Out With The Old - In With The...... Old? 1966 Plymouth Barracuda

I thought I came up with a pretty clever title. I don't want to look on the ol' Interweb to see how prevalent it is. I want to think I'm just that clever to make up something like that. Um, yeah...

Anyhoo, I've written a bit about my factory stock 1966 Plymouth Sport Fury with its 325-horsepower high-compression 383 V-8, AFB 4-barrel carburetor, and 4-speed manual transmission. This photo was taken last week at a county park on Indian Island, WA.

Refreshing The Sport Fury Distributor

The distributor that came in my Sport Fury's 383 worked well but the vacuum advance diaphragm was toast. I happened to get another 383 distributor in with some parts I bought, and its vacuum advance worked, so I just swapped the two distributors a couple years ago. The distributor worked OK but ran rough at light throttle, and when getting into the secondaries of the carburetor, the engine didn't like it and would hesitate and ping, even with the initial timing set to a very meager 4 degrees BTDC. Hmm, what to do.

Today I decided to clean up the original distributor and just put the good vacuum advance canister on the original distributor. I would buy a new vacuum advance canister if I could find one but no one seems to sell just the canister at a reasonable cost.
(update - Standard Motor Products VC187 (approx $20) may work, and I'm assuming it is what comes on remanufactured distributors, but I believe it is designed for a 1970's Mopar B/RB engine)

The mechanical advance plate in the original distributor (below) has a very small "8" stamped into it by the upper slot, meaning it provides 8 degrees of distributor timing advance. Since the distributor turns 1/2 the speed of the engine, an 8-degree plate provides 16 degrees of mechanical engine timing.

New Shift Knob for the 1966 Sport Fury

Yesterday I was helping my brother get his 1966 Barracuda Formula S (273, 4-speed - woohoo!) running after he'd done a lot of work to it. I noticed he made a shift knob from a red billiard ball for the factory Inland shifter in his car. He had several more billiard balls so he gave me one so I could make my own shift knob since I have an Inland shifter also.

New Seat Covers for the Plymouth Sport Fury - Part II

I didn't intend on making a second blog entry for the seats but as I was recovering the rear seat, I thought of a few things I'd like to mention. First off, the tools I found most helpful in removing the old hog rings are shown here (L to R: nippers, needle nose pliers, side cutters, awl):

New Seat Covers for the Plymouth Sport Fury - Part I

My dear wife bought me seat covers for my car quite a while back. Like two years ago. I don't really know why it's taken so long to get them installed, but now that I've started the process... let's just say it is a workout. Now I know what the guy at work meant when he said installing seat covers is difficult (btw, hi Jason Huff if you happen to read this).

Here is the first seat finished and back in the car:

Bucket O' Bolts - Or, where to find that elusive screw.

I'm sure most guys that grew up like me tinkering on cars/trucks/tractors/etc have a large Bucket O' Bolts (BOB) out in the garage full of the remnants of past projects. You know the scenario, something gets pulled apart to fix or repair it, then gets put back together, and whatever leftovers there are scattered around on the floor get thrown into BOB. I personally use a 5-gallon bucket. It is no lightweight either. It's got to be tipping the scales at 80 pounds or more.

Something else has consumed my time lately... a car.

Not just any car, mind you. On the contrary, this is something you don't see every day. A 1966 Plymouth Sport Fury.

Ok, so maybe I should have dressed up a tiny bit for the photo... Just don't tell my wife I'm publishing a photo with "those pants" in it. The pants have since gone to that great pants fantasy land in the sky, much to my wife's delight. But I digress (I seem to do that a lot).