12:05 Garage- ’70 Duster build
12:05 Garage- 70 Duster build
After trolling this page for quite some time, I decided it was time to share my rebuild with everyone. Dont let the title of the thread fool you, this isnt a high end shop building a car with an unlimited budget. Its a one man show in my home garage.
Along with my love of Mopars, I also enjoy the sport of triathlon. 12:05 is the time it took me to complete my first Ironman triathlon. If you dont know what that is, look it up. I wont bog this thread down with that. Anyway, I wanted to combine those two passions into a name for my happy place, my garage. A good friend of mine came up with the name so he will get all the royalty checks
Ive owned a 70 Duster for nearly half my life. I played with cars most of my childhood with my father; he had a 67 Mustang. After tinkering with that as a kid, it didnt take long for the gear head seed to be planted and I was always playing with Hotwheels and even drawing cars. In 4th grade I met a kid at school and we became pretty good friends. It turns out his father restored Mopars as a hobby. There were always awesome cars around. Some of the best ones were a 70 Hemi Cuda, a 69 Hemi Coronet R/T (one of 53), 6 pack Super Bees, and every combination of Road Runner you could imagine, just to name a few. How could one not fall in love with muscle cars? There were some A-bodies in there, but my friends dad was mostly a B-Body guy. As you can imagine, it wasnt long before I wanted my own Mopar. I acquired the Duster in 1996 as a roller. It was originally a 190ci /6 with zero options except an automatic transmission.
My goal was to turn it into a 71, 340 Duster clone, mostly because I liked the 71 340 stripes. I started collecting parts until I had enough to justify starting work on the car. I did all the work on the car myself with some help from my friends when needed. (Im only going to include some pics of that build since this thread is about the 2nd time around with this car.)
I finished the restoration in 1997. I drove the car to all the local cruise nights and local Mopar only car shows. I took home several Top 25 plaques. I was a happy kid.
Then, the drag racing bug hit. My first pass is a mostly stock 340 was 13.40. I was hooked and wanted to go faster- who doesnt. With a little more work, I eventually got the car to run mid 12s with the 340. Then I found out what happens to hypereutectic pistons when they run just slightly lean. I really wanted an 11 second car that I could still drive around on the street without fear or tearing something up. I decided to build a 360. It turned out to be a good running motor and got the car to run consistent 11.50s. Well one day I was on my way to a cruise night and got stuck behind a wedding procession and sat in one spot for a while. For some reason the motor overheated. Im not really sure why, it hadnt ever done it before. Maybe it was the summer temperatures in south Louisiana that helped with that. I made it home that night and about a week later I noticed white smoke out one pipe. I had cracked a cylinder.
Being a freshly graduated college student with a good job, why not build a bad *** motor. The stroker kits had just come out for the Mopar small blocks. Edelbrock had recently released their aluminum heads, and Indy wasnt far behind with their heads. The aftermarket for small block Mopars was finally coming alive. I procured a 1971 360 block (supposedly the best blocks were early 70s), and a balanced rotating assembly complete with Eagle Rods, Ross pistons and a stroker crank. I was at the Mopar Nationals and Indy was there with there New Small block heads. They wouldnt sell them. They were just debuting them and were not in production yet. I ended up buying Edelbrock heads that were sent to Indy prior to being machined. Indy cut bigger valves and moved the pushrod hole over to allow for bigger ports. Ive heard them called Indy-Brocks. So the day came when I stuck this beast in the car. It was complete with 13.5 compression and a huge solid roller cam. When it came to life, I nearly pissed on myself it was so loud. My original thought was, I over did it!
After lots of chassis tuning and getting the right torque convertor and getting the correct rear end gear for this motor, the car eventually ran 10.50s all day long. This was a full interior car with bench seat, 8 wide rear wheel, and exhaust. It still retained the factory style paint. It was a very deceiving car. Lots of guys in the staging lanes didnt believe it was an all motor small block running that fast. Oh, did I mention I had the entire motor painted orange, including the heads and intake just to trick the untrained eye.
So that fun lasted a while, but I obviously wasnt going very far on the street with 13.1 compression.
At this point, the years have all gotten mixed up in my head. The last time I raced the car was probably around 2008. At some point in time I pulled the motor and changed the pistons to a pump gas friendly compression ratio. Around 2011 I picked up a 5 speed Tremec from a buddy that had purchased the conversion kit but never installed it in his car. Once I put that 5 speed in the car, I really started missing cruising around in the car. If you havent driven or ridden in a car with lots of power and a 5 speed- do it!
The paint and interior was starting to show its age. It was now over ten years old since I had done the restoration. The car was nearly rust free when I got it, but now there was some rust bubbling up in the quarters and rockers. The headliner was falling, the carpet was getting ratty, and the paint was fading.
In 2012 I decided I was going to restore the interior since I had cut the roll cage out I had to replace the carpet. I also wanted to install buckets seats and a console. Well I have a problem with knowing where to stop when I start working on things. It wasnt long before I was scraping paint off and repairing the rust holes. In my mind I didnt think it would make much sense to only restore the interior because I needed to paint the jambs when I changed the paint color.
I only worked on the car a little bit since 2012 until just a few months ago. It wasnt because I didnt want to, it was really because I didnt have much time. Remember that Ironman thing I mentioned earlier, that consumes a bunch of time. I also moved in the middle of 2013 and started building a new house (complete with much larger garage), then moved into the new house earlier this year. After buttoning up most of the major honey do items, Im back on my car.
