Ok so at this point we had a few realizations, I couldn't keep fighting the rust fight, every time I would get the car clean, parts would start to flash rust again. So now we I decided I was going to get everything clean one last time and spray a sacrificial layer of epoxy primer. I knew I still had a bunch of body work to do, including patch panels, dent removal, and a few spots of rot that needed addressed but at least having primer down I would be able to get to the body work whenever I got around to it without things getting worse. Me and my dad spent an entire day dedicated to prep work for the primer. Got the car all cleaned up and then rolled it back into the garage with the plan of getting up at about 4am, rolling the car outside and spraying a coat of primer right when the air is most still and all the bugs are asleep. This didn't work out the way I hoped. At 4am when I rolled it out of my garage and started wiping it down I started to notice dew!!! God damn dew!!! So now I had to keep drying the car until about 7am when the dew started to burn off, we wiped down the car one last time and by 8:30 this is what we had.
My 71 Demon
- Thread starter JCBrindle
- Start date
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Now that the car was primed I had to decide the next step. Because of my HOA and already having had Code Enforcement called on me once. I decided I wanted to tackle the engine. Per Orange county regulations a non functioning, non registered car can not be parked outside. My logic was, get the car functioning, tag it and then finish body work. I knew this was going to make double the work for some jobs but its just what needed to happen. I started by welding all the holes closed in the inner fenders. We want this engine bay as clean as it can be. As my dad puts it "When I open the hood all I like to see is engine"
I had one other issue in the engine bay. The PO did quite a number on the passenger side inner fender. I don't know if it was when he removed the engine or some thing happened over the last 40 years of the cars life but the inner fender was all bashed in. This was the first time I got to use my new hammer and dolly set!! The picture really doesn't do it justice because of all the chipped primer but once I got the dents out and leaded it smooth. It looked pretty good. In the first picture you can kinda see the dent.
Wow,your wasting no time for sure!
John Morrow
Mopars and Harleys
Nice......
Ok so here is an important lesson learned. Make sure you address both sides of your welds when needed. The passengers side inner fender was leaded smooth and then I decided to clean the wheel well of all the under coat. Once the under coat was gone I noticed all the weld slag/burn thru from closing all the holes on the inner fender. So with my quick thinking, I said "let me just grab my grinder and take care of that real quick" Well you all know how hot metal gets when you grind on it....... I don't think I need to really tell you what happened to all my lead on the other side.....
That $4000.00 for the inital buy in keeps looking better and better.
Car looks pretty rust free.
Car looks pretty rust free.
When we bought the car it came with two cranks, and an extra set of +.030 pistons. I took the block, heads, pistons etc up to the machine shop. We decided to go with a highly recommended shop up in Sanford Fl. for all the machine work as I would be doing all the build up. We called Comp Cams to get all the info we could for choosing a cam. We went back and forth about doing different types of cams but we decided on going with a pretty tall hyd roller cam. This was agonizing to be honest. With the all the options and experts telling us what was good and what wouldn't be street-able with power brakes blah blah blah. In the end we took a leap of faith and went with Comp Cams recommendation for what we want to do with the car. Cam P/N 20-811-9 with .538/.534 lift. Comp told us despite the life, the duration would keep our vacuum in the good.
The engine shop ended up having to take out the bore to +.030. I had the shop clean up our pistons acquired with the car purchase and inspect the rods etc. Fortunately they were good to reuse. Defiantly saved some cash here. We also had new hardened seats installed and all new exhaust valves and guides. New Comp Cam valve springs and seals finished off the heads. Finally after about a month at the shop I got everything home and could start the build. Here are some pictures of the bottom end being built up. All new bearings and rings used. This is also where I learned another important lesson. EVERYONE and mean EVERYONE told me to make sure I used a drip pan under because it was going to get messy. Did I listen.... No:banghead: My garage floor was scary. I almost killed myself at least a dozen times skidding on the oil and assembly lube.
You're doing a great job and moving fast. At this rate you will have it done by summer
Captain Canuck
Well-Known Member
Great build...:happy1:
Now that the bottom was done, time to move up to the top side of the engine. Our original plan was to reuse the OE rockers. Well we had two issues. The 340 rocker arms have left and right offset rocker arms. When I was organizing my rockers I noticed one cylinder had to left offset arms. I'm now going to try to explain this but unless your a real gear head like all of us on this web site, this will sound crazy. I looked up the price of replacing just the one rocker that was wrong from the last guy who rebuilt this engine. $8, not bad. Then I noticed that when you slide the arms down the shaft there was tons of slop. Then I noticed there was a little bit of corrosion on the shafts. Now I'm looking up all new OE rockers plus new shafts put us at about $150. Huh, that's not bad..... Then me and my dad start talking and we decided since we went with a roller cam, what about roller rockers? This is a very slippery slope. You can rationalize it several ways but this should be a model example how two gear heads quickly go from $8 to about $800 in 12 hours. Right or wrong I'm glad we decided to go this route. We only want to do this once and we wanted to do it right. Comp Cams again to the rescue.
ops:Ignore the painted engine. I'm getting to that.Now the engine paint. In an effort to do this by time line I think I spoiled a few things, lol. OK so we decided to go with Eastwoods engine/header paint. I would like to hear from anyone who has used this stuff to see what I can expect for durability. So far I have a mixed review on the paint. The color is fantastic and the quality of the spray tip is great. The application was very easy. My real concern is it seems to not adhere very well. I really don't think prep was an issue with this. I cleaned the block spotless prior to laying down the first coat. My only saving grace I believe is that in the instruction on the can, it states the paint and primer must be heat cycled to really stick. I'm hoping after I get her running my worries about the paint will be in the past. The color is Hemi Orange and I taped up all the exposed bolts and nuts that were installed. I really like the contrast of the ARP 12 point bolts, studs, and nuts on the engine. I like to see the seems and lines of the different components vs. the engine looking like one big hunk of orange.
Of course now with everything painted there was no way I could keep myself from doing a little mock up to have a glimpse of what was to come!!! We decided to go with an Edelbrock duel plane air gap intake and then the matching 650 carb that Edelbrock helped us choose. We topped it off with Edelbrocks air cleaner for a particular reason. Having the air cleaner being of this design would better work with the hole I have to cut in the hood for the scoop. Almost a ram air effect. :burnout: The headers are full length Hooker Headers. The headers are nice but the finish leaves a lot to be desired. I figured the paint will be chipping off anyway so we will see how this works out. In case anyone was wondering, YES these headers are a MF'er to install. On the forward and aft tubes, inner bolts. There is zero room to tighten that bolt. I had to take a brass drift and a BFH to dimple some extra room just to get an open end on the bolt and make 1/4 turns with it. :angryfir:
cuda20
Well-Known Member
Your moving right a long. I think it's awesome that your doing this for your dad. The end result will be worth it.
Now on to ignition. We decided to go with a Pertronix set up. We need a distributor and this kit came with everything we need at a respectable price. The electronic billet distributor not only looks great but gets rid of the ugly ballast resistor. Again we want nothing but engine under the hood. When it came time to make up the ignition wires I didn't realize that you need a special crimper for the ends. MSD make a economy crimper that utilized your vise. It is far cheaper than a standard crimper about $8. It takes a little longer but if your not doing this for a living then why spend the extra $100 on a dedicated crimper! The kit also came with a second strike box. Later on I will let you know how that goes.
Once I got all the wires cut to length I quickly saw how ugly I just made my engine with all these wires hanging all over the place. Another phone call to dad to and lots of discussion about, " should we hang them over the valve covers? go around the back of them? etc. " We found these vertical wire brackets. I love the design, gives that clean look and doesn't take away from the valve covers or the engine. There was one big issue with these brackets but it wasn't the fault of the bracket. The drivers side header has one tube that comes up and aft, which really interferes with the plug wires and my new brackets. My solution was to get two 90 degree plug caps for these two plugs and loop the wires around the tube. I then moved the back insulator up one hole. Its kinda hard to explain but I think the pictures show it pretty well why I did what I did.
Your really movin' on with this project and wondered when you actually started working on this build and the timeline?
Next what tackling the front of the engine. We started with boiling the harmonic balancer for install. Mmmmmmm I like mine well done. Once that was done, on to the accessories and pulleys. We went through a few alternators and PS pumps before we were happy. I started with just OEM Autozone type stuff but then the rattle can finish of these units looked really bad on this new engine. I sent those back to Summit and RockAuto and ordered up some black powder coated units from TuffStuff. These guys really make a nice product. I still have one unresolved issue with the alternator but Bud at TuffStuff is going to fix that for me next week. I broke two of my gear pullers trying to pull the alt pulley off. Sheared the arm bolts in half. After I called Bud he told me to return the alt to him with the pulley I want installed and he will do it at no charge. Now that's customer service! For pulleys We went with CVF Racing. We started by ordering the basic pulleys and then when we saw how great they looked and the quality of the machining, we ended up getting the entire Mopar system. CVF are half the price of March pulleys and probably twice the quality.
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