We hope you enjoy this as much as we have.

The first thing you may notice is that we somehow missed getting any real good pictures of the car before we began stripping it down for the restoration. There might be more around somewhere, but I couldn't find them. The few I have are the first one's on this page, and that's about all there is. Oops... sorry 'bout that! You can laugh at the hair-lip bumper if it helps. The story goes that the previous owner hit a road sign, denting the bumper and smashing up the front clip a little. It was a "Keep Right" sign...

You are looking at the car in various states of disassembly here, mostly to give you an idea of what kind of shape the car was in when we started. I owned the car for nearly four years before I got around to the restoration. It was a running car when I got it, and I wanted to play with it for awhile. I'm sure you all understand, right?

In the following pics you will note several things, including the fender tag on the driver-side inner-fender. It's always nice to have this for decoding purposes in the event that you get your hands on an incomplete car. We were very lucky to get a complete car, although it was not entirely stock.

A bonus to getting a running car was also getting the numbers matching 340 motor and 727 tranny for the car. These items were stored along with the car in an old chicken house for 10 years (at least) before I finally talked the owner, a friend of mine, into parting with it. I traded my Kawasaki Lakota 300 4-wheeler (2 yrs old) straight across for the car (approx value $3500), and gave an additional $1000 to get the motor/tranny and some some other stuff, including a set of Craiger SS mag wheels, an extra door, and several buckets of mopar rust. The car had really cool Magnesium alloy D-slot mags mounted, with Eagle GT Goodyear tires (dry rotted).

Restoring the car was a much bigger project than I had realized until my brother and I actually got started. As you can see, the car was kind of rough under all the flash and trim. Even so, there was very little rust that was anything worse than surface damage.

The following are before-and-after pictures of the floor pans. There was a little bit of surface rust, and one small hole on the driver-side, but otherwise things were in great shape. My brother welded the hole up and I put a grinder to it. A litte wire-brush action to clean the surface, a quick cleanup of the dust, dirt and paint, and we applied the thick black coating you see here. This stuff interacts with surface rust and stops it completely, as well as sealing the metal against moisture in the future. We found the rubber gromets around the wiper shafts to be rotten, which allowed water to leak in under the dash, where it would soak into the carpet and foster rust. No longer!

The passenger-side quarter panel had rusted through from the inside, and the trunk pan had several spots in the spare tire well and elsewhere that had rusted through. This left us little choice but to replace the rotting metal. And now the fun begins...

Here are pictures of the passenger-side quarter panel before and after we cut it off. You will note the rusted trunk extension, as well as the pile of crud that fell on the ground after we opened her up. A small leak in the seam between the extension and the quarter allowed dirt to build up inside the trunk, which absorbed moisture from the air and driving in the rain. This caused our poor quarter panel to rust from the inside out. The grey prime was my feeble attempt to hide the damage until I could do the restoration.

Note the way we cut the quarter below the cutout for the side reflecter? Our after-market quarter panel did not have the cutout, and we didn't really need to cut the original out anyway. It's best to save as much original metal as possible in our opinion, which is what we tried to do here. Funny enough, I don't seem to have a picture of the new quarter after it was welded in place. We must have been too tired after all this work...

Now we'll take a look at the trunk pan, which had to be removed in it's entirety. This took a long time and wasn't much fun, at least not in my opinion. But I'm not really a body-shop kind of guy like my brother is. I'm more the mechanic kind of guy, which is the stage we're at with the car now, by the way. Woohoo!! This took the longest, and accordingly, it gets the most space on this page, including more pictures.

As you can see, this was a rather extensive part of the project. There was a lot of grumbling on my part, but I stuck it out to get it done, with my brother offering encouraging words, answers to my questions, and a helping hand. Couldn't have (read wouldn't have) done it without him! For the record, I did most of the metal removal, and my brother did most of the welding. We make a good team.

It was somewhere in the middle of this work that we decided to go halves on the car, for everything. We had already decided to go "Race" with the restoration before we got started. We both drive it, wrench on it, restore it, etc., so I sold him half interest in the car and we are now partners. This was definitely a good thing in the long run, as I would have had difficulty coming up with all the money we put into this project on my own. It has been a lot of fun and is a great way for us to spend some time hanging out, doing something we like. And the Adreneline rush is second to none!!

And now the New Duster!

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