I Left My Car in a Barn for Years - Can We Rebuild It? Part 1

so [Laughter] well remember this little girl hadn't seen her in quite a while unfortunately after 2019 power tour i just wasn't happy with how the car turned out uh i never filmed that event because it was just a miserable time we're gonna go into more detail as to why this car never got to be you know broadcast again after that but today what i want to do is get the charger back out today we're going to revisit everything that we've been working on and finally make this car something that i want it to be finally something that i can actually use and drive and enjoy because this car is none of those things currently so let's get this thing cleaned up because as you can see it has been washed in probably a couple years i would say i've driven it a few times but i've just i have not touched this car the wheels are gone it's covered in bird poop and an egg it's bad it's bad but i want to clean it up and let's start fresh remember this car this is my 1969 dodge charger that i bought in oklahoma where it was sitting for 34 years it was a 1500 mile round trip to bring it back home it's a one owner car and excluding me i thrashed on this car to make it to power tour 2019 you watch as i assembled this car to make it road worthy again and then it vanished it was too much of a hassle to take it anywhere so it sat until the opportunity arose to revive it once more that opportunity is today so stick around to the end of the video and see why i parked it and how we planned to make it even better [Music] is this kind of like a bad thing because people pay extra for authentic barn dust i mean this is as real as it gets so is it a barn find if i left it there i guess i found it there i mean i put it there and forgot about it so i guess it kind of counts here we go you ready there when all that extra money this car's worth that much less now my main goal is just to get this thing cleaned up because we're about to do a lot of work for this thing we have to uh not only wash the dirt off but deep wasp it because there's like uh five or six nests in there probably a few in the door that i didn't see whenever i got it the first time let's see no we're lucky over here maybe the passenger side that's where some have been you know i've cleaned it off a few times but you can see this car just needs interior work exterior work all of the work involved when making the car an actual car yeah it needs it all and it's always fun to wash your rust now i guess we could talk about our plan today again we're just kind of getting prepped for a build series on this car because we did a build series before but i had you know a lot of obligations to make power tour 2019 and this car did make it and it survived i don't know how but it survived it i only took one video of power tour 2019 and this is it currently on our way we're going to meet junkyard digs thunderhead 289 vice grips garage they're going to meet us in knoxville tennessee and we're going to make our way all the way to concord pouring down rain i have no wipers running at a cool 160. the windows are nice and foggy and we're cruising i think we're going to make it we're not on a major highway just yet so let's see how it happens when we actually get on the interstate as long as we stay moving i think we'll be okay we got about two and a half well maybe about we got about three hours of driving left when we meet up with them cross your fingers i think we'll be all right so the plan is to actually make this car more usable and then take it on power tour 2022 if that actually happens i really hope it does and what happened with this car i rushed it that's the the main story here i rushed the build trying to make it i was trying to do way too much meaning that like i wanted it to be super modern have every single option that i could possibly think of i mean i had an ac compressor on it that never got hooked up i had all these like fancy electric fans that didn't work then i had you know just i tried to be way too modern and took a lot of the simplicity out of things and it got to the point where i got overwhelmed and just said all right forget it let's just get it going then the transmission started to it's not i had it rebuilt but it started to like it just never drove right it's like it's always constantly slipping like the converter's super loose in it and it just didn't work right so i was always unhappy with it which i think is what caused it to run hot so the transmission's constantly slipping which means it's going to run hot and get the car to overheat so every time you sit still in traffic game over not even worth it [Music] welcome to the new site of mccool auto this is where we're going to be tackling the 1969 dodge charger in basically any project from here on out i'm excited to finally announce this we haven't finished the shop yet we're still gonna be working on it throughout the videos but we're using it it's finally able to be used we've been waiting on power to get electricity out here for gosh months now it seems like i think it was like five months trying to get power out here and uh we finally got power we came out here cleaned up everything and we've got a pile of tools over there ready to be used in the corner so we're gonna start tackling stuff like that we'll probably do a shop video tour later on but this is uh the gist of it this is the main bread and butter we have a living area over there but that's not the fun part right here is the fun part 50 by 100 shop and we still don't have water out here but we can still at least you know use what we can and do what we can do so i'm happy to finally be able to use this but the charger is going to be our test mule see how things work what we're going to do is start with the basics and by basics i mean go back to square one now this engine is a 440 out of a motor home it's a low mile engine i think it had like 50 something thousand on it and it was a good running engine had great compression no blow-by but i don't think it's the engine's fault i think something's wrong with the transmission i had it rebuilt but i don't know if it's something in the converter something i did when i put it together but the end i don't know the transmission is like it's constantly slipping so you can't ever fully like get the max potential of the transmission in the engine itself because you'll be driving and like if you wanna from a dead stop you just lay on it and spin the tires you can't it won't it'll just go and then bog and then finally just take off like a normal car it takes off at the same rate of speed whether you're driving normal or if you have it to the floor i don't know why i don't understand it but unfortunately the car just was not what i wanted it to be it's overly complicated the power brakes don't work the disc brakes they're kind of iffy but you mash i mean it's like i think it's probably a lot of the reason is because it doesn't have enough vacuum because of the stupid lumpy cam that i thought would be cool in it the biggest accomplishments i want to tackle is engine and transmission replaced suspension replaced brakes replaced if we can tackle all these things before power tour 2022 i'll be very happy and make this thing a little bit more enjoyable and easier to drive because right now it's just it's a burden honestly like just driving it i mean i'm not like but a mile or two from the original shot to here and it was already running hot and trying to run lean it sputters it pops so everything about this car is just not where i want it to be i put a really overly complicated serpentine belt system set up on it it's got this uh ac compressor that never got hooked up we rerouted this fuel line on power tour i think vice grip garage gave me this filter and had it running originally like down and directly to the pump but we replaced it and then ran this to try to alleviate the fuel getting so hot because the car was just running terribly like you couldn't drive it in traffic you couldn't i mean if you got stuck in any kind of traffic for longer than five minutes it's over the car instantly overheats i mean there's a picture of me i'll post it right now with the corn jug that luke from thunderhead289 had given me we filled it up with water he brought it specifically for me because he knew i was having issues and we had it filled full of water and every time that it would get hot he would get out don't water on the radiator we just it was bad it was really bad even got to the point where the night before i had to put i had to machine the pulley for the water pump on the serpentine belt and put a mechanical fan on this side the shroud from the factory and then put two electric pusher fans on the front now this is a cold case setup and this is originally supposed to be for this side and then it comes with a shroud but the car just for some reason it didn't run great and also i don't have a trans cooler on this thing which i should have put on that as well didn't do it was rushed again didn't work great so let's start tackling some stuff i'm excited i'm very excited to finally be using the shop we're going to get a new lift here very soon we're going to kind of make this our new workspace in this corner have an editing rig over in that corner and just kind of store some cars in the back slowly you'll see us move more vehicles over move them over and move them over but not only are we going to be moving this vehicle over here we have one more that's going to be a donor for a lot of parts that are going into this car [Music] [Music] here's the solution to all of the chargers problems now you haven't seen this car on the channel before and if you follow me on instagram then you have seen it but this is probably the first time you have seen an actual video on it i did make a video before in the past taking this thing to a drag strip and actually racing it but i just wasn't happy with the ending so i never posted it i needed it to be a better video for you guys but this is a 1978 chrysler cordoba it's a little bit more than what meets the eye believe it or not [Music] so let's pop the hood and just see what's going on under here because you're like how in the world is this going to fix the chargers problems well let me show you under the hood we have a stock bottom end 400 but the good thing about this car is it's had a lot of performance and speed parts thrown at it and it's just a solid all-around combination so what we have here is basic there's only a power steering pump and an alternator two belts that's it no crazy bracketry nothing insane to make anything work we have a comp xe268 cam and edelbrock performer rpm intake 440 source aluminum heads long tube headers and just a lot of good stuff under the hood including that power master alternator a giant radiator which you know this will stay with the car because that's what it fits but we have a lot of great things i mean this thing even had msd on it and this thing was capable literally watch this it's chipped at 6000 rpm so that's the rev limiter basically right there to you know keep it from blowing up itself and i'm going to tell you right now i've bumped that rev limiter a few times and it just pulls all the way to 6000 rpm this is a very strong engine from what i understand i did buy this car pretty much this way the only thing that i did to it was i messed with the carburetor got it to run a little bit better tweak the timing to make it run a little bit better put a different set of valve covers um fixed a header gasket that actually busted again you can it sounds like it's got a rod knock but i promise it doesn't it's just an exhaust leak out of the header but i just fixed a few things here and there to make it a much better car now this car is a very clean example of a cordova as you can see it's very very nice it's this kind of a brown metallic color the interior is immaculate and you're probably thinking dylan how in the world can you actually take this car apart and use it to put in your charger now i'm going to tell you this because i tried to sell this car but nobody would buy it and everybody said that i was overpriced i thought that i mean the sum of all of its parts you couldn't build this car for what i priced it for i thought i was pretty reasonable now if you think about it and you take all of these good parts put them in that car you're going to increase the value everybody thinks in this car the value is going to stay the same so this one's going to go on the chopping block take all the good stuff put it in the charger now on the plus side of all this i have another 78 chrysler cordoba that you guys have seen on the channel way way a long time ago i'm going to take these two cars make one good one so take all the running gear out of the black one put it in this one because that car has a very solid running gear and this one does too on top of all the good stuff for the engine they had put a i think they said it was a b m 2800 stall and then a deep pan so it's got you know some goodies on it and i don't know if it had a shift kit or not but everything runs great the car holds like 40 or 50 psi of oil pressure in gear at idle while it's hot so it's a very solid engine it does need some gaskets here and there some seals but overall we have a very very good combination of a car to make our charger that much better out back it does have a set of 373s that i'm going to leave in the car because they they howl they don't make a they work great it's like a it's a limited slip but they make a lot of noise and on top of that they went full drag car on this bad boy and put a shutoff switch on the rear bumper so i mean this car was a pretty legit little street car and they even put the battery and relocated it to the trunk so a lot of good stuff here to make a good running combination and you know the guy who built it did a really good job on this car and it just needed some extra work to get it kind of like the next step but you know i tried to sell it i tried to get rid of it as is because i didn't want to tear it apart but i would much rather have a solid running gear and a charger compared to a cordova so it hurts your feelings hate it let's look at all this stuff that i've spent so much time meticulously cleaning and making look nice and pretty i mean i spent months on this engine alone just to make it look nice everything's turned to rust and all this extra garbage so i've realized that sometimes it just doesn't matter and that's okay it doesn't have to be perfect as long as it runs good because that's where i was kind of at with this car i wanted it to look good i wanted to run good i tried way too much tried way too hard and sometimes you just got to go back to basics simplicity is not a bad thing making it usable is a good thing one of the biggest issues with this car is how bad the brakes worked now there's a couple times where on power tour i was hearing a grinding noise i actually have the pedal maxed out as far as i could push it to stop one time that's scary when your car doesn't want to stop the rear brake drums i think one of the springs broke and the self-adjuster fell out and then the pin that holds the shoe in actually broke off too so all that fell out when i pulled the drum off the shoe just fell off so it was actually like locking up and binding it caused the rear brake drum to overheat and actually discolor itself as wild and on top of that this master cylinder has started to rust because i have had to press the brake pedal so hard to make this car stop that it's push fluid out of the top of the lid and onto the master cylinder this car like i said it just it's i don't know i think it doesn't have enough vacuum in order for these power brakes to work and these are like a cheapo bolt-on conversion kit that isn't necessarily made for this car i think this is more this is like a a gm brake booster and adapter to make it all fit and i mean it works if it works but the best part about it was the disc brake conversion for the front that really was nice but all this here i just don't think it's that great so we're going to get rid of this i'm going to go straight up manual brakes rear disc just like the challenger because that car it's amazing like it does not falter as far as like brakes go it stops hard every time without like any kind of failure or anything so i've actually put more miles on the challenger now than i have this car believe it or not which is crazy to me to think about but that's the case of the matter and this poor carburetor here man it's seen some abuse you can see how bad it was running rich i can't remember what was happening but it would just flood itself you would floor it and it would immediately flood itself i think because i talked with thunderhead289 about it and he kind of helped me figure out what was going on and i think what we figured out was that the rear power valve was engaging because it's got two power valves so i think we ended up putting a block off for the power valve in the rear and jetting up the secondaries if i remember correctly so this carburetor is a bit of a frankenstein it's a 750 with vacuum secondaries and when the power valve oh i remember what happened okay yeah that's what it was when the vacuum signal drops below a certain reading meaning like this 9.5 when it drops below 9.5 inches of mercury then it'll like say oh we're going to give more fuel and it had one in the front one in the rear had a 9.5 in the front for the primaries and a 6.5 in the rear so at 9.5 inches of mercury the primaries would engage at 6.5 inches of mercury the secondaries with a gauge except they had them from the factory reversed so what was happening was this car was engaging the secondaries before the primaries would kick in so all this fuel was dumping in so you'd mash the throttle and it's already running stupid rich as soon as you floor it it would go but and then just fall on its face and it would actually flood itself so bad the car would shut off i've never had a car flood itself so bad to the point of shutting itself off so this carburetor is definitely seeing some issues in it today i think everything's good on it now so we're going to take it off maybe clean up some of this black soot that's built up on it from all that hard driving that we did to it and put it back on [Music] so [Music] so we went to o'reilly and i bought some oil dry and was gonna buy two different drain pans i had this one in my hand and another one and they just said hey do you want a free drain pan i was like sure so sure enough they had this one laying in the back corner it's like a brand new drain pan that somebody had brought left it there and they never came back to get it and have been sitting there for like a long time and they just sit here you can have it now i'm not going to say that every time you go into a rally and say go buy a drain pan you know i'm going to get one for free i'm not saying they're just handing them out but what i'm trying to say is that o'reilly's pretty cool i mean they've got it going on i mean i'm not sponsored by them every part that was on this car every part that basically i've built you know in the past few years has come from o'reilly so i do respect them i do enjoy their company i do enjoy the people who work for them and they get they gave me that so that was pretty cool of them so just a little fun free tip for you [Music] so [Music] over to the table the floor actually all right perfect radiator is out so now we have a lot more access to things in the engine bay oh that was fun look at this i had to machine this just to make the electric or the mechanical fan actually work all this brand new water pump housing and of aluminum for who knows why i don't know why i did all that then aluminum water pump who knows why just because i thought it would be the right thing to do but who cares i mean it didn't work any better than a regular one so i guess we could use it all on the cordoba engine but i'm going to try and leave all this intact just because i mean maybe i'll use it for something else maybe i won't i don't know but next thing we got to get this power steering pump out of here and or at least unbolted because that's going to spew some kind of fluid everywhere it's just a constant mess of everything that we can see but hey we're getting progress done that's really good almost done with the top side top side is pretty easy bottom side not so much there we go nice car is back on the ground pull the intake off real quick so we can hook a chain to the heads this is a little bit safer there we go you're coming with me get the cross member loose one day this is going to be awesome when we can do this with a lift the best day ever [Music] okay start to roll the car back a little bit all right that's good right there just so we can set it down safely engines out perfect made minimal spillage i mean that was mostly coolant when we finally got it out but hey it's all right now we have all this room to work in the engine bay now a lot of things that i want to do of course is we got to remove this entire cross member steering box because qa1 is going to get rid of everything everything right right here uh guess where the torsion bars get rid of the center link and all the steering linkage it's all uh mustang 2 like rack and pinion style deal so it's really nice so now that we have all this room to work with also get rid of all the brake system like redo my brake lines that i rigged up somehow it's bad for what i did but it works it does work so i'm going to go simplify everything we got a lot of work ahead of us but we've made big progress by getting the old engine out and getting it prepped for you know starting on getting the new engine in so i'm very excited about that [Music] yeah i like this impact nice that looks terrible too so i've already rebuilt all of the suspension previously so i'm not going to throw any of it away of course um i mean it's all brand new underneath here and i've got a bear hold on okay so now whenever i drove this thing on power tour everybody was like whoa this thing handles like it's on rails son okay let me try that again when we drove this car on power tour i like to do this trick called the lane change it's where you have to go from one lane to the next without hitting like the little reflectors in the lane in the middle and it's kind of hard to do especially in an old car now this car was really good at it because it had basically no body roll it would just go next like next lane that's because this thing has a giant ginormous sway bar and super super stiff shocks they're just cheapo uh kyb gas adjust they ride really great but the problem is they ride really stiff so at the expense of being able to do the lane change trick this thing hit bumps like crazy in the rear shocks rear springs bone stock i didn't even take them out so every time you hit a bump especially if you're going on a turn this thing would go over the front fine but as soon as you went over the back you could feel the back end kind of skirt and like wash out it was bad so the rear suspension never even got touched i just never even said you know what forget it i'm going to just do that later later is now except we're going to get rid of all this make it that much better quality content the greatest thinkers of our generation so here's our order of operations to get this cross member out we will undo the shocks over here and over here and then while we're there we'll go ahead and unbolt the upper control arm here here over here somewhere and over here and then we will disconnect the roll pin punch that out in the steering column [Music] oh heck no more good alignment oh that's out the door now hey tony yep could you grab the three-quarter inch wrench i can't get this all the way off yeah okay thank you all right [Music] okay you good i'm good are you good yeah good it wasn't balanced that well whoops oopsie doopsy all right here we go it's a lot of work put our cross members out and look at all this room we've got now we can hop up in there we'll get the torsion bars the rest of the way out i don't have a slide hammer or anything to knock them out backwards like you're supposed to so i just had to leave them in there like that um now we have room to clean up inside the firewall and the inner fenders and uh clean up our brake lines that i made a mess of pull out the steering column just start to get everything kind of sorted out and ready for qa1 man i'm out of breath that was a lot of work okay making some room making some progress i have removed these brake lines here brake booster is about ready to go on the inside just did a little bit of small work got the seat out of the way look at all this trash look at this garbage this is bad and we're going to fix a lot of this stuff but i've got the brake booster unbolted and we're going to pull the steering column i don't know what the deal is with this thing but it sounds terrible back when i got this car running and driving for power tour i had a lot of issues with actually using the power steering it would not center back up and you physically had to turn the wheel to make it center and it was bad it was pretty bad so the steering was not great it didn't feel like power steering it felt like manual steering except also it wouldn't i don't know it's like a bearing or something just locked up in there and the steering column might be toast we might have to do something different but you know we have to cut it anyway and modify it to you know go back into our qa1 setup so we might have to find a different one might have to find a better one we'll see but for right now let's get this brake booster out out you go forever there we go come on thank you thank you very much well everything's basically torn out of the charger for the front end at least so we're gonna you know do some work and fix a few things we've got the front suspension out completely and you know it's not bad so we're gonna keep this and use it for another project in the future that you need to subscribe so you can see that because all this is going to go back to another vehicle now from here on we have to do a few cleanup measures here we got to get the engine bay sorted out get the interior sorted out but the main goal is to make this thing a running and driving vehicle but actually a good running and driving vehicle so the qa1 front suspension is going to handle basically 99 of all that and the rest of it engine will handle the rest so on top of that we got to pull the rear end out so we can do that next time we make a video on this car so this is part one make sure you subscribe and like this video so you can see part two because part two will be coming out very shortly if you guys really like this video uh you know we can start really getting these things hammered out and makes more content i hope you guys enjoyed this video as much as i enjoyed filming it for your t-shirts or your stickers you know make sure you like subscribe all that jazz and i'll see you in the next one get my zero turn suspension working [Music]

Channel: Dylan McCool

Views: 164,717

Keywords: dodge, ford, chevy, plymouth, motor trend, roadkill, hot rod, revival, abndoned, rescued, restoration, rebuild, first start, old start, cold start, 1320, cleetus macfarland, drag race, ls swap, ls1, challenger, charger, dart, demon, hellcat, redeye, helephant, d100, d150, ram, chevelle, nova, c10, camaro, mustang, f100, f150, car, truck, dodge charger, dodge challenger, dodge demon, dodge ram

Id: RCAev84pO8o

Length: 39min 24sec (2364 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2022