Curious to hear some of the things your Mopar has gone through and made it through. Could get interesting
Lets see, my 318 has been through hell and back. With 120,000miles drove all around Las Vegas for about 45minutes. Parked it in the driveway then walked through the house to open the garage door (no power opener). Hopped back in the car, cranked it up, about halfway through the garage door it died....thats odd. Sounds funny when i'm cranking it over. Turns out the factory nylon tooth timing chain went right there halfway in the garage, took a couple valves out of whack. But, it did get me home before it quit.
Unexperienced and stupid I free revved my engine, oh to about 5500 or so. I then found out that my valve reliefs in my pistons were for stock 318 valves...which is great, except i have 2.02 J-heads on there! Oops. Proceeded to drive another 15miles home just fine with quite a few bent valves. Given I was pretty tight on $$ I didn't have the money for new pistons, rings, machine work, etc. And also to have the car down for awhile pulling the engine and such. So some clay around the rings and the dremel came out
Yep, dremeled all 16 reliefs and about 15,000miles later still running fine.
Same factory 120,000mile 904 trans behind the 318 that about doubled in power vs the stocker gave up one time. Had just a 2500stall converter, tf-2 shift kit...about 65mph or so a full throttle 2-3 shift locked the rear tires dead up
. Popped it in neutral and slid into a parking lot. Trans was dead locked at manual low, drive, and reverse. So...i drove 20miles home in only second gear. Turned out the band had welded itself to the drum locking it up.
Another poor 318 story, after passing the stripe at the drag strip in vegas i popped it in neutral and coasted twords the return road. Apparently during that I tossed the alternator/water pump/crank belt. As you could imagine, it got hot, fast! Pegging my 250* autometer temp gauge i limped down the return road. Luckily my power steering belt retained the other drive belt so i still had it, about cut in half, puking coolant...drove it home. Gallon of water and 25miles later I got home, no other issues.
318's still kickin, get a whopping 15psi of hot oil pressure with 15w-50, it gets run hard and a good amount of highway driving (high revs/3.91). Its hit 7,000rpm once on accident, about 6,500 a few times on purpose with stock rods. Bent valves, dremeled pistons, gotten way too hot...still kicks
