Dan Hiebert

I'll chime in and heartily concur with service manual first, parts manual next. I bought a service manual for my D24 from Andy Bernbaum Auto Parts. Most of the MoPaR specific parts places will have reprints of the various manuals. They're just as good as an original one, and you don't have to worry about mucking up a vintage tome (although just about every vintage one I've ever seen is well used). The colors of the covers are just differences in when and where they were printed, updates, etc. Also worth seeking are the Chilton and MoTor manuals that cover the years of our cars. The mechanicals are all covered, but such things as the bodies usually are not. I haven't found a service manual for my Terraplane, but I have a MoTor manual that covers it and it has yet to fail me. Antique shops can be a good source of manuals, too. You'll be surprised at what kind of auto literature you can find in them - all of my Chilton and MoTor manuals came from antique shops. Welcome to the Forum

I remember my parents trying to get the old Scout or Falcon started on the very few "cold" days we experienced when I was a kid growing up in Texas. Now I have remote start and only have to worry about remembering to turn the heat up and the defrost on when I park it for the night. Did I mention that if there had been two more of me "helping" move those two old, cold, uncooperative cars - on pavement that was only recently cleared of snow - that it would have made a great Three Stooges short? No? Must have slipped my mind

My D24 does that, too. Matter of fact, all my old cars do that. I've heard that its in part due to these older caburetors and relatively low fuel pressure. The fuel bowls dry out after sitting for a while because they are not as air tight as newer ones, and it takes a "while" for the gas to wet its whistle. Problem was worse for me when I lived in the southwest where its hotter and drier than NY. "Down there" it only took a day or two of sitting idle, up here it takes a few weeks before I get the "delayed starting feature". Folks on this forum have mentioned using an electric pump either in line with the mechanical one or on its own that pretty much solves the problem. Turn the pump on for a few seconds to prime the carb before they crank the car.

The dumbing down of America - due to laziness, "everyone's a winner", auto correct, instant messaging, need for instant gratification, selfishness etc. The teachers (in the holistic sense, not just the professionals) are afraid to correct. I've only a high school education, but I deal with people that have masters degrees and some doctorates on a regular basis - and some very high level folks like Representatives and Senators. I find myself constantly irritated by their poor grammar, spelling, syntax, etc. Mine's not the best, I've been influenced by many cultures over the years from working in several geographic locations and find some idiosyncrancies so amusing that I use them myself just for kicks, as well as my own bad habits, but I know enough to write a professional document that withstands scrutiny. I get stuff on a constant basis that I could swear were written by kindergarteners, even though we have explicit correspondence manuals, style guides, and professional writing training. I guess I'll do my part and hope it has some influence on someone.

Dusting off an old thread here, arising from the continuing adventures of painting my daughter's Falcon. An off-thread topic you may think, but not so - because it means I had the ol' Dodge parked outside over the weekend. And it got cold. Once the Falcon's doors cured enough to handle them it was time to put the old girl back in the garage yesterday - when it was all of 8 degrees out. While some of our northern (further northern, anyway) brethren may scoff at that temperature as being insignificant and requiring only a sweat shirt - that's still the coldest its been here this winter, and probably the coldest the D24 has ever been out in. She did NOT want to start, barely even wanted to turn over. Coughed and burped a couple times, but ran the battery down too low and she gave up. So I exchanged the cold battery for a warm one, she turned over much better, fired up, but ran really bad for a minute or two, then settled down. I recall discussions in other threads about keeping the battery warm with a shop light, but I discovered I don't have any incandecent bulbs, just the CRLs, and they don't put off enough heat, at least not when its that cold out. Even tried pushing, but everything was sluggish and I could barely move the car, heck, it would barely even shift. It doesn't have a block heater, but I also discovered that one of my freeze plugs is seeping and I may just replace it with one of those coolant heaters that goes in the freeze plug hole. Searching the Forum didn't find much in the way of solutions - just that these old MoPars can be sluggish in a real winter, so just deal with it I'm chalking this up as an adventure.

I had the same problem with NY roads vs. one of my hubcaps last year. Or so I thought. When I got the car it had 3 Dodge hubcaps and 1 Plymouth. I suspect the Dodge hubcap I picked up to replace the Plymouth one is the culprit, although I've long since lost track of just which one is the "replacement" The inside ridge that the clips on the rim snap over, on the one occasionally liberated hubcap, is ever so slightly turned in more than the other three. And I just happen to have one rim on which the clips are slightly bent. When I rotated the tires last time I didn't put the hubcaps back on the same rims they came off of, and put the odd hubcap on the odd rim and it wouldn't hold tight. After much head scratching and a few carefully selected expletives I discovered the problem, and the simple fix of just making sure the one odd hubcap goes on a rim with straight clips. It was just by chance that I had always put the hubcaps on the rims that would hold them tightly for the past 19 years.

Finish my daughter's Falcon so I can take it back to her and give myself room in the garage for the Terraplane to keep the Dodge company. At the same time tending to some little tidbits on the D24 during the winter, then drive it more than I have been while I fiddle with the T-plane. In short; more old-car time

Thanks! I guess this qualifies as hijacking a thread. I feel so....dirty But I'll maintain that I'm still talking about the weather and what we're doing with our cars when Old Man Winter creeps up. Ach - can't resist, one more comment on the Falcon - my daughter called it the green ghost because it was blue-green. She and my wife insisted it was blue, I insisted it was green, so they deferred to me and called it the green ghost because only I could see the green (although I've never seen a ghost). Female minds. Anyway, now they insist we change the name to Kermit. I'm staying out of this one.....

This is the only forum I visit, I didn't know there were other ways to view message threads - so to me, all the other sites would be backwards .

I bought mine from Kanter many years ago. For giggles I checked the catalog again a couple weeks ago, they still sell them - stainless steel, mild steel, or aluminized steel. SS is EXpensive, the others are rather steep too - plus shipping. I didn't trust west Texas muffler shops at the time, as they tended to weld their own brackets to the frame whether you approved it or not. But I'd imagine any good shop could bend the stuff for you at a reasonable price nowadays. Many have computer programs with the specs so they don't have to "eyeball" the bends.

I think the key is to get a computer that controls only the engine and tranny, not the whole car. That's were the difficulty of just pulling the computer out of the donor car lies. There are several aftermarket outfits that sell the stand alone driveline computers - look at restomod or hot-rod sites.

Just being a tad OCD-ish. I'm not too worried about it. After all, cars are made to be outdoors, I just cringed a bit because I've made it a habit to keep it out of the weather the past 16 years or so. I didn't get to finish painting the Falcon, ran out of primer. I was originally just going to do an "Earl Scheib" number but decided to remove all the trim and body parts so I could paint the door jambs, inner fenders, etc. and didn't buy enough primer to do that. So I packed everything up for the Holidays and will re-attack it in a couple weeks. But here's a couple teasers - and everyone gets a peek at my garage, too .

Typical west New York weather here. Couple weeks ago had some of that nice, thick, lake effect snow, the kind that makes its own sheet of ice before it even starts melting. And for once Wheatfield (north of Buffalo) got it instead of Buffalo proper, Painting the daughter's Falcon so had the old girl (D24, not the daughter) parked in the driveway for a couple of weeks while I "fumigated" the garage. I dare say she'd never been exposed to that much snow, being a southwest car the first 55 years of her life. Then we had a week of thaw, a couple days in the 20's, and now back to "warm". They've already been putting that "new" chemical down (calcium chloride?) that REALLY eats cars up, so no way I'm taking the D24 on the road despite the urges. Still, winter is good for catching up on the little things that I/we let lapse in lieu of driving.

Mine has the pair of center brackets as well, but they are not at all flimsy, very stout.

I didn't do any loosening or wetting when I attached mine, just ensured they had appropriately grabbed the center trim. It's gone many miles via trailer during moves (meaning exposed to higher highway speeds than when I drive it), as well as 18 years of driving it. No problems. I do, however, include checking the tightness of the screws and such during my "PMCS" - "old" Army term for Preventive Maintenance Checks and Services, to bring back some memories - I find I have to tighten them at least once a year (I don't use any loctite or other thread locker) depending on how much its been driven.

Oh, cookies and beer. THATS where I've been going wrong all these years....

My first car was a '67 Ford Galaxie station wagon. Bought it for $650 in 1979. As with most of you'uns, sure wish I still had it. Granted it wasn't very old back then, it would be a show winner today. But, alas, Bossie the cow wandered into the road just past a curve on a dark night. I drove 5 miles to the police station with a dead cow on my hood. That was on one of those Texas Farm to Market (FM) roads so the owner couldn't be held liable, but I still had to report it. (When I tell that story to my kids, they ask why I didn't just call the police on my cell phone - silly kids - trying to make me feel old before my time.) Fresh out of High School and I couldn't afford to fix it so I sold it for parts and bought a '66 Chrysler Imperial - thus beginning the Mopar saga.

Oh yeah! The stance is perfect!

Hate to be cavalier about it but - c'mon - its a Lumina. And an old one at that. Sell as-is with the replacement door thrown in, and plan for the buyer to not want the extra door. If you replace/repaint the door, you'll still have to dispose of a door, and you won't get your cost back anyway. Don't overthink the what-ifs, it'll be exactly what someone is looking for for their own reasons, not yours. It's still a good first car for a young-un, or a hooptie car for someone else.

That looks like a 100% aftermarket set-up. It looks to be welded on, and there must be non-factory holes drilled. There's nothing in that spot on my engine. I wouldn't like that arrangement at all on my car. I had an engine in a '60 Ford pick up where a previous owner put an oil pressure guage in by routing an oil line from someplace other than where the engineers intended oil to be drawn from. Ruined the engine. The factory plumbing for the oil filter is, as Greg said, on the driver's side, whether the car originally came with an oil filter or not. You can still attach an aftermarket filter to the intended plumbing if you don't trust the original types.

Well, its not the Mexicans bettering their lives, or coming in from Canada, either. The Border Patrol and border security is not about "Mexicans", far from it. But this line of discussion leads to a very slippery slope - too far removed from Plymouths and Dodges for me to venture further into on this forum. Suffice to say such things are better discussed over a beer in my little world.

When my brother and I were kids we'd spend our summers at our grandparent's places in Illinois. My mom's side lived just a couple hundred yards or so from the mainline of the Missouri Pacific along the Mississippi in Jackson County. We'd fight over the upstairs bedroom that overlooked the tracks, and I can remember the distant thrum of the trains as they approached, the mars light approaching off in the distance, the crossing bells ringing, and the distant thunder of the trains as they passed. No matter where we were on the farm we'd always run to where we could watch the trains when we heard them coming. We'd walk for hours on the tracks, and would occasionally have to jump off when a train approached - usually into a patch of poison ivy! Once I settled down, I dabbled in model railroading, it was fun, but it wasn't quite the same. Then I got my first old car - and that was all she wrote. Still fascinated by trains, tho. Got to visit the Lionel factory in Michigan when I worked in Detroit.

A nefarious bunch, them Canadians, what with all that beer drinking, hockey playing, and curling they do up there . (What's with curling anyway? Seems so mundane, but once you start watching or playing, you can't stop!) But it aint the Canadians we have to worry about sneaking in from Canada.........

You are more patient than I, and I've been accused of having the patience of Jobe (sp). For one, that shop is filthy, I'm not the neatest guy in the world, but that place takes the cake. And its a cardinal rule of the auto repair industry (reputable types, anyway) to keep the old parts for the customer.....

I'm still the Deputy Chief Patrol Agent for the U.S. Border Patrol's Buffalo Sector - the number 2 guy responsible for operations covering 341 miles from Pennsylvania to the Thousand Islands. (This is a small Sector.) I DO NOT work at a bridge (common misconception that Border Patrol (green uniforms) works the Ports of Entry (blue uniforms), we don't). I've worked in Brownsville and Fort Hancock, TX (lived in El Paso -where we got the D24), Carlsbad, NM, Detroit, MI, and now here in Buffalo (HQ is in Grand Island). Been doing this Border Patrol thing for 26 years, and despite the politicians catering to the special interest groups and getting in our way its been a hoot! Photo is on the Rio Grande River near Presidio, TX back during prohibition. Things haven't changed much - you just don't hear about it very often.