'74 Challenger, Ratty Street 360

[Oddity360]

Howdy y'all I'm so excited to be posting this right now, After five long years of patience and stupid youthful excess I'm finally ready to dig into my '74 Challenger. I made this account four years ago when I was 19, I had just been gifted the car from my oldest brother but I was in no position to do anything other than stare at its engine bay and dream. I grew up in this car and one of my very first memories is my dad driving it home for the vert first time. It's really an oddball options wise but it's in damn good shape. It's a 1974 Base challenger that was accessorized as a Demo car for a dealership and later sold to an employee of the Dealership mechanic shop who then sold it to my father so technically I guess I'm the third owner.

The details:  It came from factory with a 360 Four barrel, A Rallye hood and 14 inch Rallye rims. It has an 8 3/4 but no sure grip, Slap stick 3 speed automatic with a ball knob and a base dash cluster. It's B5 blue with a white interior.

My main concern right now is getting the old girl on the road right away, The body can wait because the car is utterly complete save for an engine, which up until a week ago was non existent. As it goes right now, I've recently acquired an entire 360 and 727 transmission out of a 76 Cordoba-style charger that I've stripped to the bone over the weekend. I'll be posting pictures of how that went shortly, I wasn't sure if the engine was a melted block of rust or a Grime coated diamond......For now have some pictures of the Challenger!  A ton of info here in my old intro post:www.cuda-challenger.com/cc/index.php?topic=82704

As it Sits

[Oddity360]

The teardown

Not knowing what I was going to find, And feeling lucky enough already that my father let me bring this damn thing home, I was eager and anxious to start disassembling this engine.
As all good projects with a donor engine start, The first thing to do was see if it cranked....Now I had just recently gotten this engine and transmission for $300 from a guy who admitted himself that he wasn't able to turn it over.
Jokingly (and as we suspected later) my brother commented that the guy might have tried turning the crank pulley by hand (lol) and me and my dad set out with our breaker bar to the garage.
At this point in time it was a mystery weather or not the block itself was worth using or if the crank would turn, but if anything the parts off of it would be useful for a rusting 360 we have in the shed.

First step was to bathe the cylinders in WD-40 via the spark-plug holes.

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Well cranking it over was a success, A little rough at first but once the WD lubed the Cylinders it was easy as a knife through butter. The guy I bought it off really must have tried turning it over by hand.... Next step, Tear off all the crap, Wires hoses emissions ect. and strip her to the bone.


First victim, The rad hose and thermo bracket (which I put in a box)

Next to go is the Junk status 2 barrel that came with the thing....On a Cordoba sized yacht-car

Now up to this point I was excited as hell to get the valve covers off and actually see my first glimpse at the state of the engine itself.
Well hell, So far so good!!!

Break time over the old mans duster (yeah this is all happening in a corner)

Just for fun, Test fitting my Mickey Thompson Valve Covers. They originally came off my Dad's engine, But since his duster has a magnum head conversion
he's got the Mopar Magnum valve Covers.

Alright well the fun time never ends and it's back to buisness...A couple brackets and some bolts later, and the battleship is removed!
Again, freaking out because I'm not sure if I'll find good or bad cam journals ect.......






It's looking better the deeper we go.
Taking a break, and a trip into the old parts room on a whim, The Distributor has a bad magneto and my dad thinks he's got a good one somewhere, Might even have performance spring in it...
We luck out after 5 minutes and find the damn thing

Well, took a nap and now Coffee's done. A little bored so back outside to "Take off the water pump and maybe the starter........."

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And what do you know, The heat shield bolts are looking pretty tempting to pop off.....Torque Converter bolts are even in the prime position! She turns like butter so hey, why not?

But I guess that's enough for one saturday evening...Why stop at the test crank right?

[Oddity360]

But wait theres more! I didn't want to run the post too long so we'll start sunday off now.
First things first is getting this thing on the engine stand! We got the hardware for that sho'nuff!

l
l

Gotta take that timing cover off next, I really want these Cylinder heads off!



Single roller....Damn, But before we take the heads off we gotta let the compressor charge. In the meantime let's get that grimy oil pan off....See if I'm going to find a melted crank

But wait, what's this?? Looks damn near brand new!

l

Relieved and confident, we proceed and take the Cylinder heads off. Finding out that the pistons and rods are in great shape, There's only one thing to do! COFFEE BREAK! 

But more importantly, We can take these pistons out! Putting sheaths over the rod studs we carefully tap them out of the cylinder one by one,
Marking each one as we go with recently purchased number stamps.   





Well so far so good, We've got the entire engine stripped and ready to be cleaned and honed.







As it turns out this engine must have been through a rebuild shop at some point, As it's had multiple sloppily stamped numbers on rods in the wrong cylinders...I.e. 6 in the 8 cylinder and two rods stamped "2" ect. but hey, Even better for me because the cylinders were so clean you could see the crosshatch from the last hone. Not bad for a $300 engine with transmission. I'll be selling that, along with the heads because I have my original 360 heads.

Next week I'll be picking up a rebuild kit and Double Roller timing chain from Summit racing, and we'll be honing the cylinders and beginning the rebuild..............Stay tuned guys, There is a hell of a lot more to come!

[Intel_12]

Nice work, keep at it! That chally is gonna be a lot of fun..

[jimynick]

Good posts and I like the photos, too. I'm also a 74 Challenger owner with a 360 and I hope and pray that mine's as nice as yours, since it's going straight back in for a wee while. Keep the faith! 

[YellowThumper]

Checking in here as I also am another 74/360 owner. Original 318 3spd stick car.

Good to see another one getting ready for the road.
Keep us posted.

Mike

[redo1973]

Cool thread and quite exciting.  I had similar issues but was not as lucky.  I had minor rust on the top of the number one cylinder and was able to keep the boring to .040 over on a period correct 340.  Keep building the story .

[slsc98]