Restoring 1971 Plymouth Satellite's Former Glory! | Roadkill Garage | MotorTrend

So Steve's car is a

1971

Plymouth Satellite and this is what makes it cool: This thing came from Chrysler with purple paint, but I'll tell you what it didn't come with a Mopar 383 because this Mopar 383 was swapped into the car, it is not. original was this a small block car or something like that 318 oh, so our plan is that Mopar three to three doesn't fail us the way the old 455 Buick 455 and Cadillac 500 did, right, no, it's a 383 never fails, okay, so we have to do this. run and drive, why do you close it? Go get a battery, some gas, and a spark plug wire here in the mud.

Yeah, no, buddy, let's move this thing away from where it is. We are very flexible in the hit-and-run

garage

, as much as we really can. What we do here is have fun with cars and when one lets us down spectacularly like the Cadillac 500 in the gremlin, we just bounce and in this case we bounce back to Steve's

satellite

71 because look at it other than what a huge dent it actually is. really good, so we're going to spend the next 25 minutes getting this thing running and driving and I'm going to say we're going to get it out of here right now, that sounds like it wants to start.

I hear valves. opening and closing yes then something is happening so we just established that the engine turns now we are going to find out if we can get it to spark. These points are wasted. No way Steve's old points literally melted away. It's supposed to be a contact block to rub the cam but it's melted and up here it's supposed to be an insulator it's not insulating it's rubbish now I have the points theoretically functional although the distributor just spins freely in the blocks the timing goes to be good off we can still see if we have spark oh wow look this distributor cap is completely destroyed you have another one right there I know but that means we have to reroute all the plug wires one eight four three six five what What are we doing is to work with the firing order.

We know that the distributor rotates counterclockwise, so it should rotate towards the circle one eight four three six five seven two and in the big block Chrysler, this bank is one three five seven. two four six eight okay, that's it, it's starting up very slowly, how is it going to turn on? Can you pull a spark plug wire and see if there are sparks across the plug wires? Sure it's a great spark that's 100 solid which is a pretty good spark at this point, we've confirmed that there's spark coming out of the coil and all the way to the plugs, we've got gas in the hole, but unfortunately it's not even like a pop and a spark , it doesn't fire at all, so the timing is probably really really bad or the spark plugs are incredibly dead, which is what we're about to find out, Steve, you're going to pull like number two.

I guess you think that's rubbish, look what Rusty, they are too, yeah, we're just going to have to pull all the plugs, pretty sure that one. It wasn't firing right Steve's got the new starter in there so we're on our way to trying this one more time you won yeah okay put some gas in there. I like to splash a little bit in the secondary, a little bit of feeding there a little bit slowly. here we go, let's see if he starts right and Speedy now, wow, he shot up right now. I know, okay, it sounded like a puppy through the intake valves, which is maybe just because it hasn't worked and probably since the 80's.

It works, yeah, wow, this is a manifold. factory Chrysler two-barrel intake, as you can see by the two holes there, and this is an old school Die Cast carburetor adapter to start off that two-barrel pattern that you'll notice is bolted to the manifold. to a four barrel now, if you are in the circumstance of considering purchasing one of these, let me assure you that there is no performance advantage. The only reason you would do this is because you have a four barrel and it is cheaper than buying a two barrel. to put in their two barrel intake, that's old school and not good, so it turns out that the 383 and

satellite

are actually a two barrel engine.

Now the 383 was built as two barrels and four barrels. We have a four barrel bolted to a two barrel. manifold with an adapter and that's not good, so what I'm going to do is use this intake manifold which is a factory cast iron four cylinder manifold that actually came off of David Fryeburger's '71 Road Runner. I'm using this carburetor it's a 1850 series Adventure Truck. Now the Adventure Truck is made for off road but it will work fine on the muscle car so I'm going to clean this all up and finish it off by bolting it on so what do we do?

What we're doing here is basically trying to re-verify that the engine is going to run well. As you saw last night, we got it to start with basically the carburetor not even working at this point. We are going to use a carburetor that we know is in good condition. and Soft Intake Manifold and try to get this thing to purr on oil pressure, how come it's not getting oil pressure? How do you know you didn't hear the elevators? Oh, sorry, I heard that, but I'm wondering, maybe there's a little bit of stickiness but it could be yeah, do you want like Sea Foam or something?

I was thinking ATF, we're talking about pouring in some automatic transmission fluid which tends to have some cleaners in it that will keep the lifters from making noise or at least loosening them if they're varnished or rusty, yeah, and then changing the oil and putting real oil in it . This thing works like a top, it works pretty well, there's no smoke here either. That's awesome, yeah, yeah, maybe you. I'm going to fall in love with this engine. I think I already have it. Yeah, yeah, okay, now we have two quarts of automatic transmission fluid in the engine, who knows what the full engine oil level is at this point, ready to turn it back on.

Wow, it works. pretty good, except for the lifting plate, man, it works very well, look, that's flawless. I know it's a good Community three, right there, the ATF is doing their job. Yes, I'm very interested in making the car look its best and I planned to steal some fried burgers. and center lines, but this requires an extra long stem and a left hand threat to work with our hubs, so we can't even bolt that wheel on, which means we will have mismatched rims and wheels, but it will take us through the way. and we can test the car of course, of course, wow, it looks more like a car, look at that, oh yeah, ready, yeah, what did you do?

Did you turn on the fuel pump? Yes, you have sparks flying all over the water pump pulley. I was scared at first, but now I like it, take a look, there's something wrong, yeah, listen to it, oh oh no, you better turn it off, you think so. Yeah, oh man, so what Steve thinks is happening is the screws going through the fan. all the way on that water pump flange they stick out the back and hit the water pump itself so I'm just going to add a washer to them and we'll fix it which I'm really disappointed because I really like this it's just One of the best things that ever happened to us, okay, try it again, hopefully without sparks, this time is the pulleys hitting each other.

Okay, let's shake the hood, let's go back, yeah, this is what victory looks like, man, it looks great, this is a treat. oh, it doesn't breathe well here, ah it smells bad, yes, wow, this thing is soft, isn't it? See, this is the value of just taking junk and making it run and driving, look at it, see, that car is junk. I have to rebuild everything from scratch. I have to paint it. I have to get an interior. I have to rebuild an engine. No, no, no, you have to just improvise that crap and drive it to find out if you like it.

Oh, this thing is the What do you think of the car? Meat doesn't like it. It's a little dirty for standard. It may be strange. The Speedo works. Oh man, this thing is perfect. I think you have to go 90 miles an hour. This thing changes in my life. that's water vapor entering the crankcase or even a cylinder, but you know, it's good enough to drive back to Steve's house, well, we ran it probably for the last time and then Steve left, like that I guess I'll walk home. and getting my own transportation that's so much cooler than his lauded purple satellite that we probably should have never started working on in this episode, he didn't even let me have the dog.