One of the biggest differences in upgrades I did to my B body was sway bars front and rear and Bilsteins all around.. I spent most of September and part of October enjoying the car and decided to do these upgrades. I did install firm feel sway bars.. (probably didn’t need rear). Upon inspection I saw that KYBs had been installed when it was restored in 2001. Although they were 25 yrs old, they had less than 10k miles in them, so for now, I left them. I am fortunate enough that Inhave a friend that happens to have a mopar Utube channel that isn’t that far away. ( well 3 hours) anyway, we had discussed mild performance upgrades and made a plan. I was to buy all the parts put them in the trunk, then take the Barracuda down to him for a few days and he would install them do some “ hot rod” stuff and have it back in a week or two.. this is where things took a turn. I bought an Edelbrock performer intake, a new 650 avs2 carb, a pertronix distributor, new timing chain and gears, roller rockers, had a cam ground for it, new 4 bbl air cleaner . The plan was, I wanted to retain the manifolds.. I didn’t want to mess with headers in an A body, I wanted a fun daily driver. Remember I have a Roudy big block 440 with headers in my B body. I trailer the car down to him and…. The fun began. He started under the hood removing intake, water pump, timing chain and gears to access the cam. Raised the car to do something.. not sure exactly what and he spotted anti freeze dripping where I mentioned earlier. I figured it was dripping out the over flow hose which is why I added the overflow tank. Well that wasn’t were it was coming from .. the rear water jacket plugs plugs were leaking! Great, while he was into it that far,decided to go ahead and pull the motor. The transmission shift seal was leaking as well so decided to pull it at the same time. The plan was to pull the heads and port match them to intake and exhaust manifolds , so he separated them and put on engine stand. It got even better.. as he pulled the heads he found that it sported only 1 of the original ‘68 318 heads, the other was a 67 .243 closed chamber head. So the compression was different side to side, then he checked the play in the crank and found it unacceptable. So, now the lower end needed attention. When he pulled the pan he found the center thrust bearing cap seemed loose. The bolts were tight! Ends up he figured it was a factory issue and the bearing had been “walking”. It did a small amount of damage to the crank in that area as well. So out comes the pistons.. keep in. Mind I have put around 700 miles on this engine since I bought it. Now he finds 4 broken top rings. Now the machine shop was necessary! I will leave this here for now.. I will get back to you later this evening…
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I pulled the intake , replaced gaskets, valve cover gaskets , rebuilt oil filter adapter. All helped but did not solve all the issues.. more to come
