We’ve been having a lot of fun getting our project ’69 Dodge Charger Killer Kong up and rolling. While we’re still quite a ways away from firing up the big Mopar and taking it to the streets, we’re really excited to see this B-Body come together in a way that’ll add up to one seriously serious machine.
What has remained the central focus to ‘Kong has been its duplicability; that with a little bit of elbow grease and willingness to put in the time, that a true blue performance Mopar can be built for much less money than what most magazines want you believe.
Last week, we showed you how a bulletproof Dana 60 can be found, cleaned up and rebuilt for a fraction of the cost of a new Ford 9-inch (which has no place in a Mopar, anyways) or one of those newfangled Dana housings.
Thanks to friend-of-a-friend parting out a junk Ford F-350 utility truck and our pals over at Currie Enterprises, we took what was once a really heavy boat anchor and turned it into a rear end worthy of nearly 1,000 horsepower!
While we know the numbers-matching guys will sneer at us using a truck housing in a ’69 Charger, note that this Mopar wasn’t a HEMI car or equipped with a Dana 60 from the beginning, heck, it wasn’t even an R/T. But hey, it’s a clean Charger and worthy of a second lease on life, right? That’s what we thought too.
Since we’re running as much meat we can cram into the factory wheelwells as possible without relocating the rear springs or mini-tubbing, we measured our new Dana to match the factory specs.
And since we’re keeping our build on the cheap, we forewent the pricey four-caliper disc brake kit that sales guys and slick advertising guys would want you to believe that you simply can’t live without, and opted for a cleaned-up set of 11-inch drums. Trust us, they’ll work fine.
Give Her The Ol’ Heave Ho!
Finally having a Saturday free of “honey-dos” and family obligations, we were open to pushing the bronze B-Body out into the daylight and lift it up on jack stands in the driveway. Chocking up the front wheels, we got the Dodge up on four 3-ton stands, letting the rear suspension hang on its own. With our trusty impact, we pulled the wheels and loosened up the U-bolts from the factory 8 3/4 rear.
Since ‘Kong’s original 8 3/4 was dry, we dropped the center housing after sliding the axles out just enough to not interfere. Pulling out the empty housing was made all the more easier with this key step.
With only the factory 9-inch drums attached (removing them really wasn’t necessary and just a bit time consuming), the lightweight rear end was quickly lifted up and out of the leaf spring perches.
Unfortunately, heaving the big Dana 60 in the 8 3/4’s place would require a lot more effort. To accommodate a ring gear a full inch larger than the 8.75-inch gear in the 8 3/4 (hence the numerical name), the Dana 60 is cast larger and thicker than the impish 8 3/4.
The Dana 60 is such a superior piece of equipment that even Ford – maker of the quote-unquote “world famous” 9-inch – used the Dana 60 in their trucks for nearly half a century.
To weasel the big Dana into the Dodge, we slid it length-wise under the body on a Craftsman floorjack, using its dual axis to allow us to lift it up and rotate it enough to allow one drum to be hefted over a leaf spring at a time.
Currently, our ideal rear suspension setup isn’t complete; right now, we’re running official Mopar Performance Super Stock 6- and 5-pack rear springs with a pair of 30×9 slicks with Mopar Performance gas shocks, but we’re going to be needing a pair of Cal-Trac bars to keep our springs from wadding up under a hard load.
Cal-Tracs (and slapper bars, for that matter) are great for rear setups like this, particularly as we’re not running a pinion snubber. The added rigidity will keep our Dana’s pinion from twisting up into the floorboards while accelerating while keeping those big rubbers planted. That, and they just look like they mean business.
With the Currie-built Dana 60 finally bolted in place, all we needed to do was hook up our parking brake cables and run our rear brake lines – all stuff we’ll show you later when we do the front brakes.
Oh, and one more tip: rear gear oil is some of the nastiest stuff you’ll run in your car. Make sure you get the right funnel so you don’t spill that smelly crap on your garage floor, driveway or down your arms. It’s a pain to get off and the smell will remind you of the deck of a fishing trawler for days to come.
Well, Lookie What We’ve Got Here!
Bananas. That’s all we can think when looking at what our once-worn out and lazy 727 Torqueflite. Rebuilt from the inside out with new TCI internals, we’ve been champing at the bit to get this new gearbox installed. Of course, we don’t have a motor to actually churn this reverse-manual shifted automatic just yet, but hey, scheduling wasn’t ever our strong suit.
While we’re going to be featuring a monster-sized technical article on building the baddest Torqueflite for the street, we can hint at the list of amazing go-fast goodies that we crammed in our 727:
Red Eagle clutches, heat-treated kolene steels, a beautifully-machined bolt-in rear sprag assembly, a full manual reverse shift pattern valve body, red flex-style high performance intermediate band with a Kevlar high performance band, a massive finned two-extra-quart-capacity deep aluminum pan, and a 4.2 ratio band apply lever.
We’ve still got the TCI converter to chat you up about as well as all the prep we put into the aluminum case. And to think, this was slogging along in a motorhome for most of its life! It’s like what we were saying about the Dana 60, the parts are out there, it just takes getting off your duff and looking around.