident was at about ten miles per hour. He said they would match the paint and I would not be able to tell it was ever hit. I told him that if it did not match exactly, I would not sign for the car. This was a fire engine red paint job that had been fading in the South Florida sun for about a year, there was no way they were going to match it. He then said to me “What color do you want the car?” I said “ It came in her two colors red and white. I want it black and Chrysler blue, like this” and proceeded to show him a picture of Don Carlton’s Mopar Missile. He said fine, it was an insurance job so he didn’t care, but he said that I would have to help tape off the blue to make sure it was done to my satisfaction. I was fine with that.

About a week later I got the car back and it was all black. They did it right, the jams, the doors and the trunk, were all done. Only the engine compartment wasn’t done. I was told the paint would need to tighten up for about a week before it could have tape put on it for the blue, and I should come back in a couple of weekends to do the blue. I had left the picture of the mopar missile with them so the paint guy already had a good idea what to expect. I showed up early the next Saturday and we taped it up and he sprayed it on the spot, no paint booth involved. I walked down the street for lunch and after eating we took off the paper and tape and got a look at the results. Even the paint guy had to admit it looked cool.

enjoy
Andrew

Captain: I'll post the current build when we get there unless Adam sais its ok to break the thread in two. But just for the record I'm forteen pages into this thing already and we're not three years into it yet.