'68 318 to carbed Magnum 5.2: Check my checklist
Looking great Kurt. Hey, why even keep the ballast?
I like the look of hiding all the little modifications or stealthy upgrading to newer parts that look like older parts. As a result, the whole enchilada looks entirely familiar - yet, it's completely different, requiring more than a few double-takes to figure out what kind of visual parts trickery is going on. It doesn't let in on how subtle it is until you give it a good look.
Take out the resistor, and that's just one less illusion, possibly betrayed further by the splice and solder required to join the factory terminals.
Packaging everything under the hood of a beater 4-door B-body is just icing on the cake. It may not be a real RK41 police Belvedere, but as a clone, I'm able to build it more as a Mopar fan's fantasy of what we really wish most police car packages to be - some kind of stealth, untouchable unicorn of a performance package, with a whole bunch of oddball goodies under the hood that look cool just by virtue of being out of the norm.
More often then not, most of these packages are not much different than their performance model equivalents, but the legend of factory go-fast bits in an unassuming plain white wrapper remains quite the emotional draw. That, and I'm sure that scoring performance bits cheap off a decommissioned car back in the day was the period equivalent of scoring some Trick Flow B/RB heads for nothing on eBay today: It's the thrill of the bargain-basement hunt.
Thus, if the real thing often falls short of our imaginations, might as well build something straight out of Jake and Elwood's Small Block Cop Car Performance Cookbook (on sale at all retailers, beginning the summer of '81), eh?
At any rate, a beat-up '69 CHP Polara with a 440 gets my attention faster than a HEMI-powered '69 Charger Daytona, and I'm sure I'm not the only weirdo who thinks like this.
There's a good possibility the 318's original valve covers may even work their way back onto this thing too. The clips keep the wires looking very nice and orderly, and I'm not sure I care for that plastic click-in-place oil fill port on the Magnum covers. Plus, it's a dead giveaway that there are Magnum heads on this thing (though, strangely enough, I don't mind advertising the fact with the Maggie covers).
-Kurt
