I've finally got to cutting and grinding on the newest build to come out of my metal shed- a '64 Dodge Polara. Venturing off deeper into Valley of Mopar, with a b-body. Bigger car means not having to do some of the requisite re-vamping I have become so used to with the smaller a-bodies, Comets, and Novas. Like mini-tubbing. The rear wheel houses are SOOO BIGGG! I've put a 10.00-15 Firestone D.O.T. slick and its swimming in there!!!! The factory recipe for these cars is a whopping 14 inch in the rear, and 10 inch in the front, as recorded from Chrysler journals. But, its a bit severe for my take, and the '64 Polara's front bumper structure makes in kinda funky. So- I've fallen upon 12 inches on the rear for altering, and about 6 1/2 for the front. It makes it so the front shackles just play peek-a-boo, under that m***ive bumper (due for an upcoming meeting with a big tank of acid for lightening!!) With the '64 Dart heading away to a new owner, its a race to fill in its old shoes with something newer, brighter, and faster. New tricks, same old school look. Follow along, and check in from time to time. If the pics help to fill in the gaps on altered project some of you are working on, its all the better! If someone see's me doing something that they may a better way, or even more era- correct(?), lemme know!!! http://public.fotki.com/bowtie0069/shop-projects-1/dales-64-polara-awb-/ Thanks- Dale Snoke
Nice work Dale, that car is going to be wild and fun nice to see the mopar engine in there keep up the good work. Ron...
Glad to see you doing a B body Dale! Can't wait to see this one when it's all finished. You did a fantastic job on your Dart. Keep us posted will ya!?
Not very many of those cars ran straight axles, really. At least not the one's that were really well known and fast. Back then when we weighed the front suspension components next to the available straight axles (usually A-100 van axles), the big weight savings just wasn't there for the amount of work required to change it. In other words, the juice just wasn't worth the squeeze. Mark Goodman over near Cathage, Mo., has a jig built for the conversions he's done, and it just bolts up to the stock suspension mounts. When he cuts the factory front frame rail off and replaces them with 3x2, it locates perfectly all the stock suspension components where they belong. Then he uses Chrysler or Imperial torsion bars which are longer than B body bars. It's very nice. I may be able to send you some pictures. Mark does some nice work. He always uses a four door donor car for the rear floor, which I also think works well. If you look at the original cars, most had a rolled pan under the front bumper, (Sox and Martin, Harrop's Flying Carpet, Butch Leal, etc) to conceal the factory K member. I know you are doing these to mimic the home made conversions and all, but I ust thought I'd throw that out there. The factory suspension handles SO much better than a straight axles, even at the drags. Many folks don't know that the factory AWB cars originally came with magnesium K members, which cracked very quickly after those huge wheelies those cars did. Once promoters saw how the fans loved the wheelies, they often wouldn't pay the racers unless they did them, further aggravating the problem.
Man ,what a cool build.A straight axle is hard to beat on looks (IMO) ,but its challenging to get a straight axled full bodied dragcar to weight transfer like an independent front.Its not impossible ,just more challenging .Either way the altered wheel base looks great on that Polara .Cant wait to see more progress on it ...
Hi Dale, I just watched your DVD on building the Dart -- very inspirational. Maybe you should re-make the front bumper in aluminum?
The A/FX K frames were stainless steel and only weigh 17.5 pounds there is one on eBay for ONLY! 14,999$
Here's 3 64 Dodges for a little inspiration.Flynn's didn't have the wheelbase moved but it did get a A100 axle.
Landy's Dodge was bad ***.I have the full feature on that car in one of my old mags .I think its Feb 65 Hotrod .The car was full of neat tricks for its day like the preloaded pinion snubber with a crossbar support and the strap on the front axle to limit travel .The man was ahead of his time ...
Storm king- thanks for helping to fill in the gaps. Point taken about weight savings, and I tend to agree, after doing a few of these. The A-100 set-ups are definately a bit on the heavier side, but look the part for sure. I"m still a fan of front drums just for the "you gotta be kidding me" factor, but thats a ways off. The rear gets cut up in the next four days, so I"ll be posting up a bunch of shots of that. Stainless K-members???? WOW!!!! Does anyone know if someone out there is still making fibergl*** parts for these? At one point, some years back, I know there were fibergl*** bumpers circulating around.. Thanks if you do indeed know of this.. Dale
Dale,another option is a tube axle there were just as many if not maybe more of them used then the heavy A100 stuff.Plus it gives a guy the choice of disc brakes if they'd like a little better stopping.
There was definetly more CHRYSLER BACKED torsionbar cars; but that is as far as it goes. Chrysler backed cars were the minority IN EVERY ASPECT; torsionbar cars were a close second minority. There was some '64-'65 cars that initially ran with just the rears moved and the torsionbar fronts in the STOCK location, but most got converted to solid axles when the front got stuffed forward later on. Dealer/owner/independently built Dodges/Plymouths with axles FAR OUTNUMBERED anything with torsionbars. Simple fact is that properly moving a torsionbar frontend was LOTS more complicated (and more importantly time-consuming) than swapping in a solid axle. To be done right, it required a jig and fixture setup with new 2X3 framrails to keep proper frontend alignment; roughly per the Chrysler handbook. Simply sliding a k-member forward about 10inches on stock framerails DID NOT WORK for b-bodies. The anchor-end of the torsionbars would end up in the floorpans instead of below the crossmember. The only very slight exception is the four cars built to (roughly) 2% measurments in 1964. The k-members were only moved ahead by about 3inches and shimmed on the stock framerails. That was enough for Chrysler to know that they needed to change things if they wanted to go farther forward with the k-members. The AWB cars were built in times when wheelbase alterations were banged out IN A WEEKEND to match-race AND MAKE MONEY. Appearance and panel alignment were afterthoughts, as long as the cars were CROWD PLEASERS. Those days were far different than what is going on today with guys taking months and even YEARS to build "correct" altered-wheelbase cars. People are comparing the wieght of A-100 axles with full-length stock springs AND BRAKES to the torsionbar frontends with brakes. Probably better than half of the A-100 beam axles were heavily drilled or slotted to reduce wieght, had SHORT reworked springs to accomodate the 10inch (usually more) wheelbase movement, and they ran without brakes. Big difference there when compared to a standard torsionbar setup. There was a few Mopars with narrowed A-100 axles, but again, only a few. Atleast 2 different Mr. Norm's cars ran A-100 axles with the spring pads redrilled to move the springs in by about 1/2inch each side on the axle. Quick-n-easy. Redrill 5holes on each side and weld it all up. Lots less work than accurately splitting, narrowing, and rewelding a cast beam axle. By comparison, LOTS of cars got buggy-spring Ford axles and custom-built tube axles. Fords and Chevs were the same way; considerably more ran beam/tube axles than original IFS setups. As for the torsionbar cars bieng quicker than solid axle cars; what a BS claim!!!!!! The type of front suspension was far from a determining factor in speeds/ETs. Biggest factors were the fuel (everything from gas/alky to hydrazine/nitro and A FEW DROPS of alky to light the mixture), blown/injected vs. injected vs. carburated, how well the cars put the power down to the track (REAR suspension), and the testicular for***ude of the drivers. Lots of straight injected and even carburated cars ran very quick because they hooked better than blown/injected fuel cars. Blown/fuel cars were most often good for big trap speeds. With that said, wheelstands and wild starting-line antics were HUGE at the time. At smaller tracks, timeclocks and even whole "best of 3" matchraces were infamous for bieng fixed to get crowd reaction so people would pay to see more the next night for a rematch. The Ramchargers (torsionbar) car was extremely quick/fast in 1965, but they had arguably more factory backing than anybody. They also ran the most exotic fuels (hydrazine based), clutchflite transmissions, and other FACTORY experimental parts, and crashed A FEW TIMES before a tube frame Dart was built in 1966 (with a TUBE AXLE!). The '65 car was crashed (and totalled) by Harrop after he got the car form the Ramchargers team. It was a pile of s****metal by mid-1967 at Cecil County. The Mr. Norm's car (previously Color Me Gone by Branstner) was THE FIRST blown Chrysler AWB to knock down quick/fast times and gained countrywide infamy for it in 1966. It ran well into 1968 before they sold it. Guess what? Yep, it was a solid axle car and quicker than the Ramchargers torsionbar '65 (8.63 in late 1965). First thing Dyer did with the Norm's car was replace the torsionbar front with a lightened A-100 beam axle and drop in a blown fuel Race Hemi. Shirl Greer had his S/S '65 down to 1700LBS and ran 8.20s at 170+ WITH A SOLID AXLE in late 1967. If you want to get into statistics, look around. Very shortly after the AWB '64-65 cars were running deep into the 8s (axle or not), the Logghe tube-frame cars were running IN THE 7s with solid axles up front. Not exactly on subject, I know, but my point is: Logghe cars were "state of the art" for thier time (when 64-65 Chryslers were still quite popular) and they STILL ran solid axles. Even the tube-frame '64-66 Darts (some 'gl***, some steel), ran solid axles instead of torsionbar fronts. My point of all this is to say: I think you are nuts for claiming that there was more torsionbar Chryslers than axle'd Chryslers, and even more nuts for claiming that torsionbar cars were quicker. Let us know when you have the factual statistics to effectively arque your claims.
34g***er/65AWB I ***ume your post was directed at me. Number one, my focus was toward 1965, although perhaps I was not clear about that. Not '66, '67 and on into flip tops. Second, I said the faster cars used the factory suspension. If you can point out "axle" cars, as the folks seem to be calling them these days, that were faster than Sox and Martin, Landy, Leal, Bill Flynn, Bob Harrop, Dave Strickler, etc, in '65, please tell me because I must've missed something. Thirdly, why not lighten the hell up, this was a friendly discussion, I thought, and I'm happy to say yeah, there's room for varying opinions and corrections, like the fact that I miss stated magnesium when the K member were indeed stainless as Funnycar65 points out. Think you know more than me about these cars? BFD. We owned the Black Arrow, ran all up and down the east coast, knew most all the factory racers. But this is just not that important to me to have someone shove the kind of **** you did over a simple, fun thread.
Funny car 65- Thanks for pointing me in the right direction with regards to the fibergl*** parts. Both are on my list to call and make inquiries about what they have to offer on the car. Hopefully, not too pricey. I also have a contact that has acid dipping done on parts. I think that may interesting. But, I know there are drawbacks. When working on the A-990 restoration for Bob Mosher, the acid-dipped front fenders did not take well to tig welding up cracks and fractures. Seems the acid never really gets out of the metal. We had a hard time dealing with it. Hmmn. I know a few Chrysler guys playing with carbon fiber???!!! With this car, my hope is to finally make it back to a few of these Reunion Style races in the mid-states. I'll NEVER try to p*** this car off as a "real deal" or a "barn find". All I love to do, is take alot of the styling cues of altereds and g***ers of the past, and try to roll it all up, with the help of a couple people in the know to keep me from going down 'billet alley', not get in over my head financially so as not to want to ever beat it a bit at the track, and just plain have a *****in time watching people freak when I ride up alongside them on the California freeways!!! There are so many others out there who lived in this era, and sweated it out. I'm not one of them. I was a kid, watching from the back of dad's truck, up against the chainlink fence at Irwindale. But I so much love this bygone era, and feel a driving desire to pay 'good' tribute to it. My altered Dart, at times, was more of an educational piece. Most average people know who John Force is, but have no idea that cars like mine, and others here, are what started the ball rolling for the crowds to come and see. It made me new friends, and opened up alot of doors for me. I hope this next one just makes the door swing a bit wider!! Dale
we had the same problem on these fenders tiging them, but they were alum. Nice thread i just pick up 64 plymouth belvedere, does anyone know if the 65 AFX clip sled city sells will fit this? new project
65 front clip will fit 63-65 Dodge or Plymouth the were basically all the same from the firewall forward.
I am looking for a 1965 grille and head light bezels for this project any one have any they might part with?
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