My dad is looking to get me some coilovers for my 66 dodge dart for christmas. The inly question i have is it even worth it to get coilovers and do they make them for a 66 dart?

If it's a street driven car, why would you want them? You already have the best factory suspension ever designed.

More importantly, there are reasons you don't want them. I'm assuming you're talking about lifting the rear end an inch or two, to combat the old sagging springs? Remember that the weight of the car is held up with subframe rails at the ends of the leaf spring. Lifting the car with a shock absorber mount puts stress on the comparatively thin sheet metal of the floorpan. If you lift it enough, and put enough weight in it, you'll rip holes.

By far the better approach is to take the springs out and have them re-arched, or just buy new springs. Espo is typically the highest recommended company we hear about on the www.earlycuda.org mailing list.

Also, one other note: the springs may not be sagging as much as you think they are. Chrysler designed them to be nearly FLAT when they're working properly. Darn good engineering reasons for this... can't remember any of 'em off the top of my head, though. But for this purpose, it's just an interesting note to be aware of.

- Erik

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Lots of early Valiants and Barracudas have crossed my path.
Also a handful of other toys for variety now and then.

I thought we were talking about front coilovers. These are not really made for drivers. There is also a lot of fabbing to get them to work. You really need a triangulated mounting system on the LCA for these to work properly.
If you are going to that much trouble you may as well use Bill Reilly's whole front end system.

On anything but an extreme racer (e.g. one that punishes its front suspension with monster wheelstands or a tube framer road racer) it's hard to justify a coil-over conversion. The front suspension already has pretty good geometry and adjustable ride height - not to mention, torsion bars make for less unsprung weight than coil overs. The rear shock mounting points are not meant for coil-overs, as mpgfanatic pointed out. To make coil-overs work well, you'd basically need to redesign the whole set of mounting points.

Properly done coil-overs are not worth the effort and expense involved for most Mopars. They only belong on the most hardcore machines. If you "only" want a Dart that runs 11 second quarter miles or can hang with new Corvettes on a road course, you don't really need them - both can and have been done with torsion bar and leaf sprung A-bodies.

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"Mad Scientist" Matt Cramer
'66 Dart - turbocharged 225
My blog - Mad Scientist Matt's Lair