Jason B.
Active Member
Do you call it a barn find if you're the one who drove it into the barn and parked it 30 years ago?
I bought this car when I was in high school more because of how excited my dad was about it than for myself. My dad bought a '71 340 Duster after he got back from Vietnam and he really loved that car. But young wives and babies, right? But when he saw this one sitting in a yard for sale, it take much convincing and I was in.
We rebuilt the 318, but it's nothing to write home about. It has some TRW flat top pistons and a TRW cam with a 650 spread bore Holley. We put a shift kit in the factory auto and a slap stick shifter, but it still has 273 or whatever airplane gears it came with. It was originally yellow, but we painted it green like my dad's 340. It sounded alright and ran good enough for a high school kid who grew up on Fast Times at Ridgemont High and stories about his uncle's and dad's muscle cars. Unfortunately, it has a leak (I think it's probably in the cowl) and water runs into the floorboard every time it rains. That was a little beyond our abilities at the time, so I parked it in the barn and it became one of those things that we were always going to get around to. But we never did. I lost my dad to pancreatic cancer a couple of years ago.
A few weeks back my 16 year old asked me if we could get it out and fix it. He's finished a year of collision repair at the tech school and worked full time this summer at a local body shop. And my skills are a lot better than they were back then. So, the prospect of pulling the dash and tackling this doesn't seem as daunting as it once did. If we can get a few to-do things checked off the list over the next couple of weeks, we may pull it out when the weather cools down and the snakes quit crawling. Maybe see what we can do with it this winter. I came across this forum while I was doing some research, and it seems like there's a wealth of knowledge here. I hope this turns into a full blown restoration thread and not just a forgotten post somewhere down the road. I guess time will tell.
Here are a couple of pictures as it currently sits. I guess one of the first things we need to do is see if we've got a trailer sitting around that we can steal some wheels off of to get it into the shop.
I bought this car when I was in high school more because of how excited my dad was about it than for myself. My dad bought a '71 340 Duster after he got back from Vietnam and he really loved that car. But young wives and babies, right? But when he saw this one sitting in a yard for sale, it take much convincing and I was in.
We rebuilt the 318, but it's nothing to write home about. It has some TRW flat top pistons and a TRW cam with a 650 spread bore Holley. We put a shift kit in the factory auto and a slap stick shifter, but it still has 273 or whatever airplane gears it came with. It was originally yellow, but we painted it green like my dad's 340. It sounded alright and ran good enough for a high school kid who grew up on Fast Times at Ridgemont High and stories about his uncle's and dad's muscle cars. Unfortunately, it has a leak (I think it's probably in the cowl) and water runs into the floorboard every time it rains. That was a little beyond our abilities at the time, so I parked it in the barn and it became one of those things that we were always going to get around to. But we never did. I lost my dad to pancreatic cancer a couple of years ago.
A few weeks back my 16 year old asked me if we could get it out and fix it. He's finished a year of collision repair at the tech school and worked full time this summer at a local body shop. And my skills are a lot better than they were back then. So, the prospect of pulling the dash and tackling this doesn't seem as daunting as it once did. If we can get a few to-do things checked off the list over the next couple of weeks, we may pull it out when the weather cools down and the snakes quit crawling. Maybe see what we can do with it this winter. I came across this forum while I was doing some research, and it seems like there's a wealth of knowledge here. I hope this turns into a full blown restoration thread and not just a forgotten post somewhere down the road. I guess time will tell.
Here are a couple of pictures as it currently sits. I guess one of the first things we need to do is see if we've got a trailer sitting around that we can steal some wheels off of to get it into the shop.
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