Thanks for all the great comments all! I've really been enjoying the car. I went ahead and took the car through emissions (idle test only in AZ for old cars) and it passed easily. So I got the car re-registered and street legal to drive for the first time since 1999. Pretty amazing.... it's been a long time coming. Still no interior or sound deadening so it's loud in there but I don't care right now.
I went ahead and got the front end aligned because I don’t want to scrub those these front tires too fast. The engine still needs some tuning but you need to drive it to self tune so that’s what I’m doing. I’ve actually got 105 miles on the car as of today. I still haven’t pushed it over half throttle yet. In two weeks I’m going to have it dyno tuned so then I can finally start pushing it a little harder.
Since I needed something to sit on, I finally got the correct seat brackets for the old Recaro seats so I bolted in the drivers side. On the passenger side I bolted in the stock drivers seat (before I got the Recaro brackets it’s what I was using to drive around). The Recaro seat slider has a 3 hole height position mount and I just put them on the max height for now. Still lots of head room even when my 6’ tall buddy sat in the seat. With both the front and rear on the max height setting, it sits too high in the front (you can see the difference in the following pictures). To move the front down to the next bolt hole I’ll have to cut the bracket, but I’m going to wait until after the seats get upholstered just in case that changes the seating position. With the seat angled the way it is plus the much higher that stock bottom seat bolsters, I’m really glad I got the tilt wheel otherwise it would be a pain for my fat butt to get in and out of the car!!
Before I forget, I also installed my $10 eBay Chrysler auto-dimming mirror. I think it’s from the LH series of cars. I mounted it using the mirror glue directly to the windshield like all the modern cars. It works great and it’s just slightly larger than the stock mirror.
I got the drivers side remote side view mirror on but the glass flops around (see my other post in the body section) so I have to figure that out because it’s kind of useless when you’re driving around. I also put the front and rear spoilers on the car. The spoilers really change the look of the car. In particular the front. Before when you’d look under the front you’d see the AlterKation crossmember hanging down but the spoiler hides all of that. I’m still planning on eventually doing the grille blackout, but for now here’s some pictures from today.
My wife was all excited to go for her first ride in the rebuilt Cuda so she filmed some video with her camera a couple weeks ago and I spliced them together and put it on youtube. Check it out:
I still need to figure out how I want to do the seats and door panels in terms of a color scheme but I’ll make a post about that in the interior section. The interior is about all that remains and should be the last big purchase on the car. I still have bugs to work out (windows rattle, fuel gauge isn’t working, glove box rattles, etc.) but that’s why I wanted to drive it to figure out what I still need to fix.
Travis
72 Cuda
