MOPAR JOHNS B5 DAYTONA RESTORATION!!

[Mopar John]

By this time I'm about 12 years old and I have another baby sister named Nancy. Shes cute and likes me a lot. Life is not as much fun now with school and chores and all that. Mom and dad are also having their last child and I now have a little brother Steve. But he's way to young for me. I've been driving by now mostly helping my dad move our extra car. His extra car was in addition to his car and moms car. It's purpose was to haul trash to the dump and make it look like the motel was busy. Dad said that nobody wants to go to an empty place and he was right again. My dad is a pretty smart guy. The first extra car was a 1954 Caddilac and when it got older it didn't run and I'd help move it around. My fondest memories of that car was that I used to keep my pet rabbit in it. Guests would come and really get excited about my rabbit coming to greet them and sit on the big dashboard. Ok, so one day everything is going good and I decide to ask my dad about how he was going to get me a car?? We'll, dad must have been ready for this one!!! He quickly explained to me that my car was going to be my resposibility! I am really glad I asked him this when I was twelve! I had some time to get ready. He told me I had to save up the money for the car, sales tax, license plate and at least six months of insurance@##$%^&&**(! WOW!! Back then you could get a learners permit at fifteen years and six months of age. I had two and a half years to get ready! I wanted my own car as soon as I could drive and that was it! Back then most adults would have to get at least a two year loan. So for the first time in my life I had money problems. I didn't have much saved but I did have a small savings account that was now my car account. I started mowing the church grounds and cemetary, baling hay for the farmers, milking cows after school, cleaning out grain elevators you name it I was doing it. I went from my catholic one room school house of 5 girls and me to a junior high with around 300 kids to Michigan City high school with 700 kids in my class. It was the late 60's and it was great!! Great music, mini skirts and no pantyhose, and cars. We had an open lunch and everyone would go to eat and then come and cruise around the school in their rides. There was everything old cars, hot rods, amphicar, marathon, an old hearse you name we had it. When I was a junior I got to take drivers training. It was great!! They went in alphabetical order and I was assigned a car with two of the prettiest girls in my class the Blank twins. Their dad owned a large construction buisness and they had money. Back then you did five weeks in a regular car and one week in a stick shift car. I already knew how to drive all this stuff pretty good so the instructor would always have me drive us out to remote areas before the twins took over. It was great! The twins actually tought me how to do burnouts in that stick shift car! The instructor wasn't real happy with them though. So now I got my learners permit and it was time to go look for my car. I want to mention here that my dad was going to get his car repainted and he decided to do some of the work himself and then drive it to Chicago at one of those in by 9 out by 5 paint job places? We took off all the chrome and anything not needed on the outside. He said it would be a better job that way. We also sanded and primered some rust. This was my first shot at what Timmy Lang's dad did. He left for Chicago about 5 one morning and got back home around 7pm with the freshly painted car. It looked great and it had my favorite smell! They baked the paint on and it was shinny and smooth. I also did my own paint job on another of our extra cars a 1958 Cadillac. That car had a ton of chrome to take off and was a mile long like my Daytona. It came out pretty good for a first attempt.
          So now it's time to go look for my first car!! I had done a lot of reasearch. I started subscribing to HOT ROD magazine when I was twelve and I still have them! They are in a binder that you could get back then. I have attached a picture of my binder and that sacred first issue from November 1967. I have to help my dad put some new transmission lines on his plow truck and will be back with the hunt for my first car soon!

[F6Bee]

What a great post with so much passion.  Congrats on a great car.

Looking forward to the rest of the story.

[Mopar John]

So it's time to go find my first car! I had been busy studying HOT ROD magazine and had some ideas. I want to get a big block V8 engine in a small body. We didn't have a garage at the motel so I wouldn't be able to tear into it much. Speaking of no garage one winter my dads two ton plow truck now a GMC broke a transmission. It was time for one of those "JOHNNY I NEED YOUR HELP" moments. My dad wanted me to help change the transmissionin a two ton truck in the middle of winter! We changed it and the clutch while we were at it. I didn't like doing it but I learned a lot on that project! Thanks dad! I had been studying the newspaper and the car dealers advertised their new cars back then. My dad wanted me to start out with a used car for my first one but didn't care about much else. My travel to dealers was at his mercy and time was short due to the buisness. We went to the local dealers and even some nearby towns to look. I came up with a short list of cars that I was interested in 1) a 1967 Dodge Dart GTS 383 4 speed car and 2) a 1968 Chevy Camaro 396 4 speed car. I decided to go with the Dodge because there were a lot of Camaros around already and I didn't want what everybody else had. So I bought the Dodge and brought it home. I didn't have much trouble with dad and the car early on. We agreed that I would not drive it to school till my senior year 1970/1971. I would stare at it every day when I left on the bus and check to make sure it was in the same spot when I returned. My dad liked that car too! The two things I remember most about my senior year was all the cars and luch time. We would all go to lunch and cruise around the school as we got back. In the spring of 71 with all the muscle cars popping up things were really getting exciting. We started having organized burnout contests in the remote school lot when we got back from lunch! The cops didn't bug us and the teachers were pretty good about it. The guys that didn't have cars would water or bleach down the starting area and kids would line up down the sides to watch. My GTS Dart with the 4 speed was awsome at this! During this time U.S. 30 DRAGSTRIP near Gary, Indiana was very popular and the guys that raced there would come back into town with their shoe polish numbers on the car. They were treated with great respect on the cruise routes! I had to try it! So I lined up a couple of buddies to go along. I made my first attempt at DRAG RACING and did pretty good! I won a couple of times and my buddies took some Polaroid pictures. I have attached them to this post. You will notice the first one had a timeslip of 15.71 at 94mph in practice and later a 14.74 at 94mph in eliminations. I was getting better and leaning on my 383 big block a little more. We came back to town with the numbers on the car and the timeslips to back it up! It was impressive to have a street car in the 14's back then and I was really proud of it. In my next installment I will share with you what my dad thought about it when I showed him the pictures!!!

[tan top]

 this is good stuff , nother great installment       ........

[mikepmcs]

This is AWESOME! Thanks so much for sharing.  Look forward to more.

[hemi68charger]

Very cool first car !!!! 

[Mopar John]

Hey guys! I need some help here! I could have had two more chapters posted but I'm having a problem at the end of my posts! When I get all done and attach some pictures and hit post it will tell me to hit back if I've used to much picture space. When I resize or delete some pictures it says I already sent the post but it doesn't show up??
So I will attach a picture of the 1958 Caddilac that was my first body and paint job! Don't worry wing car guys there is plenty of that coming up! Were at 1971 and I joined DSAC in 1977!

[hemi68charger]

Hey guys! I need some help here! I could have had two more chapters posted but I'm having a problem at the end of my posts! When I get all done and attach some pictures and hit post it will tell me to hit back if I've used to much picture space. When I resize or delete some pictures it says I already sent the post but it doesn't show up??
So I will attach a picture of the 1958 Caddilac that was my first body and paint job! Don't worry wing car guys there is plenty of that coming up! Were at 1971 and I joined DSAC in 1977!

John...
If you have a problem loading a file, then as you know, the post/reply will not work. Before you click 'back' or whatever, copy the text you typed and then go back. That way, you have your text on the computer's buffer and you can paste again once you go backwards. Then, you can either change the name of the file or resize it below the 200 KB limit........

Troy

[mikepmcs]

John...
If you have a problem loading a file, then as you know, the post/reply will not work. Before you click 'back' or whatever, copy the text you typed and then go back. That way, you have your text on the computer's buffer and you can paste again once you go backwards. Then, you can either change the name of the file or resize it below the 200 KB limit........

Troy

I 2nd that. Almost exactly what I would have written.

[hemigeno]

John...
If you have a problem loading a file, then as you know, the post/reply will not work. Before you click 'back' or whatever, copy the text you typed and then go back. That way, you have your text on the computer's buffer and you can paste again once you go backwards. Then, you can either change the name of the file or resize it below the 200 KB limit........

Troy

Lost more than a few long narratives in the past, did the  thing too.  Another way to handle this is to post the text and then go back and modify your reply to add pictures.  That way you don't lose your work, although it may look odd for someone who happens to view the thread while you're working on it.

[Mopar John]

Thanks for all the tips, I'll try them and see what happens.

[Mopar John]

I have to give you some details I left out on my first car the 1967 Dodge Dart GTS 383 4 speed before I give you my dads reaction to my drag racing. The Dart was white in color and had one of those spray on simulated black tops with red interior. I bought it in Chesterton, Indiana at Christoph Chrysler Plymouth. They claim a guy that was starting a family traded it in and originally came from Illinios. Looking back maybe a Mr. Norms car??
  When I arrived home that Sunday I was all excited about the DRAG RACING and showed my dad the Polaroids that were attached to a previous post. I didn't get the reaction that I was looking for. He went balastic and demanded the keys right now! There was a serious lecture and then he took his old Ford tractor based backhoe and surrounded the car with the arm and bucket. He took the car away for a month and told me if I ever raced it again he would smash it with the backhoe and bury it out back. So it was back to the school bus for a month. After school I would have to bum a ride or run to the job that I now had.  The month went by slow and I got my car back and I didn't race it again till I was out of the house. The next thing I remember is on a cruise night I parked with the Mopar guys and noticed a 1969 Dodge Dart Swinger 340. That car looked identical to mine except the front and the back. I got the owners permission and compared measurements on the two cars and they were the same. The next day I went to the local Chrysler dealer and ordered a 1969 Dart grille and headlight bezels along with a pair of taillights and a 1969 GTS trunk finish panel. For just a few bucks my car now looked like a 1969 Dodge Dart GTS. I have attached a picture of the front and back after the change.

[Mopar John]

I graduated high school in 1971 and started taking college classes right away that summer at Purdue North Central that was only a couple of miles away. I started college full time that fall and was working a lot also. I started dating my first wife sometime in there and had found a new interest JUNKYARDS!! Just ask marty42 about me and her late husband Ricks outings. Yes Rick passed sometime ago and I miss him!  My girlfriends brother had a buisness! Yep, you guessed it a GAS STATION. A SHELL gas station like my grandpas except newer with a lift and he had a TOW TRUCK! In the spring of 1972 the dating was going too good and I started buying more of the approximately 200 Mopars that I have owned. I bought a 1969 GTX 440 4 speed B5 blue from a guy that wrecked it with no insurance. It was hit hard in the rear but the whole drivetrain was good and it ran! I paid $400.00 for it and my soon to be brother in law towed it to his place. It had a good front end so I strarted going to junk yards looking for a GTX hit in the front. It didn't take me long because the guys were wrecking them faster than I could buy them. I made friends with the owner of L&W auto salvage in Valparaiso, Indiana and bought a 1969 ROAD RUNNER hit in the front for a few hundred dollars. I had my soon to be brother in law tow this one to my girl friends house. My dad would have never let me keep that stuff around the MOTEL! So I took the front end off the GTX and put it on the ROAD RUNNER. I then took the engine, 4 speed, Dana and doors off the GTX and scrapped the rest. I took the car over to my grandparents and used my dads old two car garage to get it ready for paint. It was about this time I lost my grandfather and inherited his mechanics tools and I stiil have them. I used one of his 1 1/16th 1/2" drive sockets to remove the k-member from the 1969 Coronet that I'm parting just Tuesday. I had a body shop spray the paint for me and I now had two cars on the road. This one had an automatic and bench seat!
I have some pictures but there too bad to get on here for you guys. The next thing that happens is the owner of L&W auto slavage calls me and tells me he just got in a 1970 lime green GTX!! It was stolen and recovered with most of it's parts. It took me two weeks to talk my dad into letting me buy my 4th car at age 18. By the time we got to L&W a local kid put a couple of hundred down and was going to pay monthly till he owned the car. I thought it was gone. When this kid paid it off he went to L&W to buy parts and the owner told him that John Borzych had been buying all the Mopar performance type parts. This guy got ahold of me and we traded the 1970 GTX and some cash for my 1967 Dart GTS. He wrecked it within two weeks. He pulled out in front of a steel hauler and my old baby had black semi tire marks all over it. It was toast and he was lucky he didn't get killed!!! I have one of my early dragstrip photos of the 1970 GTX attached. Yes, when I got out of the house I went back DRAG RACING! You will see that with the photo is a time slip of 14.60 and I now hit 100mph!!

[Dave Kanofsky]

That's a lot of tire under that green car!

Great stories John, thanks for the distraction from the cold.

[moparstuart]

 wow love the GTX , thats awesome   

[Mopar John]

Sorry about the long gap in my story! Three tweleve hour shifts and a Christmas party! You will see more photos of the 1970 GTX as this goes on. I still have that car in it's original paint! I made a serious mistake early on. The owner of the salvage yard offered me the original 440 and 727 trans and I told him no!? I had the 440 and 4 speed out of the wrecked 1969 GTX to put in there and I wanted all my cars to be 4 speeds back then. It turns out my 1970 GTX is one of the first built on August the 6th 1969 and it is mostly original! I wished I had that numbers matching drivetrain! In September of 1972 I purchased my only E body a plum crazy 1970 Challenger R/T 383 4 speed and sold my 1969 RR. On January 1st 1973 I married my first wife and her mother gave us a 1966 Plymouth Barracuda 273 4 speed formula S! Now I was up to three Mopars again! I worked out a deal with my grandmother to move back into my boyhood home with my new bride. It was good for all. I really didn't pay rent but kept up the place and took grandma where she needed to go. I have attached a picture of the Mopars in front of that house. Everyone thought we had to get married because we were so young but we proved them wrong. I was still going to Purdue North Central working on my industrial engineering degree full time in the evening and working full time during the day. My wife was finishing high school. In 1973 I traded in the 1970 Challenger for my first new car! It was a 1973 Road Runner silver metallic with red stripes! It looked great and I wish I still had that one! In the spring of 1974 we found out we were going to have our first child. Our daughter Michelle was born on September 28th 1974. I have a picture of her helping me wash the 1973 RR. I'm sure you all have heard about the baby crib recalls. I have attached a picture of my baby sitting skills. I have Michelle surrounded by two L70X14 tires playing with a set of gaskets. No getting hurt with that setup! Yes, Michelle is a Mopar gal! She owns a 1968 Charger and a 2007 Daytona Charger. I tell her it's a Daytona wanabe! Enjoy the pictures!

[Mopar John]

Here are a couple of pictures of Michelle racing her 2007 Daytona at Route 66 Raceway in Joliet, Illinois. It runs right a 14:00 in stock trim!

[Mopar John]

I need someone to send me a pm on how to have some pictures at the bottom of my posts. I would like to add my cars as this goes along.
Thanks!

[Mopar John]

It didn't take me long and I stuffed a 1969 340 into the 1966 Barracuda. It made it into a nice street cruiser. So it's 1974 and I have received my 2 year degree in industrial engineering and still going to school and working full time! I have a chance to buy a 1969 Dodge Dart Swinger from my brother in laws brother. It is similar to the one I checked out when I did the upgrades on the 1967 Dart. This car had some modifications including a built 340! I took the stock motor out of the 1966 Barracuda and sold it with it's original 273. Now I had a summer built 340 and a winter stock 340 for my 1969 Dart! I took the 1969 Dart to U.S. 30 DRAGSTRIP and it ran  15.25 at 89mph and 14.52 at 93mph. The E.T. of my street car was quicker than my race car? I won the I/O trophy class 3 weeks in a row with that car! That really cemented the racing interest in me. I did some tuning and made a gear change on that car and got it down to 13.69 at 102mph! Now it was a lot quicker than my 1970 GTX "RACECAR"! I had blown up a couple of stock 440's in the GTX about now and decided to have a race 440 built for the GTX. When I mean blown up it's when you spin a rod bearing and it gets the one next to it and they weld themselves to the crank and break the rods. Then they chop the pan in half and knock out the side of the block. Then the parts get thrown around and bend the valaves and break the cam. I remember going down the track and hear an explosion followed by a sound similar to traveling on a freshly tarred and stoned road. The next thing I know and the porcelin off one of the spark plugs comes out the back of the hood scoop@#$%^&*(!

[Mopar John]

                                                  MOPAR JOHN

Now that the computor rage has taken hold there are all kinds of computor names out there like mine MOPAR JOHN. Well, I've had this nick name longer than some of you have been alive!! When I started buying perfomance parts for my cars I was the only Mopar guy around. So the first thing I found out there was nothing in stock unless it was common like mufflers or tires. The owner of the local speed shop Jack Kniola started calling me "MOPAR JOHN".
This started with my Dart way back in 1971! My early receipts from Kniolas have cash written where your name should be because thats the way I paid for my parts. I dug through my old receipts that I still have ( I know you find this hard to believe by now!) and the oldest one with "MOPAR JOHN" is dated April 17th 1972!! I have attached a picture of it for you! Just curious about how long others have had theirs?

[Mopar John]

1975 Brings my Graduation from Purdue with a Bachelors degree in Industrial Supervision. By now I'm a store manager in the grocery buisness and with my family I can't afford to start over and use my degree! I actually liked college better than high school and got better grades. I even made the Deans list a couple of times. I continued graduate studies earning about  half the creadits needed for a Gradaute degree until they stopped offering classes locally. I am still dissapointed I didn't get to finish that.
  I check around and find out that there is a guy near by with a real good machine shop. I contact him and we form a plan to build a state of the art race 440 for my 1970 GTX! We start with a stock block that I havn't blown up and bore it 30 over and machine and true the head mounting surfaces. I go to Detroit and buy a new 426 Hemi crank from Gratiot speed shops with an 8 bolt flange. We buy a set of 6 pack rods and a set of TRW 12 1/2 to 1 pistons. The machinist Barney Barnhart balances and assembles the bottom end. I purhase a solid lifter came and some Crane ductile adjustable rockers. I searched around and found a nice pair of the hard to find 915 small chamber heads. Back then all the spark plugs were straight in. There was a perfomance shop in New York called Baldwin performance. They would take your heads and convert them over to angle plug configuration. I had to strip my heads down bare to make the UPS shipping max at that time and sent them off. There were gone about a month and came back looking great! These heads would gain as much as 50HP on dynos of built 440's! Barney put some good springs and retainers on them and bolted them to the new short block. It was starting to look like a motor now. Barney finshed all the odds and ends like timing cover, oil pump and I picked it up. I also bought a Weiand tunnel ram and two 600 matched Holley carburetors. I didn't get the motor in the car and running until the summer of 1976. I took it to U.S.30 DRAGSTRIP and did some breakin runs and tuning. It ran bad at first but as I adjusted it got better and better. Finally the big day comes where I think everything is just right and I'm going to make some full blown passes! I started out with about a 5000 rpm pass and ran a 13:22 at 89mph. This was my quickest ET to date and I was already very happy! I then followed that pass up with a 6000 rpm pass and it ran a 12:86 at 117mph! WOW!! I am in the twelves!! Barney told me that the red line would be 6500 rpm. So on the next pass I went to 6500 rpm and ran a 12:57 at 116mph! Now I think you all would feel that I'd be real happy at this point. But I wasn't!! Something real bad happened on this pass. At the end of the track I didn't get slowed down enough! I had spent all this time and money making the car faster and never worried about slowing it down! At U.S.30 they had a decent shut down area but if you didn't get it slowed down enough the end was like the first turn on an olympic bobsled run!! On that last run I went around the rim of that thing and almost rolled the GTX over!! For the first time I was scared in one of my drag cars!! Suddenly it wasn't fun anymore and I parked it!
 I have attached the 12:57 time slip along with a picture of the COUNTDOWN magazine that they would mail out to all the racers with information of upcoming events. I still have about 5 years worth of them and are real neat to look at and bring back old memories.

[Mopar John]

                                                       WHATS A SUPERBIRD??
Now it's 1977 and racing isn't fun anymore so what should I do? I had many other street cars that I bought and sold fixed up etc. but just wasn't happy. My second child was born a son and we named him Michael. I kept thinking in my head about a special car, a classic car or a limited production car. A light finally went off in my head and it was a bright one!! I remebered in one of my old HOT ROD magazines about an ad that had Richard Petty and a bunch of guys around a special car. I ripped through them old magazines till I found it. It was an ad for the 1970 PLYMOUTH SUPERBIRD. It was a limited production car for NASCAR. That was the car that I had to have! It even had the same basic body as my 1970 Plymouth GTX! So I started my hunt for a PLYMOUTH SUPERBIRD! I remebered just one locally. So I went to talk to the owner Bill Welch. He was in his 60's and owned a couple of buisnesses. Yep, you guessed it a Shell gas station and a body shop. Our conversation was friendly because he knew of our family with the other Shell gas station not far away. His Superbird was tor red and was the only one sold new in Michigan City. Bill told me that they only made 50 of them and a lot of them went over seas?
 I asked him if he would sell me his car and he said yes! I asked how much and he told me $7,000.00 @#$%^!
I thought that was high and he told me if I didn't buy it now it would be $8,000.00 in 1978! I told him that I was going to look around some more. I found an ad in the Chicago Tribune not long after that for a Superbird for $800.00! The nose was bent up and it had some primer from do it yourself body work. It was just what I was looking for. About that time my wife got sick and needed to have some surgery. I learned about the cost of healthcare way back then. I couldn't afford to buy the car. I have attached a picture of the ad that changed the rest of my life. The next chapter will be more Superbird shopping!

[tan top]

 more good reading !!     thanks for sharing your memorys !! great back in the day stuff & pictures     
looking forward to the next instalment   

[moparstuart]

great stuff john   

[Mopar John]

                                                             SUPERBIRD SHOPPING
It's the summer of 1977 and the medical issues are behind us. I started saving for my Superbird! As this was going on I started looking for one. I was watching the local papers, buying the weekend Chicago Tribune that had a good classic and antique car section, buying the car trader magazines, surfing the net and watching EBAY!  HA! HA! No EBAY or net to surf back then! One day I came across an ad for a Superbird in the Chicago Tribune that read as follows: 1970 PLYMOUTH SUPERBIRD 440 SIX PACK AUTO CONSOLE BUCKET SEATS $2800.00 McHenry, Illinois.
I called right away and got a few more details. I asked the seller if he had anyone else interested because it was a 3 hour drive to go check it out. He informed me that no one else was currently hot after the car. We made arrangements and me and my wife went to check it out. When we got there the Superbird was out front. It was a Vitamin C orange car with black vinyl top and black interior. The guy was real nice and let us take it for a drive unsupervised! I drove it under differant conditions and it ran good and the trans shifted good. I pulled over in a paking lot and opened the hood. The original six pack was there along with the factory air cleaner and looked stock. I also opened the trunk and found both jacks and the original spare and some shag carpeting. Shag carpeting was very popular back then. We decided to offer the seller $2400.00 for the Superbird and see what happened? When we got back he asked us how we liked it and I tried not to act excited. I pointed out a couple of small things that I found wrong and asked him how much he would take for it cash right now? He thought about it for a minute and said $2000.00 would buy it! I couldn't get the money out fast enough! I now owned a 1970 440 SIX PACK PLYMOUTH SUPERBIRD!!!
   This thrill didn't last long though. When we got it home we drove it some and I started cleaning it up. This thing drew a crowd wherever we went! One day I went to get rid of the shag carpeting and found some cardboard under it. I removed the cardboard and found a piece of Masonite cut out in the shape of the trunk? I removed the Masonite and found the gas tank and frame rails !@#$%^&*! This car was from the Florida coast area and salt water rusted some holes in the trunk rail and got down and rusted out the trunk floor!@#$%^! I have a picture from that day! I also have a picture of the Superbird with my 1970 GTX racecar and a 1970 Road Runner that I had at the time. I bought the Road Runner and put a new quarter panel on it and did some minor body work. My brother in law painted it. The car was a lot of fun especially with the AIR GRABBER hood! The last picture is of the bird jacked up for some rearend work out behind the house. It started snowing and didn't stop till the Superbird was almost buried. It sat there till sping!!