Automotive

1986 Dodge Daytona Turbo Z C/S

This was my last Turbo Dodge daily driver: a 1986 Dodge Daytona Turbo Z C/S, aka "Frankentona".  The "C/S" stands for "Carroll Shelby", which is basically a performance handling package on top of the "Turbo Z" Daytona package.  The C/S package includes a 32mm solid front sway bar and a 28mm solid rear sway bar.  It also includes a set of 15x6.5 inch "crab" rims (in gold for black C/S's), but I got this one with the standard 15x6 inch "pizza" rims.  See Dempsey Bowling's pages for more information on Daytona C/S packages.

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The Daytona: October 14, 2003

Posted on October 14, 2003.

Well, the car has pretty much been sitting all summer.  I spent most of it working on the house and yard, but I do now have 60A service to the garage.  I also have a compressor and a stick welder.  I just hope I get the paint on the car before the weather turns cold.  I have a heater, but I don't dare use it while painting.

I started getting serious with the floorpans a few weeks ago, but then work sent me out of the country for two weeks.  I now have all the rotted sheetmetal out of the passenger side (ended up being most of it).  The damage from the previous owner's incident with the pothole is quite extensive.  Much of the floorpan and firewall on that side is buckled and cracked, which is what caused it to rot out.  The frame rail was pushed up and outwards, but remained completely rust-free.  Apparently, the impact to the front of the K-frame, caused the K-frame to "pivot" on its front mount and mash the rear mount up and back.  Quite franky, the car isn't worth fixing, but it is too late for that now.  I managed to push the frame rail back down and over somewhat.  The position of the rear K-frame mount still isn't right, but I think it is closer to where it should be.  I bent some really huge 2" angle iron and plate steel trying to straighten the thing out. I will compensate by shimming down the K-frame on that mount and hogging-out the stud hole to give me more freedom.  Hopefully it will be enough.  The right-front K-frame mount is squashed and only partially connected to the frame rail, but it is accessible enough to fix.  Right now, I am stripping the paint off of the remainder of the floorpan and rail so that I can paint everything with POR-15.  The last thing I want is to have all this work rust-out on me.  If the car still shakes under acceleration after all this, I will be really pissed.

The Daytona: May 30, 2003

Posted on May 30, 2003.

I got the rear brakes put back together, finally.  I originally took them apart to try to fix a squealing problem back there.  I believe it was due to a broken spring on one of the brake shoes.  I also wanted to bleed the brake system and flush it out with new fluid.  Even though the brakes and lines are suprisingly unrusty, the bleeder on the left side snapped off.  After breaking an extractor trying to get it out, I just replaced the cylinders on both sides (less than $10 each :).  Of course, the flare nuts were frozen to the brake lines (which weren't even rusty), but I was able to spin the cylinder off the nut.  On the right side, the grease around outer bearing was contaminated with water and grit and the spindle nut was even rusty.  The dust cap seems OK, so I just flushed out all the grease with gasoline and repacked the bearings.  The races looked fine, so I didn't bother replacing anything.  Some new brake hardware and grease seals later, it was all back together.

I always like to get into everything on a new (ha!) car to get a handle on where things are.  The shoes themselves seemed new and I know the front pads are new, so I should be good in the brake department.  Another thing that I thought was odd was that the emergency brake cables are NOT frozen! The car is an automatic, so I doubt they were ever used.  For whatever reason, these cables are plastic-coated.  All of the '87 Daytonas and Shadows I've seen were just steel and would rust within a year or two, while my '88 had the coating.  This car gets weirder and weirder.

The Daytona: May 27, 2003

Posted on May 27, 2003.

I think I have decided what paints I am going to use.  In the interest of not having to worry about rusting under the primer, I will take the body down to metal, spray with POR-15 clear, POR-15 tie-coat primer, and PPG color and clear coats.  The underbody and fenders will get the POR-15 underbody treatment in semigloss black.  That should intomb the metal for all eternity.  I also need to think about how I am going to weld in the plates to patch up the underbody and straighten-out the front end.  At the moment, the driver's side door is partially stripped and the rear end is in the air so that I can investigate the squeaky brakes and bleed the lines.  As usual, the bleeders snapped off when I tried to remove them, so hopefully I will be able to extract them.  If not, new cylinders are only $15.

The Daytona: May 23, 2003

Posted on May 23, 2003.

Haven't done much work to the car lately, but I have stopped driving it.  I went to take care of some rust that was forming just above the bumper strip on the passenger-side door.  What I uncovered was that the strip was attached to the door with silicone rubber and under it was all rust.  In a few places it did rust through, but since it is under the strip, I'm not concerned.  It appears that the door had been hit at some point, as there are holes drilled in random places, probably from a dent pull-out tool.  Whoever straightened the metal did a good job, but they didn't bother painting it! So, it looks like I am going to have to DA the whole door and repaint it.  The paint is cracking in several places anyway, probably due to rust forming.  I see the same thing happening on the passenger-side front fender as well as the hood, but nowhere else.  Hopefully I'll have a compressor soon, so I will be able to do a proper painting job.  This will be the practice I need to repaint the Shelby.

The Daytona: January 28, 2003

Posted on January 28, 2003.

I found the damn electrical load that was draining the battery.  The battery wouldn't last sitting for more than about 2 days.  I measured about a 300mA drain, which is a lot! I isolated it to the power seat/power door lock circuit, which made so sense since I have no power seats and the power door lock motors draw many amps when they are on.  A quick glance at the wiring diagrams revealed the horn circuit also being fed from this circuit.  The horn doesn't work and I never looked as to why.  It appears that the steering column wiring for the horn switch is shorted and it was disabled at the horn itself.  Unfortunately, this left the horn relay on at all times and, apparently, and relay coil draws about 280mA.  Anyway, I yanked the relay and now everything is fine.  I still see about 22mA of drain, 4 of those are for the Dawes Devices A/F guage, which was tied right to the battery.  The rest must be the radio and clock, I guess.