Rocker's 1973 Duster "Clara"

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Rocker'sDuster

MOPAR rookie!
Joined
Jul 22, 2009
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Location
Southern California!
Ok, so I have been on here for about a year or two now, and figured I procrastinated long enough…time to finally get a restoration thread going.

This is our 1973 Duster “Clara”. The family wanted a fun project car we could take to the local cruise, so we added her to our family about 2 years ago (damn time flies). It is your typical dime a dozen slant six Duster: Honey gold, A/C, auto, sbp, manual everything, etc… But she is solid!
I am the 5th owner of the car; the previous two owners also having been FABO members! When we bought the car, it had already been painted Omaha Orange (single stage), and is a “ten footer” home job. It had older BMW bucket seats installed, and…sigh…the engine bay had been spray bombed flat black (I’m talking mask off the block and spray EVERYTHING else).
The family enjoyed the car for about a year or so, but we started to want more, so this past June I decided to start converting the car to a 4 speed V8. Don’t get me wrong, the slant was great, but we really want a nice thumping V8. I also want to cleanup/ restore as much as I can under the hood during the swap process.

Below are a few pics from 2009, when we first got the car.

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The Fam, before heading to our first cruise.
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We really didn’t make any drastic changes the first year. My wife got me a set of Duster floor mats, I removed the home made center console, and added a side sweep tach (Not much use really, but looks Damn cool!). I was most proud of the “225” callouts I added though…Gave it a unique touch, while looking like it could have come from the factory (thank you Gary).

Floor mats and tach.
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Rocking the 225.
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Oh…and a custom plate.
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Over the next day or two I will post all of my progress up to where the car sits currently. I have spent countless hours reading through FABO, and have learned soo much. It’s even cooler applying that knowledge to my actual project! Maybe it’s still too early, but I am having an absolute F@#king blast working on this car! :D

Hope you enjoy.
 
The first thing I got my wife to agree to was getting rid of the tiny stock sized tires, but in order to get bigger tires…we had to get rims too! To keep things simple, we decided to keep it SBP (this may change later). I love steelies and poverty caps, but in order to keep my wife on board with spending money, I agreed the Rally rims would look better (my 2nd choice anyways). I bought a set of 14 x 5.5 SBP rally rims off of Mopardude318. They were in good shape and came with a set of decent center caps. I had the rears widened to 8 inches, then had the set powder coated (inside and out).

I Went with BFG’s
225x60x14 up front, and 245x60x14 in the rear. The 245x60’s were not easy to find at the time!
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I scrubbed the hell out of the inside of the caps by hand…30+ years of grime to remove. They are not perfect, but damn near close! I also carefully re-tapped all of the center cap screw holes, and removed some flash off of the lug nut holes so they wouldn’t scratch my rims once re-installed.
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I went crazy with the steel wool; both on the front polished areas, and the backside!
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Yeah I masked all 4 off like this…Yeah I know there are easier ways, but I like torturing myself.
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I used Totally Auto’s "Textured Light Argent". The product worked fantastic for me, and they turned out killer!
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They look badass in the sun!

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When your limited on workspace (apartment living), you have to improvise. I gave the tires a final wash in the kid’s bathtub… my cat helped by stealing the SOS pad...multiple times!
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Finally back together and ready for the car.
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A comparison of the New vs. stock rear tire width.
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The original undercoating was solid. I hit it with a wire brush and gave it a quick coat of Duplicolor rubberized coating. Really only wanted to get rid of any over spray from the paint job the PO put on the car.
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I like the "raw" look of running without the trim rings. This was my very first major project, and I was satisfied with the results. I added a few pics of the final product...not like we all haven't seen a Duster with rally rims before though!
:D

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Still my favorite shot!

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I will continue my updates tonight...the good stuff is still coming.



 
Nice looking car. I think the grille needs some detail refinish and replace the rear shackles for a perfect stance.:D
 
The orange/black paint scheme looks good. Stick with it.

If you get rid of the rubber floor covering, keep me in mind. I've been looking for a decent black one for a while.
 
Looks great. The color combo does POP for sure.
 
You could try this with the grille. I painted the whole thing the argent silver.
Then went with a dark charcoal, almost black in the resess'. I think the
factory should of done them that way.
 

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Thank you guys for the comments so far! I really do appreciate them!

As I mentioned these pictures are old, and I will be adding more updates over the next few days to catch up to current. With the exception of the glass, backseat, and part of the suspension, the rest of the car has been pulled apart.

I really like your grill Briankaplan. I plan of repainting my grille with a much nicer coat of black, then doing the running light housings in argent to break it up a bit. I dig the amber colored lenses...definitely may have to track down a set.

dusterific, Unfortunately the rubber flooring did not survive removal for the 4 speed hump install..Really sorry man! I will be sticking with the color scheme; the engine bay has already been painted to match (pics to come in a future update).

440jimr, the correct shackles went on a week after the wheels did!
 
I made a few quick changes to the car in April, right before the start of this year’s cruise season. At the time I didn’t plan to do any real work on the car until the end of this year, as I live in an apartment and did not have access to a garage. One of the previous owners painted/dyed the interior black, and in the process also resprayed the gauge cluster the same. Since cluster was fully functional so I purchased a parts cluster and swapped the front plate. The faux wood grain breaks up the boring black dash.

I picked up an A body bench seat off of CL. The small split you see in the pic is the only damage on it! Underneath the foam and mesh are 100% intact, and Best part…I picked it up for $100. I almost felt bad. I am not a fan of bucket seats, especially when they don’t match. I also scored a set of NOS knobs for the seat adjust levers off of Ebay.


This was taken right after the seat was dropped into place, so it is a bit dusty here still.

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Keeping with the color scheme, I pulled my emblems to “refresh” them. I wanted to do them right the first time, so I sent them to Leanna to be powder coated, and the pictures below are the results. I didn’t realize pot metal could be coated, and soo nicely at that!

Pics taken after they were completed at PSC.
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Back on the car. Really like how they pop!
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More to come...

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Well in June I happened to find a friends garage I could rent, and it is less than a mile from my place! When I found out, I had intended to take the car out for one last night drive, but my excitement got the best of me and I drove the car straight to the garage to get started. I had no plans of how far I wanted to go beyond at least getting the engine bay painted to match the rest of the car. I knew I wanted to do a thorough job, so that meant I was going to clear the firewall as well. The pictures below are but a few I took of my journey to strip the front end of Clara. I will admit that I got only about halfway into it before I had made up my mind that I was not putting the slant back in.

This picture was taken at the end of the first night.
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Continuing the process.
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Almost ready to pull.
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Is it wrong that I am excited about rebuilding this?
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My pile of parts continues to grow...
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...and grow.
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Well the day had finally arrived. I am very fortunate to have a lot of friends who share my enthusiasm, as well as RAD members like craigibc, and his son JonsGottaDusta. With the whole group, we were able to rip that slant out of there, load it into the truck and haul it to storage in a flash!
A big thank you to both Craig and Jon for all of their knowledge and help on my car! I am keeping the slant in hopes to use it as my first "father/son/daughter" engine buildup someday.


Here we go...
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I love this picture!
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I admit, Clara looked pretty sad with a gaping hole where her heart used to be.
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Getting the rest of the firewall and other odds and ends would be a lot easier now. I set some old towels on the K-frame for a seat and went to work. Below are a few shots of the engine bay fully gutted. At this point everything under the dash, inner firewall, and floorboard had been removed as well.

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I was curious to see what was under the paint.
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Now it was time to Grind!!!

Still more to come...
 
Wish I could see the pics. I'm at work, so only see red x's. I'll check it out when I get home.
 
Something I didn’t mention before was that my wife is totally supportive of working on the car, as long as it doesn’t take too much time away from the family. I usually work on the car after the family goes to bed around 9pm and stop at midnight. Then every other weekend I spend a Saturday working on the car. All together, I have a lot of time for the car, but only two of those days I could really do some grinding outdoors. It was time to tackle the engine bay.

So here I am at the start…All excited
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Grinding in the July heat got old quick. I did make great progress, but I needed something a bit faster as well as get into the places the grinder couldn’t reach. I opted for the aircraft stripper…Nasty fun stuff! While working on the engine bay I decided I should do this right as I only intend to do it once…I purchased a four speed transmission hump from Brewers that day.

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I thought it was pretty cool to see that 30+ year old steel emerge from under the layers of paint.
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Just about done.
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So when I purchased the car, I knew it was in need of suspension work, and the torsion bars were torque down quite a bit. As I loosened up the front I began to notice the rear dip severely on one side. I assume a PO adjusted the front end to compensate for a failure in the rear suspension. Perhaps the ghetto shackles that were on the car messed something up. I will be addressing the rear end of the car in the future, so I am not too worried atm. The picture below shows how it was sitting.

Guess the license plate applies right?

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Heading off to my painter!
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The painter also was awesome enough to weld in my four speed hump for me.
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Below are the shots of the painted engine bay. Now before anybody jumps on me for not removing the shock top hardware, this will all be replaced when I install the V8 front suspension. The overspray on the slant K frame suspension has pretty much wiped off as it was still pretty greasy.

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A few shots in the sun.
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Getting closer to current, but there is still more…
 
Nice work you are doing. Quite an inspiring thread. Really great looking Duster and keep her rollin'...

Thanks for sharing.
 
Who did you get to widen the rallye rims and how much did it cost?

Wilson
Ontario Canada
 

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I would like to have the ones on my Demon done.
 

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Again, thank you all for the compliments!!! It has been reading about your personal projects and experiences over the past two years that has given me the courage to tackle my own project!:thumbrig:

Abodybomber, yes it does consume mass quantities of time.

Muslca, you have a PM. Your Demon is insanely rad! My dream car!!!

Rockerdude, excellent screen name if I do say so myself bro!:supz:

Another updates coming in a few minutes.
 
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Since the firewall was cleared on the inside, I figured it was time to clean that up a bit. I was stoked with how nice the metal was, especially since the factory stopped painting about two inches past the firewall/floor seam. Guess that’s the treatment the low end econo car got lol. I have seen cars that were painted from the factory a lot higher up. A few patches of surface rust that were easily dispatched with the wire wheel and I was done. I will save the actual restoration of the dash for another time, as I will eventually need to pull the windshield anyways (crack). I gave it a solid once over and it is still fine atm.

I didn’t really get any pics of the firewall work, and can only find this one “after” shot. I forgot to mention I finished the firewall before it went to paint, as I figured over spray from the inside into the bay would be a lot worse than a bit of the orange misting through the firewall holes.

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Once the rubber flooring had been removed I got a good look at the floor boards. While I did have some surface rust and scaling, they were solid. As you will see in pics below, I only found two relatively small holes in the drives side floorboard! I also found the wiring for the “seat belt warning” that plugs into the seat sensors. Pretty cool considering the car never had the actual sensors on the bench seat. It would have been really cool to find something like a build sheet instead, but still neat in my opinion.

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After grinding down all of the suspect/rust spots.
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The two holes I found on the driver side floorboard. Should be a quick fix!
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The kids really wanted to be involved with working on the car, and being they are 6 yrs old, I opted to not let them use the grinder…yet. I prepped the area for my little artists, because even though they are very good about “staying in the lines”, I wanted to take care of the edges just to be sure.

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My wife even got in on the fun! She's doing touch ups!
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An hour and a half later they had finished…Then proceeded to ask me “what’s next?”
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I want this car to be as family involved as possible, as we have already have a lot of family memories in it, so I figured the family should “sign” their work. I really think this will be cool pull back the carpet and look at 10 years from now…heck I hope that my grand kids, or generations past them may get the chance to see this!

This is hands down my favorite part of the car!
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Finished floorboard.
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I still need to seam sealer on the 4 speed hump, as well as a few other spots where the grinder bit in. Other than that I am close to carpeting her! I was throwing around the idea of getting orange carpet as opposed to the black. I think it would break up the black interior nicely…but then again I may be a kook. Feedback/experiences are always welcome.


A little bit more to come…
 
So part of the agreement with the garage my car is being kept in was that they needed to garage for the month of September. So I had the car towed where I could store it until the garage was freed up once more. No problem, as this gave me a break to focus more on home, and getting things done for the wife to keep her happy lol. Well by the time I could get the car towed back to the garage, it was the end of October! I had lost out on two freaking months. To get back into “Car mode” I proceeded to work on a few smaller items. I figured completing a few of the small things would give me that “instant-gratification” feeling of accomplishing something. Only problem is each of my smaller projects are on hold waiting for plating, paint, or additional parts. The holiday season has prevented me from purchasing too much for the car.

I started with the accelerator pedal assembly. I was going to paint it black until I inspected the whole piece only to find it looked dark gray, as if it were originally phosphate coated. I disassembled and blasted the parts carefully, then used the Eastwood Zinc phosphate paint and was happy with the results.

Before.
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After paint.
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Re-coated the top of the throttle cable groove with rubberized paint.
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I am still waiting on purchasing the correct V8 throttle cable, and foam gasket, then I can call this done!

While I had the phosphate paint, I went ahead and also blasted/painted most of my hood latch hardware. I don't have a before shot, but like everything else, they were either Orange, or spray bombed flat black.

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More to come tomorrow...
 
Again, Awesome work. I love the hand prints on the hump. :) What did you use for the floor, just paint or POR-15? The car really does look good.
 
I love this build you and your family are doing a great job.
 
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