Legendary 1970 Plymouth Duster "Crop Duster" Rebuilt! | Roadkill Garage | MotorTrend

[Music] ah the crop duster man it has been a long time with this car as a matter of fact it dates all the way back to episode 40 of roadkill which is actually when you might have seen steve dolcich for the very first time because finnegan and i went up to his farm and we stabbed a 440 in it and it was pretty awesome and then we came back in episodes of roadkill garage and we installed a 383 and the thing was quick it ultimately ended up running 1160s in the quarter mile as a matter of fact the car was so great we decided not to live with the rust anymore it actually had a big old hole in the a-pillar and so the scheme to paint it began that's when steve first did the episode of roadkill garage nearly by himself where he began the bodywork on this thing and it has been literally two years of excuses and all sorts of things getting in the way but finally on this episode of roadkill garage we are one step closer to actually finishing the duster cutting a little strip out of that but i'm gonna turn it to bare metal first because the strip's gonna be so small it'll be hard to grind once i'm done and i really don't want to thin it too much i can't believe i got the patch done on the very first try nice work freyberger oh thanks once i tack it in there i'm going to be able to like shape it around to the metal perfectly as i go and then of course the grinder work will help and then of course the slathering of the ritual bondo see my foot protector [Music] well i'll say you don't want me doing bodywork on your car over here the tacks are pretty good down here the sheet metal was just so thin up here that i had to stack some welds and when i grind it i'm sure it's gonna have some holes that'll need to be addressed but it's good enough i think it looks pretty good yeah here's one of the toughest things to do when it comes to painting a car like you get the thing painted it's really really nice but if you want perfection you're going to have to color sand it and buff it now color sanding actually means you're physically going to sand your brand new paint job and it has to be done correctly so you don't ruin it in the old days you would use these kinds of tools and you would do that by hand usually wet sanding with 600 or 800 or thousand grit and it progressively over the years it got finer and finer these days you actually use your da sander and that's the same kind of sander you use for a lot of body work and stuff like that what you do is you replace your regular da backing pad with this special hook and loop setup and then you can use the super expensive hook and loop which is basically velcro sandpaper now i've got a thousand grit and 1500 1000 is probably a little coarser than a lot of guys like these days but it'll really level a lot better than a finer grit sandpaper [Music] hold it hold it [Music] i think i did a better job on the underneath of the trunk lid than it's hot okay go slow and that's actually not too bad [Music] what i'm doing here is preparing for a blackout treatment on the car and what we're going for is very similar to what chrysler offered on 1971 dusters as an optional package so to prepare for the paint i'm scuffing the areas with 320 grit dry paper that may seem a little coarse but i can assure you it'll be just fine for a semi-flat or flat urethane the car is sanded and ready for the blackout i also had the hood to do so i've got that sanded down pretty nicely i'm gonna paint this first and then back to the car wow i actually can't believe this is about to happen i think it looks pretty good i finally got a the hang of painting the flat black this is the official final moment i know there we go steve two years done yeah that's quick man you did it dude yeah it looks amazing the blackout is so awesome this car is pretty badass [Music] this is the third car you've painted for me you know that right yeah you think i should give it back what the crop duster no way man no you're stuck with it i've got the orange duster really yeah i told you i wanted to paint the crop duster and done it it's painted but think thanks buddy it's really awesome steve you did a really really good job yeah you know what though it's all downhill from here here it is the engine for the crop duster now the crop duster had a 383 last time it ran and this is the same 383 block in fact fryeburger's had that 383 block since he was a teenager we had rebuilt it a long long time ago it ran really good it ran 11's in the crop duster but since we had it out we decided to upgrade it we ordered a stroker crankshaft for 440 source we've got their rods as well and we've got custom pistons made for it that turned this 383 into a 440 because it's bored out 65 over the top end here is a set of edelbrock heads that were cnc ported by modern cylinder head it's got a single plane edelbrock victor manifold that proved to make more horsepower on the dyno than the tube light it made 575 horsepower in the form right here and that's with a flat tappet cam it's got a custom comp flat to happen it's 241 247 duration at 50 and about 575 lift the reason it has so much lift is because 1.61 high ratio rocker arms from harlan sharp those are off the engine now because i had to borrow them for another dyno test on another engine so what i'm going to do is just button this thing back up and bolt it to the transmission and it'll be ready to drop back into the crop duster [Music] i don't know how he expects me to vacuum with this thing no you you just need a new filter david here install this and your luck will change oh this isn't gas monkey garage i don't like handling the dirty old filter i will install the new one no you can handle the dirty old one no look at that don't drip it all over the floor how do you get it off it pulls off ah dude why did you just do that i told you it'll boing off of there you were pushing it from the wrong end here you gotta no you can't just put it in there you gotta dump oh you know what this is i know exactly what this is i'm gonna never have to change the filter again i get it [Music] firewall is safe core support is safe i think you need to pull it towards you the headers we're using here are one and three quarter inch tubes from tti exhaust the question everybody asks about the crop duster is are you using those headers that you bashed up but that was with the 440 engine which is a taller deck height and this one's lower and they fit gooder more gooder [Music] man looks like the engine's in feels like we're almost done this radiator is actually a mopar b body large style radiator that dulsage forced to fit in the a body look at that power steering pumps up against the uh fan motor wow this thing fits tight yeah but good [Music] oh since fryburger's pouting about butchering the decal at the back of the car i'm gonna have to install the drive shaft now this driveshaft is all brand new because the old one was too short and it also had light duty u-joints and this one's been upgraded with 7290s front and back just the good ones well fryeburger if it cheers you up the driveshaft fits better good [Music] wow almost looks like a car again well theoretically all you have to do is plug in the uh ignition switch and see if this thing will run theoretically yeah [Music] dosage start that engine duster lives again we got our 440 cubic inch stroker big block installed in our 1970 plymouth duster and now we need to make it a running driving car yes and i think the first wrenching is going to be front suspension yeah yeah actually i think i will attack the front suspension and i will have you attack the brake plumbing oh he always like assigns me the labor that he doesn't want to do what okay you love putting in the line lock let's commence with cleanup okay that's one job done i'm going to be putting in these qa1 double adjustable shocks and even though they look brand new these are actually the ones that were on the car before and i've got to say i'm pretty proud of myself for keeping all of this stuff together i've also got the braking system going on and most of the suspension is going to be completed before you know it don't blink you'll miss it [Music] i think i've made a decision which is at least 50 of this job the problem now is i know i'm gonna mount my roll control down here but i can't get a drill motor in there and we don't have a 90 degree drill motor and i think what i'm gonna do is line it up perfectly with this factory stamped hole that i can see from the other side so that i can hopefully get this thing level which i probably won't do and then i'm going to be really irritated by that so that will land there now i got to drill the other hole let's see if i got it straight this is the moment of truth if i eyeball that seems good enough all right now i have to hog those holes out bolt this in lightly and then figure out if i can actually make those tough brake lines to go out to the wheels [Music] you can polish these by hand but they're still going to look dull i can assure you of that so what you need to do is a pro style polishing job i've got a loose polishing bonnet in my drill press set at high speed right now how you use it you turn on the buffer apply the compound which comes in a hard stick and then just start polishing now the thing is you've always got to get the wheel turning off an edge if it catches an edge all bets are off you'll break the piece and ruin it [Music] i've got the reveal moldings all polished up and i've got new mounting clips installed so this should just hammer right in place [Music] yay that took about two hours but completely worth it completely restored new foams and oh look at that totally worth it mint [Music] this is my late model master cylinder this is my aftermarket push rod which has a groove in it just like the original old mopars that takes a little rubber bushing in there and that rubber bushing snaps into the end of the master cylinder to keep the push rod from falling out when the brake pedal retracts the problem is this master does not have that groove in it so i'm going to have to figure that out this master that's similar has the groove in it you can see though this one is a one-inch bore right there and this one over here is bigger than that and so i'm gonna have less hydraulic pressure with this new master cylinder and probably not as good a pedal feel on this deal but this one has the snappy thingy in it and so there's just going to be a lot of fiddling here to get this to be the right length and to retain in the master cylinder [Music] the success is already here how's the alignment pretty good crail's weird yeah it does doesn't it yeah i don't know if this carburetor is that great because we presented on the on the 56 and we didn't like it i know but man we're running and driving and the crop does dude it basically never ends no dude i was like he's gonna lift left okay foreign [Music] you

Channel: MotorTrend Channel

Views: 325,553

Rating: 4.9398017 out of 5

Keywords: motortrend, motor trend, motor trend channel, motortrend on demand, motortrend full episodes, roadkill, roadkill garage, plymouth, duster, plymouth duster, crop duster, roadkill crop duster, car rebuild, car build, engine swap, 70s cars, 1970 duster

Id: RKsGGBNMhFs

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 29 2020