Sorry to pollute this forum with Mopar talk, but I thought I'd post about one of my other projects. When I was 17, back in 1982, I was looking through a copy of Car Craft which had a cut away drawing of a max wedge Polara. I had never seen anything as wild as that before, the crossram intake, those wild exhaust manifolds and exhaust cut outs, and all straight from the factory. Even though I was, and still am a Ford man at heart, that picture blew my mind and I knew at some point in my life I had to have one. I decided to build a clone car, as I couldn't afford a genuine one and I would like to drive it hard.
I bought a 1963 Dodge 330 2 door sedan a few years ago and had it shipped down under. It was a clean straight car that was still wearing it's faded original aqua paint, turquiose bench seat interior plus it was heater and radio delete, no power options - perfect for a super stock clone. I had the car stripped and repainted in original colour, interior retrimmed with original material from SMS and have used as many NOS or repro parts throughout. For the drivetrain, it has a pushbutton 727 that I've rebuilt and an 8 3/4" diff with 3.91 gears on a Truetrac. Rear suspension is MP superstock leaf springs with Calvert/Rancho shocks, front suspension is standard rebuilt with Calvert shocks. I'm using stock 15 x 5.5" steel wheels painted body colour with dog dish caps and Firestone G70/15 bias ply tires.
Now for the engine. The entire build for this car has been inspired by the Factory Appearing Stock Tire class racing you guys have in the US. I love the idea of a car that looks like it came off the showroom floor, but still runs really hard and fast. So I have tried to keep the engine and car looking as factory original as I can. I wasn't overly concerned with correct casting numbers, just wanted it to look correct. I'm using a 440 block, overbored 0.055" to 4.375" and a 4.25" stroke crank to give 511 cubes. For the heads, I bought a pair of 64 max wedge heads from evilbay, but only ever received one head. After many years of chasing the vendor and going through evilbay resolution, I ened up with one head. Great. So I decided to buy a pair of alloy heads from 440Source and had Jeff from MCH port them to max wedge size. These heads look very much like factory heads externally, so with a coat of paint, they will do the job. Plus they flow better and are lighter than factory heads. Intake is a repro crossram from A&A with a pair of original Carter 750cfm AFB's. Exhaust is a repro pair of cast manifolds feeding into a reproduction dual exhaust with cut outs. The engine ended up with 10.3 to 1 compression, so very streetable on 93 octane pump gas. Cam is a Comp solid roller using the XE street lobes, 252/260 at 0.050". Ignition is a factory tach drive electronic distributor firing a MSD 6AL, hidden under the dash.
The engine fired straight up on the test stand and ran in without problems. We then took it to an engine dyno for a day of tuning. We had problems with the carbs in that they were going very lean on the transition for the primaries to the secondaries opening, due to the AFB's not having a secondary acc pump like a Holley does. We over came that but increasing the primary jetting a lot, as you will probably notice on the dyno screen shot below. All along with this engine build, my aim was for the car to be able to run low 11 sec 1/4 mile times. For the weight of the car, I figured I would need about 530-550hp. I don't want to put a cage in the car, and over here we can run an 11.0 without a cage. So when we got the final tune and power numbers done, I was more than happy.
In case you can't read my crappy phone pic of the dyno screen, it made 613hp at 5800rpm and 637ft.lbs at 4100rpm. Note the torque at the start of the pull, 578ft.lbs at 3000rpm, in fact it doesn't drop below 500 for the whole pull. This is going to be one fun ride with those skinny G70's. In order to try and tame the torque a bit, I am using a converter that will stall at about 2800rpm. On the strip, I have a pair of M&H 7" cheater slicks, not sure how well they will work, but they will look the part. I guess I will have to drive it out of the hole, and hang on when I change to 2nd gear.
Right now I have the intake and water pump off to be painted, and am waiting on my converter. Then it will be engine install time. The fun begins.
