Hi all you Mopar addicts! I hope you all had a good weekend.
Here is the next chapter on getting the Maysville Hemi back in action.
I got a call from Dick about my cylinder heads and it wasn't what I wanted to hear. The heads were not busted in any way, but he said my stock valves would not work with the big roller cam springs and the required retainers. I had to get longer stemmed valves or I could not use the cam. I was really beginning to sweat the cost of all of this. I scrounged up everything Chevy that I had left to sell; a couple of early pigs with posi/gears, a 409 intake with carbs, a Borg Warner 4-speed and a set of chrome reversed wheels....other small stuff. I took a beating when I sold this stuff but at least I got enough out of it to buy the long stemmed stainless valves, pay for the multi-angle valve job, port cleanup and a great valve spring setup. Do you think that was the end of the hassle? We started assembling the engine and found that the taller valve/spring assembly upset the factory rocker arm geometry. Even with the adjustable rocker arms, you could see that it was all funky and a disaster waiting to happen.
Ahhh, the joys of high performance, lol. Been there done that but with a SB LA of course. Never had the opportunity to work on a Hemi.
If I shimmed the rocker stands, I had to have new push rods. I called Jake and asked him what I should do. He said to really make it right that I had to do both. The good news was that he had everything I needed. S&W had built a hemi Duster for a customer and they were taking it for a test and tune and to deliver it in Richmond, VA. They invited me to meet them there and he would bring the parts. Unfortunately, I didn't have the time and money to make that trip so I had him put the stuff in the mail. I remember going to one of those little loan companies and borrowing $300! Well, we got the parts and everything lined up perfectly. I even had a little money left over so I bought chromed valve covers. I remember how that beast sounded when we fired it up! A large circle of beer drinking friends had gathered for the celebration. The engine was very crisp and responsive.
I love the smell of a fresh engine! I imagine with the roller cam and higher zinc phospate content oil of the day there was no need for a 20 minute break in period.
We had also put collector extensions on the headers as per a Chrysler racing bulletin. I ended up keeping the Sun electric tach on it because I didn't want to booger up the firewall with a hole for the mechanical tach cable. In any case, the cable wouldn't have been long enough. I later sold that stuff for nearly twice what I paid for it.
I have had 3 Sun tachs in my life and never had one break on me. Old tech is not neccesarily bad tech. :)
I was so happy to finally have the Hemi back on the road but, man, did it ever suck gas!! It would fume you to death if you left it running while you were gassing up. It idled at 1,200 rpm. It was a little lazy under 3,000 rpm and at cruising speed with the 4.10 gears, the cam was still lumpy. It was a whole different ballgame though from 4 to 8,000 rpm! It was like lighting an after burner. This was the first time I really was concerned about those lousy drum brakes because it put that needle in the dash so fast and the top end march was awesome. I gave up a lot of bottom end and I figured if anybody got me out of the hole, I'd blow their doors off on the other end. About 3-months went by and no one wanted to race me. I couldn't buy a race. I paid off my loan but I wanted one of those cool fiberglass 6-pack hoods so I went in debt again. I painted it red to match the rest of the car. I remember adding a Stewart Warner electric pump and we trunk-mounted the battery. The hemi ate spark plugs like they were going out of style. To pick up the spark, Cragar had just introduced a capacitive discharge box (no, MSD was never the first!) so we put one of those on it and it helped some.
When you say it "ate plugs", do you mean that it fouled them out?
The worst thing about changing the plugs was that oil would seep down the spark plug tubes and into the chamber every time you removed a plug. That meant that a brand new plug would have to face an oil fire the first few minutes of use. The hemi would smoke like a freight train until it cleared itself out. Several times we took it up on hwy 52 at our "track" to try to dial in a leave. Anything under 2,500 and the car would bog and it seemed like anything above it would make it go up in smoke with the street tires. It wasn't as easy or as fun to drive as it originally was. I had made the mistake of making a race car out of the street car that was my daily driver. Oh well, the fat was in the fryer and it was what it was.
Yep, there's more to performance than just raw numbers. :read2: I've found my builds to be much more conservative as I've gotten older.
My Grandmother hated the car. I often drove her to church Sunday mornings in Flemingsburg and she was embarrassed by the noise it made and all the attention it got.
I also remember something really terrible happening at this time as well....I had a friend who lived in Manchester, OH who had just bought a new '69 hemi Superbee, yellow with a black interior. I met him and his girlfriend in the drive-in circuit and they became good friends of mine. He worked for the Highway Department for the state. One day, he was on a crew laying down blacktop. They told me he was "trying to catch a mouse" when he was run over by the asphalt truck and was killed instantly. His girlfriend nearly went insane. She had bought him a "Ratroaster" intake manifold for his car for an up-coming birthday gift. She later gave it to me saying he would have wanted me to have it. She started crying and I started crying and we cried until we just couldn't anymore.
My condolences. I've lost some really good friends over the years too. :angry7:
The hemi really liked the new intake and as you can expect, it sucked even more gas! A few months went by and still no one wanted to race. Jerry and I decided to see what it would do at the strip so we set up a plan. We decided we would take the exhaust system off of it from the header collectors back. We put a set of 4.89 gears in the Dana. Jerry had just gotten a new set of M&H wrinkle wall slicks (10") mounted on Cragars and we put them on the car and adjusted the pinion snubber. We loaded the Roadrunner on his ramp truck Saturday night to be ready to head out Sunday morning to Mountain Park Dragway. We spent the night in the shop using shop rags for pillows, drinking Stroh's beer and watching 8 mm **** on a white sheet hung on the back wall. (We used to get first-run films from Billy Stepp)
It was a nice day at the strip, sunny but chilly. We felt like the hemi would like the denser air and it did. Back in the day, the starting lines were always coated with VHT goo and then the rosin. The announcer would invite the hot cars to do the "melt-in" honors and specifically invited us to do so. Also back in the day, there were no limits on burnouts. Everyone burned across the starting line, usually with the driver's door hanging open to let the smoke out. Hubert Platt was there that day with a Super Stock Cobra Jet and I remember seeing him pulling 3-foot wheelies with one hand holding the door open. The hemi was hooking hard and lifting the left front wheel about 6-inches, leaving at 5,000 rpm. The second gear shift came up really fast with those 4.89 gears. The first run was an 11.72 and I thought I was "all that and a bag of chips"! Now guys, I know there are street cars out here today that do this without a sweat but that just wasn't how it was back in the day.
That was fast! My bother-in-law had an all black 383 road runner in the late 70's that would run 12's on street tires and break into the 11's on slicks. That car was incredible and I'll never forget that rumbling, big cam lope. I was just a kid back then, but that car was what inspired my love of Mopars.
Well-tuned hemi cars ran in the mid to high 13s and they were considered fast. We let just a little more air out of the slicks (to about 10 lbs) and made another pass. It was the best leave that car ever did with the 1-2 power shift and the 2-3 power shift very clean. When I powered into 4th, no gear. On the return road I could only get it in neutral. One of the eye bolts in the pressure plate broke in half causing 1/3 of pressure still applied to the disc. It ruined our day. There was no power winch on the ramp truck and we always drove the cars up on them. Sox & Martin never had power winches either! A whole bunch of guys helped us push and load the car by hand. It was a bitter sweet kind of thing to have the car run so good but then to bring it home broken and having to sink more money into it yet. I proudly showed everyone the time slip but it worked against getting any street races all the more....until one night at the drive-ins when some guys from Ripley, Oh, came in running their mouths. That's the next chapter.
Pat
