Afternoon all

My father very recently passed away and I am now the new owner of his 68 Dart. He was very vigilant about keeping up with the car and I am honored to keep it in the family and share the love of vehicles with my wife and son.

Was a mechanic in the early years of my life, but this definitely predates any of my experience and skillsets.

As far as I know- the vehicle is mostly original. Front brakes were upgraded to discs and recently vacuum assisted power brakes.

Believe it also had a factory electronic distributor added also.

It is running crazy rich so I have a local MOPAR friend who is coming over this weekend to teach me the ins and outs of this beloved Holley 1920 carb, as I have never messed with one.

My goal is to keep it as close to original as possible, honoring Dad's wishes.

If anyone has any tips or advice of things to keep and eye out for etc I am all ears. Would love to keep this car in the family for generations.

Welcome to Slantsix.org! Sounds like a great car, history, and set of priorities. You may want to also do a valve lash adjustment before or around the time that you are trying to tune the carb. Sometimes tight valve lash can look like a poorly tuned carb. Happy to talk you through that if you do not know how, or probably someone here will post a link to a thread here discussing that.

Warm wishes,
Lou

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Home of Slant6-powered fun machines since 1988

Appreciate the heads up on the lash adjustment. Will ask my buddy about it when he comes over. He is very young but loves old mopar vehicles so I am fortunate to have someone close by to help out. Will take a while to register it I am finding due to differences in documents from the state my Dad had it registered and NC laws. I am hearing up to two months until I will be able to put tags on it. God forbid they make it simple.

Thanks again for the tips !

Welcome here! Find tune-up parts and technique suggestions in this post. Carburetor operation and repair manuals and links to training movies and carb repair/modification threads are posted here for free download. As soon as you can, get the three books listed in this thread. Also take a look at this post.

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一期一会
Too many people who were born on third base actually believe they've hit a triple.

Update on the car.

So my buddy came over and confirmed right away that she was running extremely rich. What he found interesting is that making adjustments via the air fuel screw or the idle screw did absolutely nothing. That surprised and perplexed him.

We removed the carb and completely disassembled. It had clearly been rebuilt very recently as most things in it were very new. After cleaning everything and reinstalling the carb, I replaced the spark plugs. All were very wet. Gapped the new ones to spec, and used the Champion Copper plugs he recommended. It was still rich, and was not responding to adjustment still.

He marked the block where the distributor is and found the timing had been advanced to max. Adjusting that back made a big difference and brought the idle back down to a more reasonable place, which also allowed adjustments to actually make an impact.

Upon further inspection- the throttle cable was adjusted in a way that was not allowing the car to ever slow idle. In fact the car was set up in a way that the accelerator pump was activated, which again explained why adjustments had no affect on the engine. Between adjusting the throttle cable placement, also tweaking the idle bracket to put a bit more tension on that, it seemed to help. The idle dropped to a better rpm and it was just slightly missing. He had concerns about the distributor having some excessive play in the shaft, and the rotor cap, which is a Mopar NOS product had signs of impact by the rotor or possible arcing. He is going to check a valiant he has to see if it has the same play. He couldn't remember the spec and didn't have anything to measure it well.

First test drive it ran well, but every time I slowed to a stop- it stalled. Got it back to the house and adjusted things and the second test drive had it running ok, with no stalling. Definitely idling a little higher than I think it should, but lowering the idle rpm seemed to promote stalling.

He admitted he was at the end of his skillsets at this point, and his Dad is going to look at it in the future to get it dialed in perfectly as he has all the special tools from his mopar days at the dealership, analyzers etc. The problem we kept running into was the engine was running ok, but it really did not want to return to slow idle even after being warmed up. The linkage itself did not seem to allow it to return to idle. It took us a bit to see that the throttle cable was causing much of this, as with it being pulled down so much, it caused the carb to activate the accelerator pump when idling, so that at least explained why it was dumping so much fuel at idle, and why adjusting made no difference.

Clearly more to do, but the fact it isn't sputtering etc is great. Going to get it to the car wash today to wash off the 12 hour trailer ride film and get some spray wax on it.

Working on some lighting upgrades which will be greatly appreciated.

The steering wheel is going to take some getting used to. Never driven something where the steering wheel is so close, and so low. Have to compress the bench seat and slide underneath it which is a bit awkward. Searched what tilt steering entails and have no interest in a $1200 steering column. Will learn to live with that.

Hopefully the weather improves and I can begin driving it more frequently, enjoying it the way my father did, which is the whole point.

Appreciate everyone's input and advice.

I would again, seriously, encourage you to do a valve lash adjustment. Some of the symptoms you describe could have to do with adjusting carb and timing to compensate for stalling if the valves are too tight. I would adjust valves before doing a single other thing, then start from there. Otherwise, seems like you are making progress!

Best wishes,
Lou

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Home of Slant6-powered fun machines since 1988

Thanks Lou- Apologies I did not respond to that. Per his receipts the valve lash was adjusted to spec less than 2 years and 1800 miles ago. Will likely take the valve cover off this summer and check for myself, but assuming the shop did that properly, I would think it would not need it again so quickly

Once the weather is nicer- I am hopeful Lee's Dad will be able to fine tune everything given he has the analyzer and other special tools to really fine tune the engine. It is possible Lee also has the Carter single barrel for the car in his shop so that might also be an option.

Washing the car to get the film off today was a fun experience. Water shoots in the car around all the door tops, as well as the cowl area so need to see what needs to be done there, as while my plans are not to purposefully drive the car in the rain, it would be nice not to get soaked just driving.

On another note I will be looking for a thermostat as even driving the car for 45 minutes- the temp never got up to where it should and the heat was never hot either, which experience leads me to thinking the tstat is at least partially stuck open. Also looking into how to secure the dash and associated trim- as the loose rattles are going to drive me insane lol

I have nothing super-specific to say, as your problems are fairly wide-ranging and will settle out as you address them one by one, but I will say these two things:

1. Just because there is a receipt for a valve adjustment, and someone claimed to have done a valve adjustment, doesn't mean that the valves are properly adjusted.
You should actually, personally, check to be sure that the valves are properly adjusted.
There is a technique for adjusting them running and not-running.
I like not-running.
Dan likes running.
Tomato / tomahto.

2. You said the words "lighting upgrades."
Those words will pretty much make Dan appear in a puff of smoke like a genie.
He is a genuine professional expert on vehicle lighting, and you should do whatever he says, and not do anything until he has weighed in.

One possible headlight improvement, which I quite like, and which he may or may not approve of, is the Toyota Land Cruiser headlight update kit from Toyota. It consists of two flat-faced glass headlights with included H4 bulbs, with a complete wiring harness, including plugs, relays, and circuit breakers. I've used this on a couple of cars and been very happy with it. It produces a European-type sharp cutoff low beam and a bright well-distributed high beam.
Part # 81110-60P70.
$16.49, plus shipping, when I bought them one year ago from Toyota Parts Express.

You want LEDs, Dan will skool you. You may not like what he has to say, but he will be right.

Good luck!

- Eric

Your words ring true. One thing that really upset me reading through all of the receipts is the number of times he paid for the same thing. Believe the local shop was taking advantage, as my father was very much the, If it needs it do it person with his vehicles. There is no realm of middle earth given how little he was able to drive it in extreme upstate NY (Southern Canada is how described it growing up) that it should have required the things he had done to it ,so frequently.

I have a feeling Lee's Dad will be of the type we are going to start from square one, checking every single thing before even tuning the carb. From my understanding he was a lifelong Dodge mechanic 60s through the 80's so this is his bread and butter. He actually has a spare transmission for this car sitting in his shop someone cancelled on.

I actually just placed an order with Dan, so it is funny you said that. Found his website through posts on a handful of forums so there will be lots of lighting upgrades. The turn signal module has me a bit worried but no doubt if I read through it a few times I will grasp it just fine.

Considering getting a new weatherstripping kit for all 4 doors and try to adjust the doors to keep the water out from those points, then will move onto why the water comes in near the firewall inside on both sides. Seemed to run straight in went I was washing it. Just hoping I don't have a major rust issue in there as many complain about as that is project outside of my skills for sure.

It is the beginning of my journey with this car. Taking a bite at a time.

Thanks again for the support

I bought my door seals from Metro, because they are a reputable house, and I've bought from them before, but then I found the same product much cheaper somewhere else (I forget where).

It's kind of like the ACC carpet from what I can tell (others please correct me if I'm wrong), everyone sells the same thing.

The original has short lengths of squishy foam rope in the corners, where it makes hard bends. I found it impossible to reuse the original foam (which was still flexible, but had deformed and wouldn't push through the tubular hollow in the weatherstripping to get to its destinations), and I found that the foam rope seal material sold at big box hardware stores to stuff into cracks was almost identical, and worked well, but the stuff they used appears to have been an intermediate size between the sizes available in the store (I forget whether it was 3/8" or 1/2" or what) – the size just a tiny bit bigger was impossible to push through, but the size just a bit smaller worked fine. I ended up using a length of 12 or 10ga insulated solid wire to push the lengths to their destinations.

– Eric