Project Car: First Dart


By Colin Carson

Part 1: You're going to drive it home?

I tried not to become a car guy, I really did...but I'm the son of a Carson and classic cars are in my blood. After deciding that my Accord wasn't enough, I spent many hours on eBay, looking for the perfect project car. I almost fell for a 1965 Lincoln Continental that was in the Seattle area, but I realized that I really wasn't looking for a presidential cruiser: I wanted a Mopar muscle car. My dad thought that my idea wasn’t unreasonable so I decided to go ahead and do it. I decided to narrow my search down to Dodge Darts, which are becoming more desirable lately. After seeing a beige 1966 Dodge Dart on eBay, I immediately knew that it was a great project car that other people might pass over due to its plain appearance.

Bidding ended on a Thursday night, and I had the winning bid of $1500. The next day I had to figure out how to get the car. I ended up buying two one-way tickets to Oakland, CA, and my dad and I flew down with the intention of driving the car back. In the president's message section in a recent issue of the WPC newsletter, my dad wrote about our 800-mile drive back from Oakland, so I won't go into too many details here...but I will say that we left Oakland at about 1am on Saturday morning and arrived in Bellevue, Washington at about 4pm. Those might not be Vanishing Point numbers, but at least we made it back alive after driving a car that we hadn't seen before...and we only had to hitchhike twice!

interior before
My interior as I saw it that Friday night (except for the new steering wheel I added, thanks to JC Auto).

Part 2: Dual exhaust
The first improvement done was dual exhaust. After listening to dual-chambers and Flowmaster 40s at Long Beach's Rod Run to the End of the World, I decided that I wanted something a little quieter. After deciding on Flowmaster 50 Delta Flows, Gary Smith with The AutoSmith put the pipes on my car. We went with downturns and it looks great.

Part 3: Suspension Suspense
On the drive home from Oakland, it became apparent that the car needed sway bars. It REALLY needed sway bars. I called PST and ordered a 1 1/8 front bar and a ¾ rear bar, in addition to four KYB shocks. After lifting the car and doing a mock up with vise grips, we realized that the front sway bar was several inches too wide! We started to tear through the shop, looking for my sales invoice so that I could call them and get a correct bar on its way. I must admit that I was not in a good mood at that point, but my dad said, “Hey, you know what? Maybe we can just flip it...” Dad flipped the bar over and the angles at the end allowed the brackets to fit perfectly on the bolts at the end of the shocks.

Part 4: Looking for a nice rear end
Like everyone else on planet Mopar, I wanted an 8 3/4 Sure Grip rear end. In other words, I wanted a big ring gear for strength and limited-slip for racing straight ahead. Like everyone else, I quickly found out that this setup is a hard thing to find, and that Sure Grip isn’t fun in the rain around corners (yes, I admit it: I’ve put a Sure Grip car in a ditch before). After opening up to the idea of a 8 ¼ rear end without limited slip, one of my dad’s contacts just told him that he has an 8 ¾ housing. One of my grandfather's friends has a third member (aka pumpkin) for it, so I think things will work out.