The Off-Road Challenger Is Reborn! | Roadkill Garage | MotorTrend

You remember the off-

road

challenger

or the orc as I like to call it, it's our 1970 Dodge Challenger dirt track car that Finnegan and I drove off a farm in Oregon in episode 54 of Roadkill and then two years ago Sweet and I we gave it new life. and we turned it into an off-

road

vehicle and took it out for one of the most fun days we've ever had shooting in the

roadkill

garage

just cranking this thing around an old lava pit real lava from a volcano the suspension works great but that started? What turned out to be maximum fun immediately turned into devastation when a sandstorm arrived like a real haboob. 70 mile per hour winds throwing these tiny little rocks at us.

Sand. We have to make a move. This is so bad. How are we going to do it? Get out of this, it will eventually stop, right, yes, but if we stay here too long the carburetor will fill completely with sand, yes, I know, but do you want to fall off the cliff, no, we seriously thought we were going to die, unfortunately That's how it went. a real end of life experience for the little 318 engine in the orc looks cool look at that oh look look it's all sandblasted this thing just got thrown in buddy the sandblasting brought out some of the old leonard circular road letters Wow, maybe we can charge people money to just park their cars here for a couple of weeks.

I know it's a business opportunity. We left town without air purifiers and I thought, "Oh, so it'll absorb some dust." Don't count on God's torrential act destroying the thing. Oh wow, it looks like an ashtray in there. You may find it hard to believe, but all of that happened two long years ago and the

challenger

has been sitting there ever since. Look, we've been letting big dreams get in the way of good enough, so we never rebuilt the engine, but the thing is, it's been raining here and we're ready to get the off-road challenger muddy and we're ready to do it. in the cheapest and easiest way possible by making this thing run on a new engine from a parts truck that's running hot ooh not bad I've never heard this thing run before it's pretty good it's got power this door won't Open up, buddy, no, you have to.

Come from this side, wait, you can stay here forever. This thing is a exhausted monster. We bought this thing on the Craigslist side and scene and delivered it here and the guy said it was the 318. But dose, how do you know what it is? a 360. I can say that the rib manifolds are a dead giveaway that it is a 360 from this era, but the counterbalanced balancer because the 360 ​​was externally balanced, it has a lot of horn weight on the harmonic balancer that can be seen clearly, so that's certainly it. a 360. which is good news for scrolling, but bad news for reasons we'll discover later in the show.

Now we just have to start taking this thing apart. Throw her on the bed. You know, drain the outside freezer well as soon as I do. I can find a space blanket because I'm going to try to get through this entire day without getting dirty at all, okay, and we're also not going to drop a drop of anything on the floor, ah, I'm still on coolant shells, I hate when that happens, oh , what the heck where does this coolant come from? I don't know, I'm not doing anything, so much for my plan, keep everything clean and dry, it's going to be heavy, a fully equipped 360 with transmission, don't break it. grill, okay, it's up, come down, a little careful, that's our engine and transmission, here's the 360 ​​engine and 727 transmission that came out of our donor truck, this will go to our off-road challenger, but not before doing some changes let's start from the bottom and work our way up and get to the top first of all the starter I want to change it to a later model mini starter it spins the engine faster and the slider is more compact just better around the oil pan here is a rear sump that is truck only the passenger car has a center sump so the engine mounting brackets definitely have to be changed again.

The truck parts need to be changed for the car. Here we have a lot of accessories. We don't need most of these things. The smog bomb. Let's go to the A/C compressor, we'll say goodbye to that, I'm not sure if the power steering pump will work, but this will all have to be taken care of right here, we have the exhaust manifolds. we're going to take them off, we're running headers, now moving to the top, the intake manifold is coming off, we're going to come back with our tunnel ram so it'll be fine and finally this broken electronic ignition distributor is going to go away and we .

We're just going to put points on it because it's really simple and will work well on this engine. Ready, go a little to the left. I can't even believe it's been two years since we took this apart, so we've lowered our expectations. There will be a radical big engine, there will be a Bone Stock 360 and that will happen fast. I'm going to take out the radiator. Steve is going to put this on Jax and then we'll get the feed out of here. and then this one should, as we say at Steve, show you how we should plug these factory air injection holes under the exhaust manifolds.

What's up with that candy? When did they start doing that? Oh, sometimes in the 80's the problem is if you put in initial headers or manifolds, they will leak air or escape through these air injection ports. You can tap them and put a small pipe plug in there, but it's easier to just get a piece of welding rod and tamp it down. I think the engine is totally blocked, yes, yes, by a miracle, and the transmission, oh, it's blowing a lot of dirt, I know, so there's not much left to do. I think the most important thing is that if you remember the previous episode of Roadkill Garage.

When Dulce got frustrated and needed a brake hose and what did she take it from the orc? I don't remember that I need to fix the hard line that runs across the entire firewall of the car, so what am I going to do? I'm going to cut it. I'm going to widen it again. I'm going to widen a little bit here and connect the two with the coupler that way. I have a part that goes off the rails. to make routing a lot easier and then I'll put this back in we'll be ready to go it's time to change the driveshaft we needed a longer one or sorry a shorter one because the 727 trans is about four inches longer than the 904 .Well, are you ready for this?

We're taking off our locked 32-inch bead, whatever these thicker MXT Mastercraft rubbers are because I wanted to be more aggressive, the 33-by-14 super swamper vlogger. Yeah, we're hoping to do some mud crawls that we're planning. It's rained all week and it hasn't really been that much, it hasn't been wet, so maybe we have to make our own destiny with some tanker action and finally, after two years, the challenger rides again, come on, game, I won, the carburetors didn't. I don't like the bounce, but I have it uh oh uh oh I don't have equipment the jeep won't move the transfer case came out of here and the shifter fell off the transfer case so I'm done wow, they're all good.

I'm getting it oh oh oh that's bad that's bad I think it can use a little more power so the only thing we're going to do with it is put a hot cam on it I think that's going to really wake up this 360 and it'll be more than enough to drive Wiley's subaru. This is the camera you wanted to use. It looks used already. That's because it's used. It came out of the 318 that was on the car before we put the 360 ​​on it, oh okay, it's the xe268 comp, it's their extreme power line of hydraulic flat tablets 224 230 to 50 477 480 lift with the original heads, You are limited in the amount of lift you can put in because the retainers will reach the top of the guide. that will happen at about 500 lifts, so it will be safe but it will work very well, well steve, I have most of the pulley system aside here, and a nice new hole in the radiator.

I like your little advice on this. using the distributor gear drive shaft as a handle to get the cam in and out while Steve finishes installing all the lifters. I have the new set of timing gears which is the high performance roller style chain and I'm going to start putting this together. along with the rest of the front dress and hopefully we can light this thing up overnight. I have a confession to make to Wiley, oh no, what came out of an engine that I blew up in oh well, uh, my satellite, this is from the satellite, yeah, no way, so let's put all these broken pieces in this way.

Well, the thing is, it's a double row timing chain, it's bulletproof, it's in good shape, so I'm going to reuse it. Okay, that's the carburetor. I have the dealer stabbed in place while he finishes the front dress. We're pretty close to turning this thing on. I hope it works perfectly. Oh man, nice driving, here's the big one. It's like being a focus just getting out of there. See, that was quite a pitch. What do you think is wrong? The distributor drive bushing and block are completely worn out. That doesn't help you.