Another long update.
I’ve been driving the car on and off but I decided I wanted someone else to drive the car and help sort it out and to give me a 2nd opinion. So I decided to take the car to Dan Weishaar who runs a full custom shop/suspension tuning service called DTM Racing in Yuma, AZ. Some of you might remember seeing Dan’s blue Roadrunner which has completed in a number of events.
http://www.streetlegaltv.com/features/car-features/driving-the-hotchkis-68-road-runner-at-goodguys-del-mar-meet/Dan works part time for Hotchkis and does their Mopar parts prototyping. He also maintains and drives the E-Max Challenger. For example he did the driving at Mopars at the Strip and various Goodguys events. So I figured he was the perfect guy to drive my car. Remember that I bought all my suspension parts before Hotchkis was making parts for E-body’s so I don’t have any of their parts on my car.
So I talked to Dan and arranged to bring the car to him Labor Day week. Yuma is about 260 miles from me so I towed the car there. It’s also in an area of Arizona that’s one of the hottest places in the US. It was 110 when I was there. While towing there I stopped at a truck stop in Gila Bend which is basically the middle of nowhere.
If you can read the temp display it says 116 degrees! I was worried the truck was going to sink in to the asphalt. I tried to clean the windshield of the truck but the water was drying before I could squeege it off.
Anyway, once at DTM Racing Dan put the car up on the lift and gave the whole car a once over. He fixed a couple little things like the front sway bar was hitting the coil over shock possibly causing it to bind, so we had to make a spacer to move the sway bar out. Here’s the inside of the shop with Dan’s Roadrunner in the back corner along with a customers long term Duster project and a nice customers early Dart (same rims that I have on the Cuda).
After that we took it to an alignment shop down the street from his shop. Dan takes a lot of business there, so the alignment shop set up the 4 wheel sensors then lets Dan actually work on the car. Dan’s comment was “your alignment settings are OK for a Honda Civic but that’s about it”, so Dan changed it to dial in as much caster as possible. The alignment settings made a big difference. Dan drove the car pretty hard and said the huge rear tires are causing the car to understeer. I know its recommended to keep the front and rear tire size within 20 mm’s of each other, but since I mini-tubbed the car I wanted the big tires in the rear. Dan basically said “I understand why you did it because it looks so damn cool, but we might need to add a rear sway bar to free up the rear and get the car to turn”.
Dan has enough projects going on that E-max had to sit outside during the day while my car was in the shop, including when a monsoon storm passed through. I have to say that E-max is even more awesome in person. I thought this picture of it looked neat after the rainstorm had passed.
Here’s some pictures of the outside of the shop, including another customers 71 Charger that has a cool old school look to it.
You can see with my car next to E-max, that the Challenger is a good inch lower than my car.
The other thing I had Dan look at, is before I took the car to Yuma I noticed that the floorboards were tearing where I had welded the mounts for the Ridetech 4-link.
Here’s a shot from underneath. It’s basically tearing right at the edge of the weld. I’ve gotten on it a couple times now in first gear and I have experienced some wheel hop on bumpy roads. Clearly this wasn’t good.
Dan called up Brett the president of Ridetech (it’s good to have friends like that on speed dial) and Brett said they’ve seen that with cars where the upper bars are not level at ride height. My car sits a little higher than I want in the back (I have coilovers instead of air bags) and sure enough my upper bars angle up instead of being level. Brett said I either need to lower the car more to get the upper bars level or further brace that area of the floorpan. I decided to do both. Dan highly recommended the Ridetech coil overs (made by Fox shocks) versus the QA1’s that I have on there. So we ordered new custom Ridetech’s that will actually lower the car an inch all the way around.
Dan has some more work to do for Hotchkis to get ready for the SEMA show, so we stopped there. I’ll bring the car back to him in a few weeks to put on the new coil overs, re-align the car, plus re-weld and brace that area where the upper bars mount. Lowering the car that additional inch will probably require us to move the rear brake line from the stock location. There’s not much room back there with the 3” exhaust.
Travis
72 Cuda
