Birth of the Blue Missile

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blue missile

blue missile

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THE BIRTH OF THE BLUE MISSILE​
For the sake of those who have never experienced or would like to remember their own car youth I will try to remember my own. It was a while ago and there are some real fuzzy periods, due to the time period and attitude of our country.

It was june1972 and I had just graduated from a private military academy and my mother had moved us from Long Island New York to Miami Beach to be near her parents. We had a condo right on the ocean and Miami Beach as a whole was a sleepy little town. There were private houses still on the beach where now there are nothing but high-rises. The South Beach of current fame was a collection of run down motels. Life was at a slower pace than I was used to. There were a few Kids my age that used to congregate in the poolroom in the building where we lived. One of them was Larry who also had a constant companion Bob. Larry owned a powder blue VW bug that we would take all over. We were musicians and traveled in many circles up and down the South Florida coast.


He was the only one I knew that had even a remote interest in cars. He had fixed up the engine and done some interior work but nothing radical.


A small aside that may help to give you the picture of how undeveloped and slow paced the area still was.

There was a small jetty at the base of the seawall, which formed the pool deck. You could actually snorkel and collect stone crabs by hand along this jetty. There were all sorts of larger fish to be seen and caught surfcasting. You could swim in the ocean there off of the small beach that still existed between the wall and the water. One day Larry and I were on the pool deck just hanging out. It was during the summer so it was ninety degrees and one hundred percent humidity. This helps to account for the slow pace of life there. All of a sudden we heard a series of small explosions, which turned out to be rifle shots from the roof of the condo. We didn’t think terrorists, or assassination plots we just thought crazy person. But you see there were also sharks that would come right up to shore where you were swimming. One of the occupants of the building had gotten tired of this had decided to take action. I don’t know how good a shot Ozzy was but he scared the hell out of all of us. To put this into perspective the building was twenty stories tall. So the shots, as far as we were concerned could have gone anywhere. I have no doubt that though he saw a shark and that was what he was shooting at. The police were never called but the building manager went to the roof and just told him to quit. You see this was still a small community of people, mostly old and retired, and Hot Rods and that scene were nowhere to be found.


There are also another couple of characters that have to be introduced to the picture, one was the head valet at the building, Thomas was his name but we all called him TK. His helper Will was another character that is of note. The closest I got to performance driving was Will and TK taking the assorted cars in and out of the underground parking garage at terrifying speeds. You know the car parkers in the movies, Will especially was worse. But to his credit I don’t know of any wrecks he caused. The burn out pit at your local strip had nothing on this place.
I guess I should also address the fuzzy aspect of this time and I will try not to dwell on it. The only thing more plentiful than grass in Miami at that time was the water in the ocean and the water in the air. My first experience at the building with getting ‘well adjusted’ was being invited by Will and Tk into the main return air plenum for the building’s air conditioning. In this case it was a room about six feet across and ten feet long and the ductwork, which made up the ceiling, went straight up to the roof. It was right behind the valet booth and the intake grill was about four feet wide and six feet tall. They had taken off the screws and used it as a doorway. They had a few chairs in there and would go in and spark one up. Actually that’s not quite correct. Because of the flow of air you had to light up outside of the ‘room’ and take it in. The benefit of this location was they could watch for the customers and no one could smell what they were doing. You could see out the grill, but because of no lighting inside, they could not see you. We would go to many parties with the both of them and it was after one of these that Larry took me to meet one of his friends.Who was also a valet at the building.


His name was Jimmy. He had big glasses and always had a cheshire cat grin, and he had a 1970 yellow Plymouth Duster with the black stripe package. It had a 340 in it that had been built to the hilt, and according to Jimmy it had belonged to an aircraft mechanic that had been drafted and sent to Vietnam. Even in my ignorance I could tell this was not your ordinary car and it was probobly the reason for his grin. Jimmy spent every Saturday morning adjusting the rocker arms to make sure the solid tappets were just right. The thing Idled with such a violent lope that the antenna would rock back and forth like a conductor leading an orchestra. Once we met, we all hung out together and went for many rides in his Duster. The Duster was his daily driver, now this was not a problem in town because at that time we could buy Amaco 101 at many locations for about forty cents a gallon. But it had a 4.10 posi in the rear so he could not take it on long highway jaunts. We tried this, and every fifteen minutes or so he would have to pull over and let it cool off. For road trips we used Larry’s bug but for in town there was nothing like that duster.


One day with Jimmy driving and me in the car, we were going south on Biscayne Blvd., for what reason I can not remember, we had just stopped at a light. Next to us in a large brown boat, a Buick maybe, an old man shouted out to us “Hey it sounds like that thing needs a tune up”. You see he had to shout because Jimmy had a pair of blown cherry bombs for his mufflers. It was LOUD. Jimmy turned to him and shouted back “Hey old man, you want to race?” The old man gunned his boat and smiled. Jimmy told me to hold on tight and enjoy. Once the turned green he punched it and pulled a wheelie half way to the next light. We looked back and the old man was still sitting at the light dazed in amazement. It was at that point that I was hooked!

More later
Andrew
 
Got for it, Andrew! Brings back lots of memories.
I had a '69 340 Swinger that I cruised on Whittier Blvd. in SoCal back then. The 40-cent gas price you mentioned made me chuckle 'cause my ex-wife gave me a lot of grief back then for buying Chevron 'White Pump Supreme' for 36.9-cents per gallon. It was 2 cents more per gallon than the normal supreme grade gas.
Those 340's sure were fun. Hope the 360-powered '69 Dart I'm building now is just as much fun!
 
Carry on, my good man! You picked the right car and the right time for a ripe, juicy tale.....get to it!:-D

Warning; Once you get rolling, you'll remember things forgotten and buried decades ago. That's kinda scary!
Warning; It's kind of a drag when you reach the end. But a story's only good (like a bottle of wine) if you share it, so pass it around, my friend!:-D :-D :-D
 
Ok here's the next bit,

It was now 1973, I was going to the University of Miami and living in the dorm. There was very little car action except my request of my mother to let me buy a 1950s completely restored Jaguar. It was the one that looks like a Rolls Royce. It was snow white and had a red leather interior and the guy was asking $5500 for it. Now on the performance scale it rated negative numbers, however on the party/chick scale it was off the chart.

The reason I was making the request of my mother was that my father had died just after I graduated the academy and there was insurance money she had control over. I was eighteen but the age of majority bill had not yet been signed. You could be drafted, but you couldn’t vote and you couldn’t sign contracts yet. So I was beholding to her for use of the small amount of funds left to my brother and me.

It was after that she actually took me to look at used cars at a ford dealership. I sit here chuckling still remembering the look on her face when I showed her the used car I wanted. It was a DeTomaso Pantera a few years old for about the same price as the Jaguar. She went off on me like a roman candle. “How could I bother wasting her time to look at something like that.” Unless you have a Jewish mother or maybe you are a member of the Musad you have no idea of this level of wrath. This explains why most Arab nations don’t screw with Israel, too many Jewish mothers to deal with!

I have to explain that in Miami at that time public transportation was almost non-existent. So getting a car was a necessity if you didn’t want to be confined to where ever you happened to be at the time. Larry did come to the dorm from time to time and we would take jaunts all over. There are too many stories here that have nothing to do with cars, maybe at a later date I’ll enumerate.

Later that year the age of majority bill was signed, so I went to her and demanded my money now that I was ‘of age’. She gave in, and within days I was at the Broad Causeway Plymouth Dodge dealership.

I walked into the dealership in shorts, tank top shirt and flip-flops. Larry gave me a ride and was actually more excited than I was. He knew exactly why I was there and exactly what I was going to walk out with. I told the salesman I wanted a Plymouth Duster with a 340 in it and what were my options. He told me they had two in stock. One was yellow with black stripes, this wasn’t going to do Jimmy had one of those, and they had a fire engine red one with white stripes. Well red it was. It had air conditioning, disk breaks, a torqueflight and the center console shifter. It had a black and white interior with white bucket seats. It looked like a great place to start.

I was then ushered into the little sales cubicle by the salesman and we sat down to talk about the money part of the buy. They were asking $4200 on the sticker, now keep in mind that you have a guy in a suite looking across the table at an eighteen old kid dressed for the beach. He asked me how I wanted to pay for the car. Well I said “first of all we need to talk about how much I’m going to pay for the car.” He looked at me in shock. I then said “look you are going to make enough money on the financing to let me have it at a much better price. Why don’t you go and see what you can do?” He said “I have to go talk to my manager.” He then left and, I assume, went to go smoke a cigarette. He returned with a sales contract and said “OK we can do it for $3800. Now let’s talk about the financing.”

It was then that I said “Ok it’s financed” and took my checkbook out and wrote a check for the cost of the car plus the tax tag and title! There is no way he was thinking this kid has cash. His mouth was on the floor; he just watched his commission go out the window. I signed the papers and he took the check, and I told him I would be back tomorrow to pick up the car.

Now for my first of many confessions; I didn’t know how to drive yet! Larry and Bob were going to have to drive me there and one of them was going to have to drive it back to the garage apt I was occupying. I picked up the car and signed up for driving lessons the next day. You see at the military academy you were not allowed to have a car nor was there any sort of drivers ed for the cadets. The course took about a week and after that I got my license and was off.

More to follow
Andrew
 
Captin: by the way the end of this story is yet to be written and will be done when the current Duster is done.
Andrew
 
Since I happen to still be up I'll post part three:
PART THREE​

Once I was in the drivers seat I knew I wanted more of everything, Power and flash. Jimmy then introduced me to his mechanic Tommy who was the spitting image of Duane Allman.

For those of you who don’t know, the Allman Bros’ mother, until a number of years ago, lived in a small community just north of Miami Beach called Surfside where they grew up. Where you could on occasion hear the Allman Joys play concerts at the Surfside community center, what a time it was in South Florida.

As it happens Tommy was a mopar man also. He had a sublime green van with a punched out bigblock in it. Now when I say he could pull wheelies with his van, He could pull wheelies! I personally did not get to experience them but after E-mailing Larry the text of the story he added this:

“The time I met him (Tommy) he took me for a ride in that ’61 van with the 3 speed manual shifter on the dash, an uncovered blueprinted 426 Hemi sat 6” from my left leg, that had a carburetor as big as my 1.6 liter VW engine, he popped a wheelie, that in a flash, I was looking at the nice South Florida midday sun!.” L.W.

I do remember Larry returning from that experience (it was a beer run I think) him jumping out of the van as Tommy pulled it under the carport. Larry’s eyes were rather big and he would have been pale if he weren’t already. Let me describe him. Larry was six feet tall slender build very light skin with typical freckles of someone with naturally fire red hair. That hair was to the middle of his back and as wide as his shoulders and very wavy. A red headed Robert Plant comes to mind. His hair was of such note that when we would use the elevator at the condo, women standing behind him used to stroke it and tell him how nice it was. This was very disturbing to him for he was naturally very shy, and the women were his grand mother’s age.

Tommy suggested that I take the Thermoquad off along with the manifold and replace them with an Edelbrock highrise and a Holley. So we put on a LD340 and a 3310 with vac secondaries. Wow what a difference. Larry and I then put a set of Hooker headers on, it just kept getting better. Now the headers that I put on are basically the same as the ones you can get today. They did hang low but South Florida is flat and speed bumps were not invented yet, so the ground clearance was not as big a deal as it is today.

At that time I was attending a junior college, because my party major at U.M. was discontinued along with underwater basket weaving. (I really did not take well to the big university system where there were three hundred students to a class in the lecture hall and you were not allowed to ask questions. I was used to small classes at the academy and a working relationship with my teachers.) One day while leaving the parking lot I was trying to get in line to turn left and there was someone letting me into line. A lady turning into parking lot entrance road actually tried to get in front of me, and ended up hitting my drivers side front fender. She also hit a couple of cars that were in the right lane waiting to turn right. I was almost in the line and she just wasn’t paying attention or didn’t care.. This made little sense because it was two lanes in each direction, and she was the only coming in at the time. She had plenty of room behind me to enter the parking lot go figure. Florida was and is a no fault state, so she got the ticket. She was unhurt but did try to sue me because her clarinet case slid across the seat and hit her in the thigh. Too many people looking for a free ride, sound familiar? Sorry, I forgot, not this thread.

I was insured to the hilt and took the car back to the dealership to be repaired. The service manager told me they could fix it good as new. It was only the sheet metal, no frame damage because the accident was at about ten miles per hour. He said they would match the paint and I would not be able to tell it was ever hit. I told him that if it did not match exactly, I would not sign for the car. This was a fire engine red paint job that had been fading in the South Florida sun for about a year, there was no way they were going to match it. He then said to me “What color do you want the car?” I said “ It came in her two colors red and white. I want it black and Chrysler blue, like this” and proceeded to show him a picture of Don Carlton’s Mopar Missile. He said fine, it was an insurance job so he didn’t care, but he said that I would have to help tape off the blue to make sure it was done to my satisfaction. I was fine with that.

About a week later I got the car back and it was all black. They did it right, the jams, the doors and the trunk, were all done. Only the engine compartment wasn’t done. I was told the paint would need to tighten up for about a week before it could have tape put on it for the blue, and I should come back in a couple of weekends to do the blue. I had left the picture of the mopar missile with them so the paint guy already had a good idea what to expect. I showed up early the next Saturday and we taped it up and he sprayed it on the spot, no paint booth involved. I walked down the street for lunch and after eating we took off the paper and tape and got a look at the results. Even the paint guy had to admit it looked cool.

enjoy
Andrew

Captain: I'll post the current build when we get there unless Adam sais its ok to break the thread in two. But just for the record I'm forteen pages into this thing already and we're not three years into it yet.
 
too many....uhh whaddya call them? ...uhhh...WORDS!! ya that's it. Not enough PICTURES :-D:-D:-D
 
Thanks for the encouragement;

PART FOUR​

The next time I got together with the gang again is when they decided it should be called the blue missile. After that I got a set of aluminum mags and a set of M-50s for the rear. It still had the drums on the back and I have to assume it was the large bolt pattern the mags had the three position inserts for the lugs and they were on the largest position. It also had an 8 ¾ rear with a 3.23 diff. The tires did rub a little so I also did what everybody at the time did and put on a set of air shocks and jacked it up a little in the back. I also had Tommy put a B&M auto/man shift kit in the tranny. I also put in what at the time was cutting a edge stereo, a quadraphonic eight track player, with either Zepplin, Hendrix, Deep Purple playing at deafening levels, or John Mayall to which I was constantly Jamming on harp while driving with the other hand. My avatar is the car at this stage. Oh I also still had the Duster front plate from the dealer. I used some of the extra blue paint and painted the ‘duster’ and lettering blue. I also painted the side emblems and the tail emblem that say Duster blue inside.

It was also at that point that I got involved with electronics. I put together an alarm system using an old siren/radio unit out of a trashed highway patrol car. There was lead foil protection on all of the windows, and a round key to arm and disarm it on the side by the driver’s door. It had mercury switches for tilt and bump and a momentary panic switch in the ashtray with the sliding door behind the shifter. We used to call that switch the South Florida Idiot Horn.

Now let me explain.
Even in the 70s when the roads were not that crowded some people drove like real idiots. There is a traffic maneuver that has become known as the ‘Cuban Glide’. This is when you cross five lanes of traffic at full speed without signaling from left to right at almost a ninety degree tangent to traffic to exit the freeway. Well when it became obvious that there was a cluster of folks trying to behave in such a fashion that danger was imminent I would hit that momentary switch and let a short ‘WHOOP’ and everybody would act like sane drivers for a minute or so until they could figure out where the cop was. By that time I had cleared the situation and was on my way with no harm. Let me say I never pretended to be cop or harass anyone. This was defensive tool only.

OK there was this one time. I was following behind Bob and one his friends, we were traveling to a gig together and I was behind them and I leaned on the SFIH . Bob new very well who it was, but his friend didn’t and tossed his lid out the window. Bummer. That never happened again! Lesson well learned.

Back to the electronics.
It was a little later that I decided that I was going to fulfill my love of driving and take some long distance cruses. So I would need a CB radio, no cell phones yet. I bought a Lafayette electronics CB radio that looked like a carphone and installed it with a single trunk mounted antenna. I mounted the radio to the console on the passenger’s side within my reach. It worked well for short distance talking on the highway.

We the three musketeers, Larry, Bob and myself spent much time zipping around Miami Beach in the duster. One of our challenges in life was to see exactly how fast we could go and still get the quarter in the basket for the Broad Causeway toll. Thirty-five Mph was my best, there were no gates and if you threw it ahead of you enough as you went through you could watch it turn green as the tollbooth faded in the rearview mirror. One of the other pleasures in life was a road called Pinetree drive. It is a winding divided road that goes the full length of Miami Beach on the mainland side of the intercoastal waterway. There were never any cops, only a few houses at that time and a blast to go eighty or ninety around the curves. Larry would drive it in his bug like a madman but the duster was more fun and a lot less scary.

Captin: one of great delemmas here in feeding the monkeys is that there are too many monkeys that will see then do. I'm really having to balance what I write with dicsretion. You see I work for God and Sons now!
Andrew
 
Wow this is great .... hmmmm do you have copyrights on this thing???....I might just start printing it up .... lol
 
[QUOTE Captin: one of great delemmas here in feeding the monkeys is that there are too many monkeys that will see then do. I'm really having to balance what I write with dicsretion. You see I work for God and Sons now!
Andrew[/QUOTE]

I know just what you mean. Exactly.
I work for the same guy.
PM me if you need any advice
 
Ok here is some more, I got a bunch done while watching an empty job site.​
​
PART FIVE​

​
This next little vignette is here because Larry reminded me of its significance and it is one we both remember with fondness. I would also like to say that Larry and I both wish Bob could be here to share these memories. Bob took the path that slid him into the dark abyss of hard drugs and a street lifestyle. So for you young guns out there please don’t go that way. He died sometime in the late eighties in his late twenties and is buried in an unmarked grave in Miami’s pauper field. Let me also say that at that time it was still legal to go on such hunts. The farmers didn’t care so long as you didn’t harass the cattle or destroy their fences. I also want to say that we all start out as ‘young and dumb’ I am happy to say that I have greatly matured and these kinds of stunts or behavior are not part of my lifestyle anymore. But back then, after being introduced to the wonders of South Florida’s mycological flora by TK, we all had many adventurous hunts.

Larry, Bob and I were hanging out at my place one Friday night listening to albums and decided to take a ‘field trip’ in the morning. .As Larry puts it (We were going on a fungus-collecting safari in North Miami where I was doing some research on how territorial male cows were at daybreak! L.W.) The partying supplies were running short so I decided to ration them. I told them we would get well adjusted before we left in the morning. Larry and Bob really liked to party and had little patience for such measures. We were going to leave 6:00 or so. They crashed at my place so we could be sure to leave on time. I set my alarm for 5:30 and went to sleep around midnight. The alarm went off the next morning, we had breakfast got well adjusted and left. We climbed into the Duster and left. It was still dark as it should have been, we turned north onto Biscayne Blvd and as we went up the street I spied the clock on top of the bank at the corner of Biscayne and 79th st. The clock said it was 4:30 in the morning! Because of their impatience those guys had set my clock ahead!

We turned back and hung out for a while. We needed to get to our destination at daybreak, where we were going, you were so far out in the country (I know in South Florida?) that there were no city lights and it was pitch black before sunrise. When the sun came up it would cause the incredibly thick fog to glow a caramel color and you could not see more than a few yards in front of you. Now as the sun actually came up the fog would lift and It also went from being sort of cool to hot and steamy in a matter of minutes. This incident happened before the sun was fully up. As Larry has already said, and the part of this story that makes us both smile, when we were on the hunt Bob would not leave one of the local residents alone. Bob was definitely the craziest of us three. Now he was not yelling or acting in a goofy fashion, he just wanted to get past the cow to look in another part of the field. These cows have relatively long horns pointed to the front, not like the Texas long horns, which are to the side. Larry and I were at least ten yards from the fence line and Bob was at least forty. As he continued to approach this particular cow to get past it, he finally violated the cows ‘personal space’ and the cow charged him. All of a sudden through the fog we heard a snorting sort of sound and Larry and I climbed over the fence with relative ease just in case. Then through the fog came Bob with the cow behind him, making a mad dash for the fence and diving over it. These fences were four strands of barbed wire about four feet tall on metal posts. Larry and I lost it we were laughing so hard. The rest of the morning was spent without incident and we returned back to my place, with memories of a hunt we will never forget.

Lots more to come, I have already sent a later portion to an old friend in Hollywood he liked it but said there was no future in it. Too much like deleverence. Iwll tell you all that every word of this tale is true and as accurate as Larry and I can rememberit.
Andrew
 
Here is another chunck for those of you who may still be reading.
Andrew

PART SIX​
Since a good portion of this story is about road trips I have to at least tell you of a way not to take a road trip. First its not in a mopar, secondly its in a VW beetle, thirdly its from Miami to Queens New York and back. And then don’t try to make it one way in one day. I made this trip with Larry in the fall of 74.It was an fun but uneventful trip, I all I remember is that we were well adjusted the entire way and had to stop just south of the Chesapeake bay and crash. We got up the very early the next morning in hopes of seeing a beautiful sunrise and had breakfast at a restaurant either on the bridge or at the southern end of the bridge. Because the fog was like pea soup we never got to see the sunrise over the bay.

After talking to Larry today he told me a small story of just how crazy Will the valet was. We didn’t discuss exactly when this occurred but we were all still hanging out at the condo.

Let me set this up first.
The condo had an underground parking garage with an entrance ramp at one end of the building and an exit ramp at the other end of the building. The building is about one hundred and twenty feet wide and fifty feet deep. The ramps extend about thirty of those feet to the other side in one incline from the street to the parking level. Facing the building the ramp on the left was the entrance and the one on the right was the exit.
Larry said that one day Will backed a Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham against the base of the entrance ramp facing the other end of the building. He power braked it and spun the tires until the entire parking garage was so full of smoke you could not see your hand in front of your face. Larry said the smoke was billowing out of both the entrance and exit ramps in huge quantities. He said after the event they all went down to survey the scene and found bits of molten rubber on the floor and the walls.
So do you still think its really worth a five dollar tip?

Back to the Duster:
The car now had enough miles on it to be considered broken in. This chick I was hanging with had some friends going to the University of Florida in Gainsville that she wanted to visit. One day while dashing around town she suggested the visit, and all those in the car said ‘ROAD TRIP!’, sounded good to me. There were four of us in the car; Francy, Brian the lead player from the band I was in and his girlfriend Lori, and myself. We left right then and there and headed up the turnpike. We got outside of the greater Miami area and joined up with a line of vehicles going north. This ‘convoy’ was traveling about eighty miles an hour. The trip would be about three hundred miles long.

The current thinking at that time was that, if a trooper saw us from the other side it would not look suspicious because we were all traveling together. You know there could not be that many people speeding all at once. Radar units were around but not that common yet. At that time the turnpike was relatively empty the further north you went. So after about a half an hour of this I decided to break from the pack and open the Duster up. About this time we saw a state trooper going south on the other side. After the last person in the convoy could no longer see him I got on the radio and told everyone I was leaving and headed up north. I got over in the passing lane, got to the front of the line and bid my farewell to all. I centered the car on the stripe and brought it up to one hundred and ten cruised there for a little while and then brought it to one fifteen. After only a few minutes the front end started to get a bit floaty on me and I backed it down to around one ten. During the course of this I did pass a couple of cars. One of which was a VW bug filled with chicks. They were probably going seventy and I was doing one hundred and ten. They did not take kindly to this. After about a half hour of this the oil pressure dropped a couple of pounds so I backed it down to around fifty five maybe sixty, until I could get to the rest stop just up the road to check things out (the current speed limit was 55). Oh yes, I had put a real oil pressure gauge under the dash but I never installed a tack.

Just about that time the Florida State Trooper (you know the one who was headed south) came over the hill in his tan and black Dodge Interceptor with his lights flashing. He was going so fast that when he came over the hill he left the ground momentarily. Obviously he had also been listening to the eleven-meter band when I decided to leave the group and open the Duster up, and he wanted a piece of me. He pulled along side of me did a rolling speed check and pulled me over. Let me try to convey a proper picture here. He caught up to me and ‘stuck’ along side of me so suddenly it was startling. I looked over at him in his tan Stetson, all the troopers wore them at that time, with a very stern look on his face he then hand signaled me over to the side of the road. You know he could have been chasing someone else; I was just doing the speed limit! ;-)

He stepped out of his car and asked for my license, registration and insurance. Keep in mind he only caught me doing roughly the speed limit. He asked me to step out of the car, and this was of concern because I had no shoes on. At that time in Florida you could get a ticket for driving without shoes, don’t ask me why. It was obvious that the occupants of my car were convinced all of us were going to jail, and they freely told me so before I got out of the car.

The trooper asked me if I had been speeding? I said “yes”. He said “like like how fast?” I was up to the consequences of getting caught say, doing eighty, so that’s what I told him. He said “Bullshit, I just chased you for a half an hour doing one hundred and forty five!” I had nothing to say, knowing he was only able to clock me maybe doing sixty. He said “Son let me tell you, I have a Charger with a 440 in it. My wife and I take it out on this road at three o’clock in the morning and do that kind of speed, but this is my road. You are not allowed to do that. Do you understand?” “YES SIR” I replied. He then said “Lets see what you have under the hood.” As we walked to the front of the car and I popped the hood the VW full of chicks passed us and yelled “Yaaaaa they caught him—they caught him!” as they passed. All I could do was bow my head. He looked at the 340 said it all looked great but wanted me to remember this encounter so he wrote me a warning for doing sixty! We went our separate ways, I to the rest stop a couple miles up the road and he to the south.
When I got back into the car the gang could not believe all I got was a warning! Of course as would be the case, we bumped into the chicks at the rest stop where I had to explain to them that all I got was a warning. Mopars rule!
By the way, the trip took about three and one half hours, even with the interruption and the rest stop. J
I will say that at this time the Duster was getting about twelve MPG in the city and eighteen to twenty MPG on the highway. On that trip it got a little less!!!
After we arrived at the University we partied for a couple of days we met lots of people, including a couple of guys trying to steal the M-50s off the back of the car. All I can say is thank God for the McGuards I had on at the time. Because we caught them in the middle of the act, when they ran off they also left the other lug nuts on the ground, which we were able to put back on. We went back home the next day.
 
memikie:
I will increase your photo viewing by 100% here is the only other photo of the original blue missile that I have. As you will eventually find out that car no longer exists. The whole point of this thread was to tell the story of that car its successor and then the build of the current version.
If the story is not wanted but what everyone is loking for is the plans and what little progress there is to report on the current build. Thats what Ill do.
Thats the reason I asked Adam what he wanted me to do, to which he has never fowarded a response. No problem there I just thought you guys would enjoy these tales.
Andrew

front view BM2.jpg
 
We would like both.
Your choice if you want to put them together or,
This one for the stories.
And another thread for the build.
Good stories.
Either way-keep it comin.
 
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