I turned 16 early in 1992, and about half a year later I spotted a text-only ad in the back of Cars and Parts magazine:
1965 Dodge Valiant Custom 200 sedan, low miles, never winter driven, excellent condition, $3,000.00 OBO. Stoney Creek. Ont, Canada 416-(nnn)-6609
There’s a feature article on Canadian Valiants in one of the back issues of the Slant-6 News in the complete collection I’d bought, so I knew straight off this “Dodge Valiant” was probably no misprint or clueless-owner fumble. The American Valiant had been its own make only for 1960, its introductory year, before becoming a Plymouth model for ’61. But in Canada, Valiant carried on as a make, rather than a model, all the way through 1966. The ’61-’62 Lancer and ’63-’66 Dart weren’t sold in Canada; Chrysler’s compacts were all Valiants in that market, and they were sold at all Chrysler Corporation dealers.
I called and was soon speaking to the car’s original owner: Mr. Moffat, a recently-retired longtime Chrysler dealer mechanic. He had good answers to all my questions, and promptly sent a stack of photos. Those looked good, too; a whole lot better (and more forthrightly and completely presented) than the red 1961 Valiant. It wasn’t what I originally had in mind—not a ’60-’62, no pushbuttons—but it really did look to be a creampuff (mmmmm, creampuffs).
My sister was in the middle of a summer stock theatre thing in upstate New York, very close to the border with Ontario, which in turn is very close to Stoney Creek. And we were already planning to go visit her there. H’mmm…! A plot hatched, as plots are wont to do; in the middle of our New York visit, mother and dad and I crossed the border in the rentcar and went to see the Valiant. Left to right here are Mr. Moffat, me, the car, and my dad:
In the seller’s driveway we had our first encounter with the notion and actuality of a “winter car”: a ’79ish Diplomat or Caravelle that was just moth-eaten with rust. Even the vinyl top appeared to be rusting! It was a sort of remote sacrificial anode for the Valiant, which was in astoundingly solid, clean, well-kept condition. A ding here and a scuff there, and the bumper chrome wasn’t the world’s shiniest, and there was a sheetmetal screw drilled through the left “Custom 200” nameplate-cum-fenderside-trim to hold it on. These were the kinds of picky little faults I was finding.
The car was very well kept as close as practicable to original, too, with Chryco and Autopar replacement parts widely in evidence. Those were how “Mopar” was translated into Canadian for many years; I think Mopar was phased into Canadian use very gradually starting maybe in the ’80s, finally shoving the other two brands aside in the early-mid ’90s or so.
The seller didn’t budge much on the price; I don’t (and didn’t) blame him. I think we agreed $3,000 including his trove of parts. He let me dig around his grudge in a kind of impromptu Easter egg hunt. And boy, did it ever yield! Lots of maintenance parts—fuel and air filters, points and condensers, caps and rotors, spark plugs. Many repair parts like voltage regulators, switches, gaskets, a new-in-box carburetor for a later-model Slant-6 car (but not late enough to suit the ’79 Caravelle). He was selling the Valiant because he’d got a new 3-season car just before he retired, a 1990 Caprice Classic (“Chrysler wouldn’t sell me what I wanted any more”), and three cars were one too many.
While I was rooting and pawing around on his upper shelves, separating out the Slant-6 gaskets and other flat-pack parts, I –came– happened upon his porn stash. He and his wife were standing outside the grudge keeping an eye on me, probably chuckling at my enthusiasm. I think he saw me reaching for that shelf, and I think he was trying to think how to steer me away without calling additional attention to what he was trying to distract from, and I think he saw the moment it was too late to try. He and I made an instant eye-contact pact: I’d pretend not to have seen anything, and he’d pretend not to have noticed me not seeing what I didn’t see.
Mother and dad drove the rentcar and I followed in the Valiant, down the highway back toward the States. I don’t recall any substantial hassle at the border, except the Customs agent scoffed that I’d paid more than the car had cost new. We turned in the rentcar and used the Valiant for the rest of the New York visit, and—the second half of the plot—my sister’s friend’s brother and his buds, who needed a ride back to Denver, would have it in the form of driving the Valiant.
On the plane to New York I’d found and circled a Hemmings ad for a complete factory A/C setup out of a ’65 Dart in Texas. At the airport to head back to Denver, I called the seller in Texas and said I’d take it—$300 plus shipping, I think, about 10% of the purchase price of the car. Not a self-contained knee-knocker add-on, this; it was the whole integral HVAC-D system, complete with all underhood and in-car parts. ’65 was the first year it was available in the A-bodies, and it was a late-availability item at that; not many cars were equipped, and a small proportion of those had the six-cylinder engine. So that was quite a find and I added its fortuitous timing to the list with the others as favourable omens.
The drive to Denver went fine, except the brake pedal gave way when they pulled in for gas at one point. They’d been going slowly enough that they could stop the car with the handbrake and the parking pawl; adding brake fluid to the master cylinder brought the pedal back up and they carried on with no further incidents (whew). It wasn’t long, maybe about a week, before the gang arrived in Denver, and the 15-minute trip from our house to theirs felt like it took at least 15 years. But we eventually got there, and smiles were smiled.
I hadn’t had the three kilodollars to buy the car, so my folks bought it for me and we arranged monthly car payments. I was working at a print shop (offset presses, not photocopiers) across from my high school, so it didn’t take too long to pay off the loan. I do kind of recoil in retrospect that my folks let me drive this car. It had safety glass and (front) lap belts, and Chrysler’s “safety rim” wheels that did a better-than-average job than of keeping hold of a flat tire, but beyond that it had absolutely zero safety engineering. No collapsible steering column, no shoulder belts, no crumple zones, no head restraints, no roof crush strength to speak of, no side-impact guard beams, a minimally effective defogger for the windshield and none at all for the rest of the glass, all kinds of severe injury threats in the interior (the door handles and window cranks would’ve finished off my left knee, for example), and I could go on and on. Anyone who knew anything about traffic safety would have rightly called it unsafe and a negligent, especially hazardous choice for a new driver. But while they’d nixed my idea of importing a right-hooker Valiant from Australia, mom and dad had no qualm about my driving a car most of three decades behind the state of the safety art. I got away with it unscathed, but only by luck. I guess we’d had no difficulty registering the ’62 Lancer in the state of Denial, so it was even easier the second time round.
The ’64 Valiant had been a learning machine, and this one was that, too, but it was also a driving machine. For the matter of that, forget BMW; to me this was the ultimate driving machine. No, it didn’t have pushbuttons or swoopy Exner styling, but it was the platonically perfect exemplar of Car. Of course it was; everybody with half a brain knew a Slant-6 A-body was inherently perfect, and could be made even more perfect (ahem) with innumerable upgrades.
Sister’s friend(?) Courtney, one of the wealthy kids at our high school, got a replacement brand-new Audi from money and daddy when she crashed the first one, and I didn’t care; I had not just a Valiant, but an unusual Canadian model: Dodge Dart body and interior, Valiant badging, and specification differences sprinkled interestingly throughout. For example, the car was built with a direct-drive starter from the Canadian branch, in Sarnia, of Auto-Lite (the company that later renamed themselves Prestolite, not the spark plug brand spun off from Ford). This was similar—but not identical, my detail-fixated eye and ear detected—to the starters on ’60-’61 American Slant-6 cars. And this kind of starter took a different kind of control circuit, so the wiring and relay setup was different, and that meant other knock-on differences down the line, and so on. There was also an Auto-Lite distributor: same cap as the American Chrysler-built dizzy, but a different rotor. And otherwise like that.
So here I was with my first actual, real, running, driving car, and it was a Slant-6 A-body just like it says in Scripture, but the starter made a conflict for me: on the one hand, different and unique. On the other hand…no gear-reduction starter sound! Here’s what it sounded like cranking (recorded up by the engine) and starting (recorded back by the tailpipe):
Mine wasn’t the only Valiant at school, either. There was a girl in my art class who had a ’63 convertible, same cherry-red as that ’61 I’d returned to sender. And there was a besideburned redheaded dude with a halogen smile, a workout body, and a metallic purple ’65 Valiant V-100 2-door with a beige interior and a 170 Slant-6 engine, but I don’t remember any details. We exchanged a couple of words every odd and then, but I viciously stomped down even the shadow of a crush or any clever ideas about striking up an actual conversation—far too dangerous.
I spent enormous amounts of time, energy, and effort improving the Valiant. Some of the improvements were real; many of them were experimental, and quite a lot of them were imaginary. I reconfigured the air cleaner and got my first traffic ticket.
One day the car began misfiring and bucking on my way to school, worsening by the minute. The engine hiccuped, coughed and sputtered the remaining 1/4 mile; I coasted to a stop in the car park. I don’t recall how I diagnosed it, but I do remember how I fixed it. No auto parts stores within convenient distance, but there was the auto shop. Come lunch period, I rummaged around on the classroom shelves and found a condenser for a Tecumseh lawnmower engine. I liberated it, wrapped a few turns of bare wire around its cylindrical body, grounded the other end of that wire, and put the condenser’s lead wire on the coil negative. The car started and ran fine and got me home, where I installed a correct condenser.
I got it in my pointy little head that the timing chain needed replacing, and decided to do this job in the driveway, starting at about 3pm in the middle of a December schoolweek. I think I did get a new chain installed, and a new cam sprocket, though the original crank sprocket stayed put. I got to bed around 2:30 am, frozen and sore. The car started for me to get to school not many hours later, but it ran very poorly. On my off-period I borrowed the timing light from the auto shop, found the ignition timing to be way off, reset it and adjusted the choke, and that made the car run, ah, just about exactly the same as it had before my ill-considered timing chain job.
Let’s see, what else? Ooh, I know! The time I noticed the rearmost exhaust manifold nut was loose! I waited until the engine was completely cooled down, put a wrench on it, pressed lightly, and the stud broke off as though made of butter. I used another car to go get an Easy-Out (of all the false and misleading product names), then I tried to drill the stud for it with the manifold still installed. The drill bit promptly snapped off in the stud stub. I’m sure the gory details of what happened next would make a terrific story, but all I remember is that it involved a jigsaw, a hammer drill, a massively oversized hole, JB Weld, a strip heater, and a great deal of gasket sealer. In the end, I wound up with a new rear exhaust manifold stud and without a coolant leak, and I used the opportunity to swap on an aluminum intake manifold off a 1976 Feather Duster or Dart Lite. But what a pointless exercise in masochism! There hadn’t been an exhaust leak or a coolant leak or any other kind of problem, it was just a loose nut and it wasn’t hurting anyone or anything, but I just had to go picking at it. The ability to recognise well enough and appreciate its merits enough to leave it alone came very hard for me; I had to repeat that lesson many times over many years before it sank in. I’m sorry I can’t tell this particular story in Technicolor, but I promise there’ll be many others before I’m done with my COALs.
And the Valiant was just one of two Slant-6 cars on site; there was also dad’s Lancer. Dad wasn’t into cars and didn’t know much about them beyond what I taught, but we worked on the Lancer as a son-and-father activity that also kept his daily driver going. One of the car’s two horns stopped working, so I grabbed a yardpulled one off the garage shelf, tested it on the workbench with a reasonably well charged battery, got some noise out of it, figured it was good, and dad and I proceeded to do the simple swap.
Once the “new” horn was in place and hooked up, dad put the battery cable back on. I leaned in the passenger door and touched the horn ring. The new horn began to emit a mix of squawk, quack, and wail which didn’t stop when I jerked my hand away from the horn ring. After what could not have been more than one second, there was a giant puff of smoke, a loud frying sound, and the horn stopped making noise. All of this right in front of my completely stunned father and me. I scooted fast round to the battery and yanked the cable off, but I might as well have taken my time and stopped for a coffee on the way. The entire engine wiring harness was charcoal, burned beyond recognition in two or three seconds that went by in super slo-mo.
We stared at the smoke still curling up from the ruined wiring, and stared at each other, and stared back at the wiring, and back at each other. Obviously, the horn wasn’t as good as I’d assumed based on my quickie bench test. I started apologising, but he waved it away and said “Dan, I think if you’d done something damn-fool, we’d both know it.” It was just one of those things.
But fault or none, we were still faced with a garage monument where dad’s transport had been a moment before. The next day on my lunch period I drove my Valiant down to Santa Fe Boulevard where there was a little-known wrecking yard. It’s long gone now, but it was set back from the road and sunk down to a level well below it. I knew there was a ’62 Valiant there (it contained one of four or five aluminum 225s around the Denver area that I kept meaning to go get and never did). The yard was fully staffed with scary dogs and even scarier goons. I asked about the ’62 Valiant and one of the goons chewed on his wodge of tobacco and said “I donno, twenny bucks for however much wiring you want out of it”. Working quickly and carefully, I removed the engine wiring harness and a goodly portion of the dash harness, paid my $20, and gave the dogs wide berth on my way back to my Valiant.
I made it back to school in time for my next class, and that afternoon I stopped at a coin-op car wash, hung the engine harness on the wall by the floor mat clips, and powerwashed the grime off. It was in basically perfect condition; score!
That night, dad and I put in the “new” harness. It didn’t take but about half an hour, working carefully; there aren’t many wires on a ’62 compared to later cars, but they’re all important. The only wire we didn’t connect was the one to the now-absent low-note horn. That harness is still in the Lancer, but now it contains some main circuit protection.
In an earlier chapter, I mentioned having copied down names off the Slant-Six engine patent and cold-called the one Directory Enquiries had a number for. That was Willem (Bill) Weertman, who was Chrysler’s chief engine engineer for many years. He and I corresponded by letter and phone, and not long after the incident with the manifold-stud-from-self-inflicted-hell, he said he’d be flying in from Michigan to come skiing in Colorado. Ooer! On the day, Dad drove his Lancer and I drove my Valiant up the highway (no mean feat in a stock Slant-6 A-body with a 1-barrel carb; let’s hear it for the 225 having been such an inexpensive option versus the standard 170!) and we had our own little two-car, three-man car show in the parking lot of the Loveland ski area:
Then Bill went off to ski the advanced black slopes. Dad and I stuck to the greens and we might’ve tried one of the easier blues. At the end of the day the lot of us went for supper. I peppered Bill with endless questions about the Slant-6’s development, and how it might be different if it were being developed then in the early ’90s…I didn’t want to stop talking any longer than necessary to hear the answers, for fear the magic would break. To me this guy was a celebrity, a rock star, a giant.
The original carburetor, still on the car, had a throttle plate anti-ice system Chrysler offered as optional equipment in Canada right from 1960: air was drawn from the clean side of the air filter via a ¼” hose and steel tube which swooped down and passed upward through the № 2 exhaust manifold runner, whence another steel tube—this one covered with woven insulation I did asbestos I could to avoid breathing bits from—emerged and connected to the throttle body. It probably served usefully with the gasoline of the 1960s and ’70s in Ontario’s winters, but with the stuff of the ’90s in Denver, mostly what it did was boil the carb like a teakettle.
I was fascinated with the variety of carburetors specified over the years, and set about reading up on the details, collecting as many different ones as I could find, taking them apart, sometimes putting them back together, and trying them out. Same with distributors, alternators, and other parts. I beefed up the brakes by installing the heavy, finned ’70-’71 drums, but they were still little 9″ drums fed by a single-pot master cylinder.
I found a big ’65 Chrysler at the yard with the same colour interior as my car, brought home its rear seatbelts, took out the stitching on the foldover part that held the buckle and tongue, put the straps through the washing machine, got my mother to sew them back together, and put them in. Better than nothing, I suppose, but that’s a lot of kinds of eek.
Mother was unpredictable, though. I took an interest in the activities of the Denver Regional Council of Government’s activities related to traffic-caused air pollution. I was more enthusiastic than knowledgeable, but I felt I had an interest at stake, as there was talk of banning the use of old cars on certain days of the week or on high-pollution days. I was on the phone one day to the administrator discussing an upcoming meeting I wanted to participatein. I’d learned by experience to take the precaution of making calls from the basement phone, out of mother’s earshot, but she picked up one of the upstairs extensions, heard a short bit of my conversation, and flew down the two flights of stairs. She grabbed the phone out my hand and—without hanging it up—at the top of her lungs she let fly with a scornful dressing-down about how I had no business with any regional council and they didn’t need Daniel Stern to tell them how to run the government. Torpedoed again.
German, because of course it does, has exactly the right word: Verschlimmbesserung. It means to make something worse in an attempt to make it better. Google translates it succinctly as “disimprovement”, and I surely made a speciality of it.
The car’s original transmission was a little slow to engage first thing in the morning. No big deal, it just took two or three or four seconds to hit Reverse the first time out of Park, especially on a cold day. For the rest of the day it was fine, and there were no other problems. It would’ve carried on just fine, and the symptom would’ve been invisible if I’d got in the habit of shifting to Neutral before the first start of the morning. But I was still many years away from leaving well enough alone, and I was a booksmart perfectionist hellbent on having a ’60s car behave with ’90s manners, so I decided the transmission needed rebuilding. And if that was the case, why, what a perfect opportunity for some upgrades: wide-ratio gears! Part-throttle kickdown! Oh, and since those are difficult and complicated to retrofit to a ’65 trans, it would have to be a ’66-’67 transmission, which would necessitate a new driveshaft, because ’65 was the last year for Chrysler’s longstanding ball-and-trunnion front universal joint. And since there would need to be a new driveshaft, well, the 7¼” rear axle was making noise and had a weepy pinion seal, so obviously it was time for an 8¾” unit, which I sourced from the yard. Et cetera.
It was a feature-creep foulup fiasco. The steering column alone tried its best to whack me upside the head with a clue-by-four, but I was oblivious and doggedly ploughed on: I had to swap in a ’66 column for the rod shifter (versus the twin-cable shifter for the ’65 trans), but the floor plate was different, so I had to take the ’66 column back apart and swap the floor plates, but the [something else] was different, so I had to swap that, which meant the [something else] wouldn’t fit, so I had to mix and match more parts.
I found a local transmission shop who said they’d build what I wanted. They didn’t, and it grew ugly; they not only tried to scam me with an off-the-shelf transmission they hyped as a custom build, but they also lifted the car by its front and rear bumpers, which came away with ugly scars. They (or their insurance) wound up buying two bumpers’ worth of chrome for me.
Then I found another shop, called A&A Transmission (as they seemingly all were; businesses tried to out-AAAAardvark each other to get to the front of the listings in the yellow pages), whose owner said yes to my specifications. I wish he’d said no; I was absolutely wrong about all of it. I regretted it a couple of minutes into the first test drive, and hated the transmission in that car for years afterward. It shifted badly, and it sounded wrong (I’d gained the gear-reduction starter, but lost that melodious first-gear whirr; the wide-ratio gears sound like a Ford AOD…uck!).
The wide-ratio gearset was intended to cope with super-tall 2.45 and 2.26 rear axles Chrysler were putting in passenger cars in the early ’80s because they didn’t have a 4-speed overdrive automatic like Ford and GM. These gears were a poor match for my ’60s 225 engine and my 3.23 rear axle. I tried to save the project by swapping a 2.76 centre chunk into the rear axle, but that just made it suck somewhat less. I’d been completely sure the 2.74:1 first gear (vs. 2.45) and the 1.54:1 second gear (vs. 1.45) would make a big ol’ improvement in the Valiant’s performance, and I’d been completely big ol’ wrong.
The A/C install was another case of ideas being much better than actualities. I ought to have just put a knee-knocker in, like the one in dad’s Lancer. That would’ve been adequately effective, minimally disruptive, and minimally difficult. But ohhhhh, no, I had to have factory air. Here too, I wish the highly competent shop I asked had said no, but they said yes (and they’d be hanging the disc brakes up front while they were at it). There are many, many different parts in Darts and Valiants with factory A/C versus without—the accelerator pedal is different, for example, because it has to be, because the rotating-rod throttle linkage on non-A/C cars would have to run right through the middle of the A/C-type heater box. So different accelerator pedal, whole different throttle and kickdown linkage, different brackets, all kinds of different parts. And factory air wasn’t even offered in Canada in ’65, so no provisions were made. No dimples in the metal for hole-drilling locations, just none of it. It wound up being an expensive job for me, a “we’re never doing this again” job for the shop, and the punchline is the system didn’t even work all that well. It was underspecified and undersized, and the poorly-insulated car without tinted glass was a rolling solar oven. But I had my factory air, by gum!
(Postscript to the A/C portion of this story: the system I bought out of that Texas ’65 Dart arrived with Dymo tape on the control panel spelling out BUILT IN DETROIT BY IDIOTS. I thought little of it until about three years ago when I was going through my long-dead father’s school papers and found notes taken one day in law school—Harvard, which he aced—when he was clearly bored. There were doodles and little sketches in the margins, and at the top of one page he wrote BUILT IN DETROIT BY IDIOTS and drew a box around it. It’s entirely possible he wrote it the very day my Valiant and/or that Texas ’65 Dart was built. Was this a thing of some kind? A saying or a book title or something like that? I’ve not been able to find anything substantial.)
There are many more stories like this just with this car alone. Still, it wasn’t all a shitshow fuelled by a trainwrecking mix of youthful enthusiasm, inexperience, ignorance, and delusion. I got very active with the Slant-6 club, first as a technical representative (answer man for questions sent in by members). That took quite some chutzpah, given my young age and my less-than-perfect batting average with the cars I was actually looking after in person. But on the other hand, I was keeping them running and driving, and there is some value to unusually broad and deep theoretical and specificational knowledge, and since multiple tech reps answered each question, my ability to rattle off obscure technical service bulletins and little-known part numbers was balanced by more experience-based answers from others. That’s how I came to expand my already-extensive correspondence with another tech rep out in California, name of Bob.
Bob was a very intelligent retired Navy officer in his late 40s or early 50s. Terrific writer. The bulk of our written (him) and word-processed (me) letters’ and our phone calls’ content was car-related; he owned numerous Slant-6 A-bodies, had owned numerous others, and for some years had worked as a wrecking yard. He had all kinds of good stories. The conversation strayed into countless little zigs and zags and jogs. Quotidian stuff—water heaters, college (he’d gone to UMichigan; I’d not yet), history and politics in his state of California, bicycles, popular music. He was pretty much my only connection to anything beyond the suburbs.
He drank himself to unconsciousness every night with bourbon, and he was a well-practiced drunk: functional and articulate but irrational and irrascible. And me, I was a snotty, clueless, mouthy suburban kid. We were both very adept at slinging very sharp words, so the friendship ended several times.
He had short luck with a long string of women, most of whom lived multiple states away and so could only be seen with a road trip—therefore not frequently. When he’d break up with yet another of them, he’d give me instructions for calling him—let the phone ring twice, hang up, wait 25 seconds, call again, let it ring once, hang up, wait 15 seconds, call back and then he’d answer—so he’d not pick up her calls. And there were his slightly-off-key references to boobs and chicks. And his Navy career stationed at Alameda. Oh, and that drinking-himself-to-stupor-every-night thing. The last time the friendship ended was shortly after I came out. Upon hearing the news, he said “Do not contact me again” and hung up—the only individual ever to react that way, at least out loud. 2+2=5.
He’s dead now, but he was very much alive at that time, and we used to play a game we called the Snippy Awards: which of us could give the most caustic answer to a thoughtless tech question without getting swatted down by the editor? Fun and yuks at the time, but I am surely not proud of this, and I avoid reading the Tech Q&A sections of the old magazines because I don’t care to hear from my mealymouthed past self. This is also the main reason (aside from not liking it) why I don’t drink alcohol: my mouth’s plenty damn big enough as it is; don’t nobody need it getting no bigger.
It wasn’t very long before I decided there should be an official Colorado chapter of the Slant-6 Club. All I had to do was announce my intent, and »poof!« there was a Colorado chapter, with me in charge. Once again, fortuitous timing: I spotted a snarky remark about Dodge Darts in an article in the Denver Post, and I picked up the telephone in response. Extra, extra, read all about it! (click for larger in new tab/window):
At the time I was regularly driving to Boulder and back for sessions with one of a long list of experts my mother (about whom perhaps too much more later in this series) shopped me around to in the name of doing something about my problems which were really her problems. More than once I saw a black ’62 Valiant zoom past on the other side of Highway 36, and so I paid the Boulder County clerk and recorder $40 for a list of all cars with VINs starting with particular number sequences, including the ones for ’62 Valiants. It arrived as a dot-matrix printout on fanfold, pinfeed paper, and each car was listed with its VIN, licence plate, registered owner’s name, address, and phone number. Wow, the past is a foreign country, eh! The Valiant I saw on route 36 was on the list, but—as with most of the other owners I tried to contact—I garnered not much interest. Nevertheless, the first Colorado Slant-6 meet was a fine success, all things considered…
…as was the second…
…and the third meet was also the final one.
I was headed out of state to go to university, and nobody stepped up to take over the chapter. A pity, but I had a wide world to go explore, me and my Valiant. There are more stories to tell, and I will, but next week we’ll take a bit of a detour.
My very first car that I bought for $700 in 1968 after receiving my driver’s license; was a 1966 Dodge Dart, with a Slant 6 engine; automatic transmission. It gave me good service until 1972 when I purchased a 1970 Plymouth Duster .
Another great Saturday Valiant article! My Dad bought a 65 Dart new just after i was born. It was a dark blue four door that is probably the same color as Frank’s car above. I’ve been a Dart and Valiant fan ever since! Thanks for making my Saturday morning enjoyable!
Always wonderful to read your work! That smile of yours is practically glowing in some of those early pictures. I couldn’t wait to read about your first running car and l wasn’t disappointed! I’m sorry about Bob. I remember coming out to my best friend at the time who bemoaned “the man he’d lost” and said maybe he’d talk to me again when I’d “come to my senses.” Well, it’s been years and we never did speak again… I hope he came around in that time and was kinder to the next person to confide in him. Still stings thinking about that last conversation.
I’ve been driving a-bodies since my first purchase of a Dart 170-auto in 1986. But I think in the few years described here, you did more mechanical work on the one car than I’ve done in 35 on six! I’m exhausted! And we still don’t know what happened with the car!
Anyway, thanks for the story, I’m working up to changing my ’63 over to HEIV this summer, following some detailed plans someone you know has provided on line …it needs a tune up, and I’ve but one box of old Brooklyn-made points left!
Someone I know, eh? 🤓
another from my youth, 66 273, tflite, ps,,a/c, just bouhjt, ww’s soon added, lovely car from nice little lady
From your youth? Just bought? That black Ford pickup in the background looks pretty recent. Maybe it was a time traveler?
with my viion problems thought these were my earlier picture, i hsd it in the 70’s , a lady doctor bought from me, got it detailed esacgh year until shp closed, one of lasrt timew was in took pics in same spot as orig for caomparison, still looked the same, forgot she put bw back on,why thioughtwere esarlier pics. DougD ever see the purple/white roof 60 Doge Matasdor 2rt in the yard south of Silvera’s (by 80’s THAT car, wrecked aqua ’56 Tbird and green 65 Raiv rear ended had been mine, inACHICO 61 fury 2gh ,62 300 ht and 63 wildcast ht in yard off fair stwere misadvrmtuures. lucky here cars dont rust ogte4n
Small world, I grew up in Stoney Creek. I don’t recall ever seeing your car but you’d think I’d have noticed a well kept Valiant in the mid 80’s during high school.
And as for safety, my friends and I all drove late 60s early 70s cars too. At least yours wasn’t hideously rusty. We saw lots of cars in our junkyard adventures that had crashed and literally come apart at the seams. It was a different time, extra luck required in those days but still safer than a 1930s car.
sorry wroin Stoney crerek one 20 miles awy
Nice essay and pretty funny German word!
I love the story here .
Those were good cars .
-Nate
Saturday mornings have become my favorite ones of the week. And this was an exceptionally good one. So much to unpack.
You were actually doing what I was doing mentally at that age, endlessly improving the car of my dreams. And yes, sometimes that doesn’t work out so well. And no, I would never have thought about swapping in the wide ratio gears; that one is a bit of a head-scratcher, but you were probably the only one to ever do that. And prove that it wasn’t a good idea.
I can only imagine the conversations with Bob. I met a somewhat similar guy in Asuza, CA who had a whole big storage lot of Peugeot 404s and his garage was jammed with perfectly organized shelves of parts. Mind boggling. But he wouldn’t sell you a thing unless you met his approval. Meaning you had to prove you were a genuine 404 aficionado. I passed muster. But there was no way he’d consider selling me the 404 Cabriolet rotting in the broiling sun. I wonder what happened to them all; he was getting quite old. His last name was Light. Can’t remember his first right now.
This was perfect for an extended breakfast read as my 68 year-old back is a bit sore from my automotive labors in the driveway yesterday, installing the lift kit for my xB. I got one front side done. It was a bit of a bitch. The backs are supposed to be easy, so I saved them for last. Kind of like eating the spinach first…
I know a guy with a shed that was like that but his passion was the Hillman Superminx endless supply of brand new and good used parts a lot of it unobtainium stuff and though I did buy parts from him I never knew just what he actually had…..
Untill he finally sold me his 66 Superminx wagon and all the parts came with it now they are my problem to store and dispose of the surplus I’ll never need problem is its a limited market survivor wagons number in a handfull over here and they were tough reliable old things that didnt rust too badly so a big supply of spare wagon unique panels are going to be hard to sell.
One of Bob’s stories that stuck with me from his counterman days was how he’d deal with attempts to steal parts: “Okeh, a carburetor, ten dollars, an alternator, ten dollars, and take those parts out of your pockets and put them on the counter so I can see them…thank you, two turn signal lenses, five dollars each, so we’re $30 and tax makes $32.57. From forty, here’s your $7.43 in change”, then he’d pick up the heavy deadblow hammer he kept behind the counter, smash whatever parts had been pocketed or otherwise snuck, and deadpan “Looks like those might be defective. Sorry, no refunds.”
Like your 404 guy, Bob had no patience for people he considered timewasters or otherwise unworthy—even if they wanted to buy parts from his extensive stash; especially if that’s what they led with—so I appreciated his longhand letters and long conversations. But as I say, the friendship ended several times. He went silent after a phone call when I mentioned seeing a rebuilt engine being offered for sale in what I thought might be his vicinity and asked if it was nearby; he’d been well into his nightly bottle of bourbon and misremembered it as my asking him to go buy an engine and deliver it to me. There was no convincing him otherwise. Eventually he “forgave” me, but didn’t really erase the black mark from my permanent record, as it seemed.
There was another very active longtime Slant-6 clubber elsewhere in the bay area, who built amazing project after amazing project while holding down a full-time job and being a present and involved husband and father. When Bob perceived from him a concerned eyebrow raised in re constant drinking, he summarily and permanently ended that many-decade friendship.
Bob wasn’t a bad person. He was badly damaged, and in case it’s not obvious, I have my suspicions about what warped his personality so badly, but we’ll never know.
Thanks for the compliment! I will try to carry on upholding the standard I’ve set. This is the first extensive, deadlined, non-technical writing I’ve done in a very long time, and it’s exercising muscles I’d forgot exist.
(And here I thought off-roading in your xB was an April Fools’ bit!)
(And here I thought off-roading in your xB was an April Fools’ bit!)
All too real.
I’ve certainly enjoyed all your articles, a huge undertaking on your part, and greatly appreciated by us all.
I’ll give you my take on the “Made in Detroit by Idiots”
“Made in Trollhattan by Trolls” was a Saab slogan (official or unofficial, I know not).
Perhaps a bit of ‘merican sarcasm?
There was an official sticker, but there have been some unofficial ones also.
https://www.saabplanet.com/saab-made-in-trollhattan-by-trolls-stickers/
I had a 65 Aussie Valiant an AP6 the model was called nothing like your one either to look at or general condition mine was a well beaten rust bucket, 225 slant six engine that ran beautifully and 3 on the tree.
Bought for $20 with a broken rear uni joint a replacement tailshaft was found in the local rubbish dump and installed and the car was pressed into service as work transport, they were good cars the old slant six Valiants but I prefer the later cars from the 70s with the hemi six and owned several, always well thought of by Kiwis the Aussies didnt seem to get it their preference seemed to be Holdens and Falcons due to the illusion that the were true blue Australian cars,(the power of advertising).
I think the VH-on Valiants were shunned by the market because of their styling rather than not being perceived as being less ‘true blue’. Thanks to a massive advertising campaign we all knew the Hemi engine was Australian, and anyone who read the car magazines knew this was an Aussie-only body, but the ‘fuselage’ Valiants just looked so much bigger than the Holden and Falcon, with such small windows. At a time when people were already feeling the Holden and Falcon were getting too big, the even-bigger-looking Valiant was a hard sell.
I still regret that my cousin with the 1965 Dodge Dart 270 station wagon did not tell me he was selling it because his wife thought it was too ugly. It was a hand-me-down from his Dad who got it as a hand-me-down from his father–in-law. Lots of family history, there! That was a car on which I had done a valve job, too (it had a 273 V-8, not a Slant Six). When it got hit in the left quarter, and State Farm gave up on finding a replacement, I found a Dart 170 wagon in a yard 40 miles away. The car got fresh paint but had nonmatching trim on that quarter panel until it was sold.
They are status-conscious BMW people now. I think one of their BMWs is uglier than a 1965 Dodge Dart.
Shame….
Oh, so much here. Yes, I too cringe at some of my early automotive jobs. “Leave it the hell alone” did not come easily to me either. Like on my 59 Fury – the temp slider had the “hot” arrow pointing in the direction that was the opposite of hot. So of course I had to fix it. In the end the thing worked exactly the same way, but now the only way to switch away from “defroster” mode was to manually push a rod under the dash because my repair of the brittle 20 year old plastic piece that vacuum hoses attached to was not good enough to make the vacuum controls work as they should have.
And yes, while the logical side of me knows that the direct drive starter is better (faster cranking which is huge on cold days or on a weak battery) I was disappointed that my 59 lacked the reduction gear starter that defined Mopars in my mind.
I also love the old stylized parts logo that used the DDCP letters (which included DeSoto but ignored Imperial). The 20 year old belts and hoses under the hood of my 66 Fury still used that logo, which had to have been about the end of the line for it.
Your heater control Schlimmbesserung is a very close match for my headstrong insistence that it wasn’t enough for stuff to function; it had to be all the way correct, damn the expense and collateral damage.
Let’s resolve that starter conflict for you, though: the direct-drive starter is not better. Aside from being heavier (though there’s that), it applies less torque while a cold engine requires more, and it draws more current while a cold battery provides less. Its current draw drops the line voltage, weakening the ignition system’s output. The gear-reduction starter applies more torque while drawing less current, resulting in more likely starts in any event—especially with a less-than-perfect battery or ignition system.
The gear-reduction starter’s tradeoff of more torque at slower speed is a good one; cranking speed is irrelevant.
That DPCD logo—Dodge, Plymouth, Chrysler, DeSoto—did indeed stay on a lot of parts long (’70s!) after DeSoto’s demise. I’ve seen people try to retroactively shoehorn Imperial in by pointing to the tall part of the “P”; no sale here on that one. And where’s the V for Valiant? This is invidious discrimination! 🤓
Great story. I remember that yard back west off of Santa Fe. Walking through it was like traveling back in time. There still is a motorcycle scrap yard off of Union and Santa Fe which can be interesting.
Another broken stud story: In autoshop I decided to “rebuild” my ’62 Greenbrier’s engine. Of course I promptly snapped one of the head studs and, much to the autoshop teacher’s dismay, decided to put it back together w/o replacing that stud. Six months later on a cold morning start that cylinder’s head gasket gave away and I drove it like that for another year, with what sounded like a minor exhaust leak. Of course the stale air heater was blowing those combustion byproducts into the cabin whenever I used the heater.
My next car, a 65 Monza convertible blew a fuse and I decided to wrap the blown fuse with aluminum foil, just until I got around to buying a new one. Lots of smoke coming from under the dashboard on the way home from school one day.
It sounds like you had a lot more common sense than I had at 17 years old.
I’ve kind of whipped myself mercilessly here, but I wasn’t a complete screwup. Far from it, actually; I managed to keep two thirty-year-old cars running and driving well most of the time. I might sift in a little balance in the next instalments.
There used to be a whole bunch of yards off Santa Fe—remember Svigel’s? And there was Erie Auto Parts and another I forget the name of in Dacono, and Seven Sons, and …
You actually successfully repaired cars at that age; I broke them.
I remember an import yard up in Erie or thereabouts. It was a good yard with a ton of air cooled VW stock. Svigel’s I think was the one with the fake helicopter out front but it wasn’t nearly as interesting as that other yard on the south side at the end of that same road.
Denver metro area real estate prices are at nose-bleed levels so independent scrap yards have pretty much disappeared, replaced by houses and condos and big box stores.. A few big, hi-turnover corporate yards remain but the more interesting yards are in Wyoming and Utah.
Schlimmbesserung — that’s a great word! I too suffered from the malady at a young age. I recall making things worse with my model cars in a failed attempts to “improve” them. Like scraping off the spray paint on a front fender by using sewing scissors. Or trying to fix a slightly wobbly wheel by making it a loose, more wobbly wheel.
That’s sad about Bob. I had a friend in college whose father threw him out of the house (for good) after he came out.
Your seat belt story reminds me of my 75 Buick that I had purchased from the original owner. As per that era of GM it had the dual retractor single buckle system with the positioning loop on the seat. She was a rather petite woman and found the shoulder harness portion incompatible with her. So she very carefully undid the stitching that attached it to the buckle piece. She then neatly folded up the portion that was left sticking out and sort of stuffed it in the opening. So one of the first things I did to it was find some heavy duty thread, I think it was billed as for carpet, in as close of a color as I could find. It did appear to be very similar in diameter too. I then carefully stitched them back in place doing my best to follow the witness marks left by the original stitching. Thankfully I never put them to the test.
Your picture of the Rotor and box is interesting. DR stands for Delco-Remy which would indicate the original mfg. Plugging that into the cross reference shows that number does indeed fit GM cars (and IH’s which is why the number seemed familiar). However it does not look like the rotor pictured next to the box. The rotor pictured next to the box looks like it is from a Ford 4cy. FF was the prefix from Ford stuff while AL for Auto-Lite meant they were for a Chrysler.
Nuh-uh, you’re looking at the wrong part and putting too much weight on prefixes that only look like they’re a uniform system. They aren’t. DR is the Standard brand’s prefix in many but not all cases for a GM application, but Echlin uses an RR prefix for most of those parts. An “AL” Echlin or Standard part often but not always means a part for a Prestolite (AutoLite) system, MO (Echlin) or CH (Standard) is often but not always for a Chrysler product, etc. This rotor’s Interchanges include Standard № FD-308, Ford № E6FZ-12200-A and a bunch of others, Echlin MO35 and FA154, Chrysler № 33003389 (obviously) and 56027075 and 5142594AA. GM and AC-Delco do not appear to offer this part. Applications are:
Ford:
• Aerostar ’86-’97
• Bronco ’84-’92
• Bronco II ’85-’90
• E150-250-350 ’84-’96
• Escort ’86-’90
• EXP ’86-’88
• F150 ’84-’97
• F250-350 ’84-’96
• LTD ’84-’86
• Mustang ’84-’90
• Probe ’90-’92
• Ranger ’85-’94
• Taurus ’86-’95
• Tempo ’84-’94
• Thunderbird ’84-’95
Jeep:
• Chicory ’87-’96
• Comanche ’87-’92
• Grand Chicory ’93-’94
• Wagoneer ’87-’90
• Wrangler ’91-’94
Lincoln:
• Continental ’88-’94
Mazda:
• B3000 ’94
Mercury:
• Capri ’84-’86
• Cougar ’84-’95
• Lynx ’86-’87
• Marquis ’84-’86
• Sable ’86-’95
• Topaz ’84-’94
Merkur:
• Scorpio ’88-’89
• XR4Ti ’85-’89
Not a single GM application in the bunch!
Standard wasn’t the only brand that used DR to denote it was a GM product even though they could be found on other brands too.
Filko for example and it is for some GMs as well as some Ramblers and IHC who bought their distributors (and other parts) from GM.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Filko-DR-143-Ignition-Rotor-for-1957-62-Chevrolet-6-Pontiac-6-Rambler-6-NOS/303711496538?hash=item46b69da95a:g:Bk4AAOSwHoNfdgJc
Meanwhile Niehoff was one of the others that used the DR prefix but their 143 is a dimmer switch. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Niehoff-Dimmer-Switch-DR-143-55-56-Chevrolet-56-57-Hudson-1956-Nash-NOS/154404930892?hash=item23f340454c:g:iv8AAOSw-npgR-2X
I agree pictured appears to be a “Ford” rotor.
Chrysler did source Ford ignitions in the AMC era, so that would make sense.
The pictured rotor wouldn’t fit a Slant-6 application with “real” Chrysler ignition. I’m not saying that fit was implied for the rotor, I haven’t ready every word nor comment.
“DR” may indicate Distributor Rotor in the numbering scheme, or it may not.
The “Chryco” name appeared in 1938, when Chrysler of Canada started making their own engines. Engine numbers ended with the letter “C” to show it was made in Canada.
Chrysler of Canada pushed Chryco parts through the 1970’s and into the 1980’s. With free trade between and Canada and the U.S., Chrysler Canada began selling Mopar parts in Canada instead of Chryco.
And from 1938 Chrysler of Canada started pushing parts for non-Chrysler cars and trucks. Everything from engine parts, tune-up parts, to even sheet metal parts. In the 1950’s you could buy rocker panels for your Meteor or Pontiac Pathfinder at your Chryco dealer.
And Chrysler of Canada started selling all parts to service stations, brake shops, etc., across Canada. That part of Chrysler’s business was separated under the name Autopar. Pioneer Dodge in Mission B.C. still has their “Autopar – Chryco” sign.
I remember this 1966 Valiant from a couple of decades ago. Very nice condition for the age. At the same time this 1966 was shown to the world, I was driving a 1963 Valiant V-200 sedan – white with rust. Had a small jealous streak as the 1966 was indeed a beauty!
Thanks for this history, Bill!
My Dad bought a 1949 Ford in the late 50’s. It had a little decal in the corner of the windshield that read “Made in Detroit by Idiots.” That is my first memory of seeing the phrase. I’m sure Dad removed the decal quickly as he was a blue collar worker in an iron/steel foundry and would later be an active member of the United Steelworkers of America. These decals and bumper stickers were pretty common in the Midwest around that time. As were the stories about Coke bottles left inside doors and other worker sabotage on assembly lines. What was perceived as the increasingly poor quality of US cars was a constant subject of discussion – I have an old collection of Motor Trends from the period and you can see it there with increasing frequency in the late 50’s and on into the 60’s. I think there also was antipathy toward the UAW and other unions as corruption in some (but far from all) labor leadership was revealed in investigations at the time.
The pictures of your car remind me of how good-looking these “Darts” were. My aunt had an ice blue 64 that I thought was very handsome. My English teacher in high school traded in her 63 (similar color to yours) for a new 67 hardtop in white with a black vinyl top. Nice looking car but IMO not nearly as attractive or a well integrated design as the original. Great Saturday read – looking forward to the sequel.
Hi !
Have you ever seen the 1986 movie “Gung Ho” with Michael Keaton ?
That – pretty much – reflects Average Joes impressions on how american cars were built. In a hurry, from untrained, unskilled workers, pressed to get the numbers up on the cars that leave the factory. Latest on delivery first parts fall off. If not in the factory already.
And this is still today the impression on most europeans. The most US cars we get to see are the obnoxious Jeeps and Corvettes and Cadillacs or Mustangs. The top of the line – and *they* have a good build-quality, since they are expensive. We barely got to see the bread-and-butter-cars, except from some castrated Mustang II in the mid-70s or some V6 Buicks, low-end Fords, few TranSports or such. And those were by far *not* impressively made.
The two Chryslers I owned were mid-range and so-so. Some potential for optimization, dusted designs and signs of a generous quality control. A japanese quality control manager had committed suicide rather than pushing the car out of the factory in that condition. It needed some rework on both of them to get rid of squeaking interior parts or adjust doors to matching gap levels (which the local dealer did on the red one – and which did the previous owner on the silver one).
And low- to midrange US-cars of the late 80s *still* had some stuff installed european automakers hadn’t used for a decade or longer – like the pull-switch for the lights. The entire dashboard looks pretty dated when the car was new. But – okay – it is from the US. They like that sort of stuff over there … 😉
My first car back in 1978 was a beige 1967 Opel Kadett 2-door limo. I once joked, that the pre-war-era for german automakers essentially ended in 1973 with the presentation of the VW Golf. The Kadett was … very basic. 1100cc / 45 hp / 4-speed manual with a looooong gearstick – half a meter. At least the 2nd half 1967 model had coil springs on the rear axle already, no more leaf springs.
But apart from that: even it was an entry-level model it had an outstanding built-quality. My dad – who drove the car half a year before I got my driving license once complaint about a funny noise. All on that by-then 11 year old car was rock-solid, however dated and less fancy and with no comfort features, but solid. He said it was a noise like a marble rolling around.
One day I lifted up the rear bench. And there it was: a 1 inch glass marble.
It’s not always the automotive workers that louse things up.
Sometimes previous owners kids are also good in that.
Peter from Germany
Your car sputtering to a stop reminded me of when that happened with my Cougar. Had to be in the first year I had it and so one day I went to change the coolant and hoses. For the life of me I couldn’t get the bypass hose off and for whatever reason it didn’t cross my mind to cut it off. So I left it, changed the other two, and filled up the radiator.
Then the next day, maybe, I am on Highway 8 west bound in San Diego passing through Hotel Circle. I’m going to meet someone there as my new job is first to follow him through supermarkets. This is 1970 and I am 16. Right as I get to Hotel Circle the engine stops on the freeway and I manage to coast to the right hand shoulder. Get out, open the hood, and see coolant all over. The bypass hose split open.
What to do? No cell phones or anything else so I leave the car and jump the fence, hike down the embankment, and walk to where I was to me this co-worker. I get him to drive me the 10 miles back to my home where I pick up that bypass hose along with Prestone and water. He drives me back and drops me off next to my car on the shoulder. I open the hood, replace the hose, and fill her up as cars whiz by. A CHP Officer stops, walks around, and asks what I am doing. I tell him and he’s like Ok and then drives off.
I’m ready to start the car and it won’t start. What now? So I open the hood to check ignition. Pop the distributor cap and see a broken rotor somehow. Great now what? So I hope the fence again and walk to a gas station on Hotel Circle Way and see if they have a rotor. They do, I buy it, walk back, hop the fence and install it. Start the car and off I go. Only took about two hours of time. That is the only time the Cougar ever broke down and it broken down because of me. Oh, and ever since I cut those stupid bypass hoses off when I change them out as they always seem to adhere tightly.
I’m surprised no one identified the origin of “Made In Detroit By Idiots” I’m pretty sure it first appeared in MAD magazine. MAD would produce quarterly special editions that would have bonus features like sheets of pre-perforated brightly colored lick and paste stickers bearing witty, snotty, clever and hilarious phrases, slogans puns Etc. Many were of two-part phrases, the first part in large easy to read letters and the second part in smaller letters that forced you to look closer. One of these said proudly:
“MADE IN DETROIT”
by idiots
I’ve owned lots of Darts and Valiants with both V8s and /6s. I’ve currently got a 65 Dart GT convertible with the HP273 also a 65 Barracuda with 4speed about to receive a built 360, just working out the details of scattershield, external balance flywheel and clutch.
The German language is very good for devising new words. I don’t speak much of it but it seems that can keep adding bits on to a word until you have the word you want. The fun is when you attempt to translate it into another language like English and you get some really interesting and evocative juxtapositions. Schlimmbesserung is an excellent word and I have performed it or have been he who provides it. For me it is usually the result of “just enough knowledge to be dangerous” or knowing just enough to be convinced you have the answer but not having enough experience to know about other possibilities thereby committing yourself to a particular plan of action that leads to failure/disaster. Only then does it occur that you may have been wrong from the very beginning.
I learned some things from this article. I too have salvaged a factory in dash air unit from a 65 Dart. I did not know about the linkage differences although I was planning to install it into a V8 car. Keep writing, man. I can’t wait to read more of your MOPAR A-body stuff.
By the way, is the “Bob” who owned the Valiant wagon from the Bay Area the same Bob who started the Slant 6 Club?I remember finding their flyer under my windshield wiper and ended up meeting the founder of the Bay Area chapter but don’t remember his name. I didn’t join but went to one of their shows. Do you remember what wrecking yard he worked at? Our paths may have crossed there as well.
Thanks, Paolo.
Mad Magazine, eh? I can believe it.
The V8 ’64-’66 A-bodies got the same cable-type accelerators and throttle linkages as the factory-air ’65-’66s, so you won’t have to deal with that particular rework, though there will be many others. Beyond that, there are ways of improving the system, and ways of making it worse.
The Bay Area was the centroid of the Slant-6 club, which was started in 1980 by Harry Aunes, in the Bay Area. He sold the club to Jack Poehler, of Oregon, in 1985. If I recall correctly, Bob worked for Phelps Auto Wrecking. You might’ve met Doug Dutra, who was a prime mover behind the Bay Area chapter activities—and still is, despite his shop, seven of his eight cars, all his tools and parts, many years of photos and engineering drawings, and a whole lot else having been lost to the recent fires. The pic attached to this comment is what’s left of an aluminum 225 he had on a stand in the shop. X-(
Oh no! That’s terrible. I loved reading some of his articles.
Where did you see his stuff? Over the years, Doug Dutra has put out a vast amount of consistently dependable, unusually high quality advice and expertise, gained by immense experience, on just about every subject related to Slant-6s and A-bodies in everything from grocery-getters to screaming racers. He’s the one who got sought out to rebuild the engine for the XNR.
He’s a peach of a guy, friendly and happy to help out and almost impossible to piss off—even with thoughtless or unreasonable questions. He answered my phone call (at dinnertime, I think), talked me down off my panic, and got me sorted out when my first Slant-6 tappet clearance adjustment went awry—I had been paying such careful attention to alternating 0.010″ and 0.020″ feeler gauges that I’d overlooked the two intakes side-by-side in the middle of the engine, so I’d got half the clearances backward. As soon as I described what the engine was doing, he knew exactly what was wrong, from having answered the same question for many others before. That was among the experiences that inspired my own years of answering questions and helping solve problems in the Slant-6 forums. I’m glad I had Dutra’s counterexample to temper the “Snippy Awards” example Bob set!
(With people like Dutra around, I have no interest and see no point in wasting time listening to some self-impressed dillweed spouting fetid nonsense about Slant-6s on YouTube)
Links to his articles at Valiant.org (IIRC), which I found via allpar. I am a pretty serious (virtual reality) /6 aficionado, and his articles on hopping it up were the best. He’s one of those gems; it was obvious from just his articles.
I haven’t met Doug but hope to one of these days. I know he is a contributor at the “For A Bodies Only” website which I frequent. I always read his posts with great interest. I’m very sorry to learn he was wiped out but fortunately he escaped, injury free I hope. These fires are no joke.
Harry Aunes name rings a bell. I might still have that original Slant6 Club handbill stashed away in a folder. I tend to hang onto stuff like that forever. If I ever find it I’ll send you a copy.
I did occasional business with Phelps Auto Wreckers in San Leandro but didn’t know anyone there personally. Bob’s method of stamping the receipt for “special” customers wasn’t unique, my friend Robert Kennedy, the owner of (now closed) All-Auto in San Francisco used a nearly identical check-out procedure. He added his own flourishes all designed to prolong or intensify the discomfort and humiliation of the guilty party. It made you squirm to see it unleashed to some poor devil.
Most junkyard owners I’ve known have similar, effective customer service tools. The others cultivate hostile, repugnant personalities that keep everyone else at arms length and afraid of “setting the old bastard off'”
H’mmm. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen much (any?) of Doug at FABO, but he is one of the anchors of slantsix.org , where he goes by “Doc” and “Doctor Dodge”.
I sure wouldn’t mind hearing more detailed stories of “customer service” tactics for would-be thieves; some of mine are here.
Hmm, about three years back my upholstery guy bought a 63 Valiant convertible out of Berkeley. He tends to do that when the right one arises and then sells it for maybe a thousand more. He actually asked me if I wanted it. Anyway, he found an older fellow in the South San Francisco area who had a basement full of parts, many NOS, for Valiants and Darts of the first half of the 60s he told me. With the amount of parts he said he had this much older fellow must be on your radar.
I don’t know who that might be. Could be any of numerous people who were involved in the Slant-6 Club in that area over the years, or someone who wasn’t.
Thats some quality read, right up there with the most remarkable of the COAL series here, chapeau!
One tiny nitpick though, the actual expression in day-to-day use would be “Verschlimmbesserung”, we do love us some prefixes indeed.
As for “Built in Detroit by idiots” – I did encouter that phrase quite early and expected it to be more commonly known back home, there are plaques of it, after all.
Thanks, Herman. This page mentions both forms of the word, but this seems to confirm your correction, so I’m fixing the title and text of this post accordingly.
So much history and great stories! .
RE : Bob
In 1967 one of the new inmates was ‘Tommy’ ~ a 12 year old bewildered kid who’d been summarily kicked out of his family’s house when he told them he was queer ~ “gay” wasn’t the same meaning back then .
I wasn’t going to comment on this but it’s sad and wrong to kick your own children out for being fundamentally different ~ I have little doubt anyone chooses to be gay .
-Nate
…inmates?
O.K. then : cellmates .
-Nate
I still don’t get what you’re describing. An actual prison, a school, a mental institution, a cafeteria, a car wash…?
Jail/school .
-Nate
Hi Daniel,
I loved your asbestos I could joke! Top class.
Richard,
Dublin, Ireland
»bows, doffs cap«
What a great write up. I could see myself going down the ill conceived modification to improve my vehicles had I had a place to do so and parents that could have indulged a bit. I was certainly a theoretical master mechanic, at least in my head.
Believe it or not, “Made in Wolfsburg by Elves”—the precursor, I thought, to “Made in Trollhatten by Trolls”—has no presence at all on the Web. What gives ?
Try “Made in der forest by der elves ” that’s that the decals said back when .
There were many more….
-Nate
Not “Made in Wolfsburg by Wolves”?
No .
-Nate
Yes, I do believe that both my ‘ 66 Dodge Dart , purchased in 1968, (with peeling paint ) was originally painted in dark navy blue paint from the factory, as well as your father’s Dart ; in what is officially called ” DT8332 ” Dodge Dark Blue ; with a Dupont Paint Code # of 4757 & 181-97800 and an Acme-Rogers Paint Co. Code # of #5060; and a Ditzler Paint Code of # 13040.
In 1969, I had my ’66 Dart re-painted in the same color as original ; based on these color codes at a local to me -then- auto body shop. Here is a ’66 Dodge Polara with that same ’66 Dodge Dark Blue .