Old Barracuda's Old Wiring Woes

I hopped in the '66 Barracuda Formula S at church one night in the dark after instrument practice and something strange happened. I turned on the headlights and very soon after I started driving, the dash lights went out and the under-dash "map" light came on. As an added bonus, the two C-pillar dome lights no longer worked, as I'd found out since I was fiddling with the headlight dimmer switch to try and get the map light to go off. Get this, all three map/dome lights are controlled by the headlight switch - it makes no sense why one light would be on steady and the other two won't turn on. I figured it wasn't a big deal to drive home with no dash lights, and they did actually come on (and the map light went out) about halfway home.

Everything's fine, right? Apparently not. When I got home my brother texted me and said he saw no taillights or brake lights when I drove away from church. Hmm. Well at least they probably came back on when the lights "fixed" themselves on the way home. So, today I started digging into the 58-year-old dash wiring (the car was built November 1965). I wasn't sure what would cause this issue, so I started at the headlight switch. The easiest way to get to it was to pull the instrument cluster. It's not a terrible job but it isn't trivial. The steering column also had to be lowered to get the dash out.

More 1966 Barracuda Post-Paint Reassembly

No, I still haven't gotten around to repairing and painting the trunk lid. Maybe soon... This blog post is to document a few things I did at the end of 2022 and up to now.

First up is a repair of a door armrest. The metal where a sheet metal screw threaded into had rusted away, so I very carefully welded in a piece of metal, being careful to not burn up the 56-year-old foam rubber.

Whittling Down Some Small Parts For The Barracuda On The Unimat Lathe

It's not often I have a project small enough to use the Unimat DB200, so when this project presented itself, I took advantage of it. The rocker molding on my 1966 Barracuda uses nylon/plastic "push rivets" to hold the bottom edge of the molding to the car. They are small plastic things that have fingers which are pressed through a hole in the molding, then through a hole in the car's rocker panel, after which the center pin is driven in with a hammer to expand the fingers outward, keeping the rivet in place. A flange on the outer end of the rivets holds the molding flush to the car. Below is a photo showing an original white rivet next to some black ones I found at O-Reilly Auto Parts.

1966 Barracuda Post-Paint Reassembly

The long and tedious job of reassembly is next on the to-do list for the 'Cuda. One of the first jobs was to put the windshield back in. I used a new rubber seal. Later in this post I installed the lock strip.

1966 Barracuda Emblem Paint Refurbishing

The front and rear Fish emblems used to have paint accenting the fish. It's getting quite thin. The top emblem goes on the front grill and the bottom piece goes between the rear glass and the trunk lid.

1966 Barracuda New Paint - Part 2 of 2

The dastardly deed is done. Painting is complete. Well, almost. The trunk lid still needs a lot of work. The rest of the car is painted though. It wasn't without problems. The main problem is that I'm not a good painter. I do it so rarely that I don't know what setting to use if I run into issues, like I did... I attribute it to my using a brand spankin' new Harbor Freight $12 HVLP paint gun and my lack of knowledge. It is what it is... There is massive orange peel and several runs in the paint. And flies. Lots of flies. If there were a million flies outside, there were at least half a million flies inside the closed garage. They must live in there.

Anyway, after doing the underside of the hood and door jambs outside, I installed the doors, then drove the car back into the garage to paint, you know, to get away from the flies....

1966 Barracuda New Paint - Part 1 of 2

I've put off doing the major bodywork on this car for a long, long time. A couple of previous posts from two months ago and had me doing the left front fender (fender)  and the left rear quarter panel (quarter panel) of the car. That work was actually done in July of 2018 and February of 2019, respectively, so I didn't get to the right side of the car until four years from the time I did the front fender. Four years to get all the bodywork done shows how much I dislike bodywork. But as I mentioned in a previous post, I wasn't about to hand over $15,000 to a body shop to do the work, and my philosophy is that if I am able to do the work on my old car, I should do it. After all, isn't that what us car guys do, work on our cars?

Well, the long, and sometimes painful, hours of bodywork have paid off. I've actually started painting the car. The Chrysler paint code is RR-1, Yellow (yup, plain ol' Yellow). It's what came on the car from the factory and I wanted to stick with the original color. Here's the first bit of paint on the inner door frames and gas cap:

1966 Barracuda Trunk Lid Repair - Part 1

Time to tackle the trunk lid rust. This trunk lid has less damage than the one that came with the car. Below is the driver's side corner partially complete.

1966 Barracuda Right Side Body Panel Repairs

(Work actually done 7/20/2021) From a distance, the car didn't look that bad on the right side. Upon closer inspection, there were several areas that needed significant attention. The first being the right rear quarter panel and fender.

1966 Barracuda Front Suspension Strut Rod Bushing Replacement

(Work actually done 7/1/2021) Do these strut rod bushings look ok? Nope, time for new ones.

1966 Barracuda Driver's Side Rear Quarter and Fender Bodywork

(Work actually done 2/27/2019) Time to start work on the rear quarters. Oh, joy. Bodywork is not my forte. But I figure that someone with an old car needs to put in the time to fix up things if they can. Sure I could hire it out but that's not my style if I can do the work myself. And my brother recently told me that when he had the car, he took it to a local well-known body shop (John's Auto Body in Poulsbo) to ask what they would charge to do body and paint. The guy looked the car over and said, "Tell you what, bring me $10,000 and I'll let you know when I need more."

On that note, here's the better of the two rear quarters that needs fixing:

1966 Barracuda Driver's Side Front Fender Repair

(Work actually done 7/12/2018) The fender on the Barracuda needs a little help. It has a boo-boo.

1966 Barracuda Clutch Z-Bar Installation

Continuing with the Z-bar refurbishment, I purchased some new bushings, clips and seals for the Z-bar from Brewer's (seals aren't in the photo), a company that specializes in MoPar manual transmissions. The parts were about $40 shipped to my PO box.

1966 Barracuda Clutch Z-Bar Repair

I just couldn't seem to get the clutch in my Barracuda adjusted right. I'd push the clutch pedal to the floor and there was still a little resistance in the shifter handle when shifting into gear, which meant to me that the clutch wasn't releasing fully. It was almost there but not quite. And I had the adjusting rod to the point that the throwout bearing was just clear of the pressure plate fingers when the clutch pedal was all the way released. Another issue was when I released the clutch, there sometimes would be quite the shudder. Something just wasn't right. So I delved into the problem, and found that the Z-bar had a lot of play in it. And it had been repaired at some point in its past.

1966 Barracuda Sun Visor Repair

The preferred fix for a sun visor that has lost its stitching is generally not to drill holes in the thing and use rivets. Someone previously decided to do just that though. And it didn't hold up all that well to boot.

Dash Circuit Board Pin Repair - Barracuda

A few nights ago I was driving my 1966 Barracuda and decided it was time to fix the wiper motor issue, and it was also then that I happened to notice a couple dash lights weren't working. Then my high-beam indicator light went out. I tapped on the instrument cluster and the dash and high beam indicator lights all came back on. So since I had the dash out of the car to work on the wiper motor, I also did some detective work to fix the dash lights. Here's what I found:

Sluggish Windshield Wiper Motor Repair - Barracuda

Living in Washington State comes with certain things deemed necessities that may be considered optional in some states. Windshield wipers come to mind. Yes, I know wipers are mandatory equipment in all states but if you lived in SoCal for instance, you could probably get by most of the year without needing them. Not here. We may need 'em any month of the year.

So here I am, driving the Plymouth Barracuda home the day I bought it from my brother earlier this year and it starts raining lightly. I try the wipers and they swipe up, then stop. Hmmm. My brother was right, the wipers do need some attention. So a couple days ago I pulled the dash out of the car and removed the wiper motor to see what's up.

1966 Barracuda Inland Shifter Rebuild

Those familiar with mid-Sixties Mopars will know that in 1966 Chrysler made a giant step backwards with their 4-speed cars. Prior to 1966 Ma Mopar had been using Hurst shifters on their A-833 4-speed cars. In 1966 though, they changed to a shifter made by Inland. The one nice feature of the Inland shifter was that it had a reverse lockout "T" handle, which is pretty cool.

The shifter in my car was woefully out of adjustment and a bit sloppy, but the main issue was that when pulling the shifter to the left to engage 1st or 2nd gear, the shifter would partially enter the reverse gate and lock out 1st/2nd gear engagement until the shifter handle was moved to the right slightly. This process got old quickly so I removed the shifter from the car and disassembled it to see what the issue was.

1966 Barracuda 8-3/4" Differential Adjustment

My Barracuda had a strange rubbing noise coming from the differential when I drove it home the day I bought the car. I wondered if one of the tires was low and causing the Sure Grip to make noise. Nope, wasn't it. I then checked the axles for end play. That wasn't it either. I checked the axles for excessive run-out on the lathe (the photo below shows measuring in the middle of the axle but I checked bearing and spline ends too). Still not the problem.

1966 Barracuda Small Door Panel Repair

An unwanted guest made its way into my Barracuda prior to me purchasing the car. The guest was brash enough to chew a small hole into one of the door panels.