Well, seeing that I should have the car home today I guess I'll go ahead and make a thread about it. I'm not good at short stories, so bear with me.
I've known about the car for about a decade, it used to sit on a local ford dealers lot, I used to drive by it in my '69 Coronets and my '64 Dart and wonder if someone traded the thing in on something and it was so ugly they couldn't get rid of it at the auction. A year or two ago I rode thru the lot and the car was missing, I figured the thing had been scrapped and felt bad that yet another mopar was off the road for good. A while after that I was driving around town and spotted the familiar faded red shape of a Valiant in a row of cars at a local shop....sure enough it was the same car.
As the year passed I had several other "toys" but longed to be back in a mopar, although I couldn't really afford it at the time since all of the local mopars that used to sit around were long gone and anything decent I found elsewhere would cost me as much to get it home as it would to buy the thing. I eventually got in the position to buy something and started looking around and one day I ran across the Valiant again and this time it was For Sale. I looked it over a bit and for the asking price it wasn't terrible, a lot more sensibly priced that pretty much any other run down mopar I had come across and after some prodding aroung I got in touch with the owner and got the car.
The car belonged a guy who worked at the ford dealership, it had belonged to his father and he ended up with it when he passed away, got it going and then let is set at the dealership until they made him move it, which is how it ended up at the shop. After about a week of hounding the guy I got the title and the keys.
I started to get it running and found it wasn't getting any fuel, so a new fuel pump went in place.....I haven't had any chance to make mych more progress than that because today I was told I couldn't work on it there anymore...so today it's getting hauled home.
First up on my list of tasks is getting it running, cleaning the tank, yanking the carpet and work my way down the list of dead and broken things from there. It's going to need a lot of work, but I'm excited about it, it should make a fun and different summer cruiser.
Those rear lower quarters behind the wheel look like loads of fun...