This is the story of Bluey:
Found this car on craigslist for sale a few years back. 1991 Daytona. Complete base model. 2.5L TBI, factory non-A/C, 523, manual windows, manual locks, no cruise control, no sunroof, no overhead console, but it has power mirrors! Whoo! The guy was asking a little much for this vigorously winter driven Daytona which was making a "knocking noise," $900. I left it alone. A few months later it shows up again for $600. Still no appeal. Then about a half a year later, it pops up for $300. I had a Daytona I wanted to convert from auto to 5-speed, and I figured pedals, cables, shifter, console, trans, bobble strut mounting would cost about that much anyway, and this saved me the hassle of scavenging them. So I went to go see it. I was hoping to be able to drive it home, about 30 minutes away, but the motor was klanking like nothing I've heard. I could barely get the car up to speed, felt like a sledgehammer was pounding on it every few seconds. I told the guy that I'm sorry but I'm gonna have to pass, I doubt it'll make it home. He asked me what would I give him for it anyway. I said I'd do no more than $150, since that's what a trans alone would cost me from the local yards here. After some negotiating, more test driving, and finally walking away from the car, the guy runs up to me and says fine, I'll sell it for $150. Well, the car did end up eventually making it home. Once on the highway at 55mph, and keeping the motor almost at not load, the motor seemed to achieve a perfect harmonic synchronization with the klanking and would run silky smooth!
Here are the first shots my buddy Ron made after he washed it for me
The car had a very rare type of life. Extreme chicago winters all its life...and it was garage stored all its life. So the paint looked great but had very rusty rear wheel wells and rockers. Despite the outer sheet metal being rusty, the floorpan is all there and there is almost no rust on it nor on the frame rails, so structurally it is very sound. I hated having to winter drive my other Daytonas, so I decided to throw in a 100K mile junkyard motor that I had laying around and it'd serve as my winter beater. Well, the car drove pretty well, motor ran good, but I decided to do a full tune-up on it just to maximize my fuel efficiency. Spent $50 on rockauto and got new spark plugs, plug wires, distributor cap, rotor, fuel filter, and most importantly, a new O2 sensor! Well, turns out that two of the spark plugs in that junkyard motor's head were cross threaded in by the previous owner. One I got out after drenching myself in sweat, but the other one snapped flush with the hole in the head. Could not get the rest of it out for the life of me. I had a freshly remanufactured turbo head sitting on my shelf, which I picked up as a spare from the yard a while back for $100, I really didn't want to have to use that one, but I wasn't about to go out and buy another head when that defeats the point of me having spent the $100 to HAVE a spare head, lol. So this Daytona ended up getting a completely fresh top end! I test the fuel economy all the time, and it get 41MPG highway at 60MPH!
I frequent junkyards and haul a ton of parts and furniture, and I would always feel the scratches I would put on my other Daytonas as if they were on my own skin. The interior was already a little beat up on Bluey, and with the phenomenal fuel economy, it ended up being my year round beater. Being that it was my beater, I felt no shame in messing around with it! I had a bunch of parts laying around, so I decided to slap them on for the heck of it:
INTERIOR:
Installed a digital instrument cluster, 6 button traveler, premium BCM, 2001 Dodge Stratus radio, and in-dash 6 disk CD changer. Don't tell me that it doesn't fit!
Redid the headliner:
Restored an overhead console to match:
SUSPENSION:
Suspension was jelly, so I invested $300 in new struts, shocks, springs, control arm bushings, ball joints, and inner and outer tie rod ends.
MOOG bushings, they are nice and firm! No more slop when making tighter turns. And they came blue to match!
Removing shocks the only way you can up here:
Nice firm progressive rate springs. Cut them to firm them up some more and lower the car to a nice stance. Fabbed a bracket to bolt the bottom coil to the strut.
Fabbed up my own adjustable panhard bar:
Rear suspension looking good, lol.
I've taken some pretty nasty turns with this suspension to test it out relative to my other Daytonas, and I have yet not gotten the rear wheels to squeal! I'm afraid to take a turn any faster than that around here in the city. I'd LOVE to autocross it at one of the upcoming SDACs, but it might be a few years, I've got a Laser I'm dying to finish
EXTERIOR:
Rattle canned an ES front bumper since I was about to junk a car with it and figured why not:
Wanted to see how it'd look with the red chin spoiler, and it grew on me. I have all the ES ground effects to install, but first I have to weld on some sheet metal for it to hold onto! For now, I got some Shelby Z side skirt hiding the cancer. I got the blue rear spoiler off a blue 92 TI IROC I parted out. Also found some 15x7 ultra light weight rims and tires for $225 on craigslist:
I don't think it looks too bad starting from a $150 car! After this upcoming winter is over, I expect to cut out the rusty sheet metal and weld in new sheet metal. I have a bunch of front Daytona fenders that I'm going to cut up to fix the wheel wells. It ain't too much work when you ain't working on a show car!
AUDIO:
Being a heavy industrial metal lover, I like to have a good sounding system in the car that has loud bass. I was set on a mission to only use Chrysler parts I find at junkyards to perform all my interior and electronic upgrades. Spending about $50 at a junkyard, I came out with four Chrysler Infinity 6x9" speakers, two Infinity 3.5" speakers, and a 360W Chrysler Infinity amp. Daytonas came with 5.25"s in the doors, and 5x7"s in the back; but all it takes is persuasion to get it all to fit and work! I also removed the newer 2001 Stratus radio and 6 disk CD changer since I was forced to use a cassette adapter to listen to my phone's MP3 player, and I used that far more than the CD changer to justify it. So I installed an Infinity III radio and soldered up an auxiliary input using the slave CD player port. The Infinity III actually sounds better than the 2001 radio, and I get a more modern style of audio input at great quality! It rivals the sound output of aftermarket radios I've used, but at a fraction of the cost. Plus the interior retains a clean factory look.
6x9 next to a 5x7:
Before:
After:
Here are some old pics when I used some 6x9 GM speakers in the fronts as an experiment. Before installing the amp, just replacing the 5.25s for the 6x9s made a tremendous difference alone. But on the second day after amp installation, those GM 6x9s burnt out... go figure. I replaced them with the Infinities I got at the yard and they've handled everything that amp's been able to push for a few months now. Notice how nearly perfectly sized the plastic bracket is!
I had to sacrifice the front-bottommost screw mount that was on the bracket, I'll come up with a workaround one day, but it doesn't rattle at all so it's low on the priority list. The sound performance is well worth fitting larger speakers up front. Especially since these are so easy to come by. Now is the era of the very late 90s and early 2000s cars piling up at the yards, and they nearly all came with Infinity speakers.
This is the amp to get. The 688AC. Found in second generation LHSes. 360watts, thumps as if there was a subwoofer in the car! Has 4 inputs and 8 outputs. The amp takes line lever input and has built in crossovers so you have 4 LO outputs and 4 HI outputs. I wired the front HIs to the 3.5 inchers, the front LOs to the 6x9s in the doors. For the rears, I wired the LOs to the cone woofer, and the HIs to the tweeter.
Now my audio system can do some justice when I'm listening to these guys! Finally got to see them last year!
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Originally Posted by Dodge Aries K
