Restoration Exasperation: the '70 SFGT basket case... and an S23

no idea as to their sources ect..is just info l ran across in my wanderins
...have never seen a S-23 no. other than yers now so have no idea as to the real number...thoughts most welcome as usual...imagine this was put together by someone that didn't realy know the correct numbers per chance.
for me l have no idea as to S-23 numbers but wouldn't mind knowin
 
There's more to reproducing a fender tag tha just plopping numbers on a sheet of metal. What was coded, when it was coded and even where it was coded on the tag changed during the model year. What may be correct for one plant in August may be totally different at the same plant in May.

Tag geeks, like Carsten ;), can spot phoney tags right away. Bad tags raise questions as to the legimacy of the car as well as the quality of the restoration.

If you do not know tag details, don't guess! It's better to have no tag than a bad tag. People complain about a $30 part being "wrong" but think nothing of spending $100s of dollars for a bad tag. I don't understand this.....
 
Did you post any pics of your S/23 yet 70GTbasketcase?

Dave


Well... since you asked... I was planning to do that because the mission to restore ONE 1970 SFGT basket case accidentally became a tale of TWO FURIES. Hence the title to this thread, a SFGT and an S23. So it is now -drum roll please-


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We now back track from where the story is... summer of 2009... to January when I took delivery of the GT and realized I was going to need another car. The search was on for a 70 fast back fury, TX9 interior with buckets and console in usable condition that didn't have a concourse car price tag. I soon came across this ad on the craigs list

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An S23, eh? Well, its exactly what I'm looking for but too pricey so I passed.​

2 months later it was back on the Craigs list; And then again 2 months later in June. At that point I was thinking whoever it is should be a "motivated" seller by now. I made a call -no answer-left a message. No call back. I made a call -left another message. No call back. Its been a week now.

It dawned on me: what if its some dopey kid that has the car? I sent a text message to the number and got a reply from “Bo”. He was a young guy, maybe 20-25 –it was his car but it used to be his dads car and “dad” could answer all the questions about it.

I ended up dealing with “dad” for the rest of the transaction. The car belonged to his dad, then him (Bob), then he gave it to his son (Bo)… who has a Camaro now and doesn’t want the Fury anymore. The original 383 was blown years ago and replaced by a mid 70’s 440.

The car itself had undergone a restoration 10 years prior. A/C didn’t work anymore, and neither did the AM/8 track. The car looked great in the pictures… but I had a feeling it would be a “10 footer” in real life.

It had some issues with a rough running engine and a faulty fuel pump but Bob said it was driveable for moving it around under its own power. He guaranteed floor pans and trunk were solid. I bargained down to just over half the original price... which was ultimately generous by a good thousand bucks but spending the money on travel expenses to eyeball the car and pay less would have simply made it a break even proposition.

Money changed hands, transport was arranged and 3 weeks after I bought it, it arrived by car carrier at around 7:30 PM on a mild July evening. No I didn't take any pics of its arrival unfortunately.

A Grizzled OTR trucker unloaded the car to the street casting a wary eye in my direction as he muttered something about “dumbass New Yorker never learns”.

Yeh yeh, it from Georgia, and when i fix it the south will rise again, so just unload it to the curb already smartypants.

I'm already thinking about where to get the next car -the donor... but suddenly a womans voice in my head...
"Where's my engagement ring Mr. big spender??"
"You want rings?? Take your pick: TRW, Federal Mogul, Hastings..."
"you're NOT funny"

Sheesh, One more southern car and my GF is going to succeed from our union!
Yeh I sure will miss her, AHEMM... But I digress...

So its the middle of July -The spectacle had brought out all the nosey nates to see what all the big-rig noise was about. When the land yacht slowly rolled off the platform and hit the street there was an applause from the gathered gentry as if they'd witnessed a ship launching. I paid the driver the remainder of the transport fee and he went on his merry way.

The car was delivered to the same address as the GT -my friend Richy's house. He had the yard space I didn't. Richy's sister was there at the time -she looked at the car and said "Oh Dave, you're not really going to take this apart to fix the other one are you? its so nice!"

Oh cr@#p, she's right. It is too nice. So here are some pics of what got delivered-
These pics are from later in the year, around october 2009.

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That mid 70's 440 in the S23 had a thermoquad carb on it which didn't fit into an original factory dual snorkel unit from 1970, It was just for show that I plopped on a dual snork that I'd bought which turned out to be for a B-body engine.

It was a nice car... but it had A LOT of little problems that added up to one BIG head ache.
 
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So, Richy's back yard was a jungle that I had to clear -and that took a bit of time to do being a crew of one. I moved the car to the back yard and began a review of the problems with the car. The one bright spot being I actually had a car with a G@#dammd fender tag. The FCBO membership should be relieved as well given all the apoplexy I caused over proposing the fabrication of a replacement fender tag for the GT.
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The decode showed it was indeed an S23, and it still had the correct features listed on the tag. I think thats an October 1 birthday code; and That interior code was hit by something and the second digit cant be made out but the interior is clearly an "H6XA".
First thing I found -and it really annoyed the living s#!t outta me- was the big deal restoration it got many years ago included changing all the factory bolts for ACE hardware store nuts an bolts
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I found myself sayin "WTF??!!" a lot!

meanwhile, under the hood...
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Seems like the kid yanked out the vacuum ball.... and all the vacuum lines that went with it. You can see the hot water valve is gone too; We're all heat all the time now.
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No more receiver-drier, or A/C lines either. A bare compressor sat on the engine serving as nothing more than a belt tensioner. Even the Condenser was missing from the front. Jeeeze kid, couldn't you have sprung a couple of bucks to fix the friggen A/C instead of just ripping it all out???

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While we're at it, lets loose that pesky hood to radiator seal... and the cowl seal was gone as well. Nice resto work boys.

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Hood mounted signal lights were history along with the under-hood insulation.


I noticed one of the high beam lights had leakage current making the filament glow when the low-beams-only were on. And having no experience with hideaway headlights, I'm still pretty sure they're NOT supposed to snap open with a hard clunk when I turn on the headlights.

The A-arm “dust covers” were also gone, along with the splash seals everywhere else on the car!

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Oh an how about that brilliant job of attaching the negative ground lead to THE FRIGGEN EXHAUST MANIFOLD!!! I'm a dummy and even I know thats stupid!!


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The rear window chrome trim retainers were corroded away an could no longer hold the trim in place and there was bubbling under the paint by the c pillar.

But it got better. Under that nice vinyl roof, there were warts… everywhere. Great – the roof is going.

You know the door plates the have the "sport fury" script attached? Yeh, well, those were attached to the doors with RTV because the *** hats who restored the car broke the tangs off of them. Oh and the cheap stick-on wood grain they used on the console and the door plates was all puckered and peeling off.

A new headliner was put in... sans the shoulder belts- and all attachment points were completely covered over. Great, restoration by 3 stooges auto shop. I'm guessing the "kid" who had use of the car is the one who removed all the lap belts and left them piled in the back seat.

yeh, the driver side window was replaced at some point in recent time and now it doesn't shut correctly, the glove compartment door wouldn't latch closed anymore, the console door had no hinge and just laid on top of the console, and the rear seat escutcheon plate was missing the emblem.

Ooooh its gonna be a long road to recovery for this beast... BUT...still, the S23 was closer to being fixable then the GT and it seemed dumb to destroy a rare S23 to fix a rare GT, so I began decided to restore the S23 first, then work on the GT. I had to start drawing up another list of parts to buy, parts to restore, …and I still needed a friggen fury donor car!!

This brings the 2009 chapter to and end.
 
So, Richy's back yard was a jungle that I had to clear -and that took a bit of time to do being a crew of one. I moved the car to the back yard and began a review of the problems with the car. The one bright spot being I actually had a car with a G@#dammd fender tag. The FCBO membership should be relieved as well given all the apoplexy I caused over proposing the fabrication of a replacement fender tag for the GT.

The decode showed it was indeed an S23, and it still had the correct features listed on the tag. I think thats an October 1 birthday code; and That interior code was hit by something and the second digit cant be made out but the interior is clearly an "H6XA".
First thing I found -and it really annoyed the living s#!t outta me- was the big deal restoration it got many years ago included changing all the factory bolts for ACE hardware store nuts an bolts
View attachment 113447
I found myself sayin "WTF??!!" a lot!

meanwhile, under the hood...
Seems like the kid yanked out the vacuum ball.... and all the vacuum lines that went with it. You can see the hot water valve is gone too; We're all heat all the time now.
View attachment 113449
No more receiver-drier, or A/C lines either. A bare compressor sat on the engine serving as nothing more than a belt tensioner. Even the Condenser was missing from the front. Jeeeze kid, couldn't you have sprung a couple of bucks to fix the friggen A/C instead of just ripping it all out???

View attachment 113450
While we're at it, lets loose that pesky hood to radiator seal... and the cowl seal was gone as well. Nice resto work boys.

View attachment 113451
Hood mounted signal lights were history along with the under-hood insulation.


I noticed one of the high beam lights had leakage current making the filament glow when the low-beams-only were on. And having no experience with hideaway headlights, I'm still pretty sure they're NOT supposed to snap open with a hard clunk when I turn on the headlights.

The A-arm “dust covers” were also gone, along with the splash seals everywhere else on the car!

Oh an how about that brilliant job of attaching the negative ground lead to THE FRIGGEN EXHAUST MANIFOLD!!! I'm a dummy and even I know thats stupid!!


View attachment 113453
The rear window chrome trim retainers were corroded away an could no longer hold the trim in place and there was bubbling under the paint by the c pillar.

But it got better. Under that nice vinyl roof, there were warts… everywhere. Great – the roof is going.

You know the door plates the have the "sport fury" script attached? Yeh, well, those were attached to the doors with RTV because the *** hats who restored the car broke the tangs off of them. Oh and the cheap stick-on wood grain they used on the console and the door plates was all puckered and peeling off.

A new headliner was put in... sans the shoulder belts- and all attachment points were completely covered over. Great, restoration by 3 stooges auto shop. I'm guessing the "kid" who had use of the car is the one who removed all the lap belts and left them piled in the back seat.

yeh, the driver side window was replaced at some point in recent time and now it doesn't shut correctly, the glove compartment door wouldn't latch closed anymore, the console door had no hinge and just laid on top of the console, and the rear seat escutcheon plate was missing the emblem.

Ooooh its gonna be a long road to recovery for this beast... BUT...still, the S23 was closer to being fixable then the GT and it seemed dumb to destroy a rare S23 to fix a rare GT, so I began decided to restore the S23 first, then work on the GT. I had to start drawing up another list of parts to buy, parts to restore, …and I still needed a friggen fury donor car!!

This brings the 2009 chapter to and end.

I really appreciate your story here. I'm in exsactly the same boat, but my projects are a pair of '66 Chrysler 300s, and I too am looking for another parts car for my parts car. . .
 
Hi,

first of all thanks for sharing your stories.
I like your way of description with a lot of humor, too.

Your S23 story has stopped now in 2009. You wrote you want to do it first.
In case you have not done it: I would leave the S23 pretty much as is. Fix up minor details and get it running and driving well.
So you can drive it while you restore the GT. After the GT is finished you can sell the S23 off as a driver.

It is not everyones cup of tea to drive around with non perfectly restored cars but it can make fun, too. And you have to worry less.
A trip to the local walmart parking lot doesn't give you a bad feeling when leaving it outside alone. Just my 2 cents

Carsten
 
I would have told you in 2009 that i was totally on board with the idea of "driving" the the S23 as Carsten says. Its what I wanted to do. I thought all I needed to do was fix a couple of thing and get it going. I figured I'd button it up for the winter and get started in the spring of 2010.

Meanwhile, Since 2006 i was looking for work as a teacher but was turned away by every district because Bi-Lingual was the hiring criteria for every teaching job. I spent years working as a substitute instead.

A change of life plan was going to be needed if I was going to move the GT and the S23 forward: I needed a REAL job and had to put the cars on hold while threw myself into the search and interview process.

With sheer brute force and a lot of lying I finally landed a “real” job - as an engineering aide-with a salary that was much better than the nickels and dimes I was getting from substitute teacher work and endless hours of math tutoring for kids who couldn’t pass an exam in a car going 55!

I maintained my dedication to the project buying lots of parts while the Snowstorms of 2010 kept me indoors. I made a few nifty scores too…
 
With my new found wealth in 2010 I kept my commitment to the project with a lot of parts buying for both cars... while I could. I picked up some power window switches for the GT
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I got some NOS window cranks for the S23 and some door handles for the GT ...
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Got my hands on an NOS water heater valve for the S23...
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and I even scored a set of H70-15 Polyglas tires off of the Craigs list of all places!!
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Well, they're not nearly as nice as the ones Fury Pursuit got for the V-code fury project but try to find the damn things in ANY condition for under $250 a tire! For $350 takes em all, I'll take it as a win and figure out how to make em pretty.


Unfortunately, the cost of parts to do the job right was eating me up alive and while the pay on my “real” job (as opposed to the joke jobs I had) was better, it was still the low end of the pay scale so the money didn’t go very far before it was gone.


Meanwhile, the steady flow of little blue & white MOPAR boxes delivered to the front door step had my grizzled old step dad –a retired OTR trucker- casting a wary eye in my direction…

“You have a DODGE somewhere I don’t know about??”

“Uh, no, I can honestly say I haven’t got a DODGE.”

“Then What the hell are you doing?”

“ummm… just fixin’ a car.. “

“-is it a money job at least?”

“Would you rather I was sitting in the basement scratching my butt and playing Nintendo all night?”

In retrospect -from my vantage point 7 years later, sitting in the basement scratching myself and playing Nintendo was probably the smarter thing to do.


By the time summer of 2010 came, the head line read:

CAR EATS MAN… ONE paycheck AT A TIME!
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I can comfortably assume that all 4000 plus members of FCBO “been there”.
 
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cough ....cough....still lickin my wounds from the first one while l fight with another....think the first one gave me rabies...l may have a problem.....
 
I really thought I would be able to make a driver out of the S23 that summer but the car had other plans.

The former keeper of the car just ripped out anything that needed fixing until the car was basically an engine and a steering wheel. Everything was either broken or missing. Every time I dug into something that needed fixing, three more red flags raised. The car was not going to work even as a driver: No vacuum lines at all in the car, an with the heater box vents shut, there was no summer defog or winter defrost. With no AC, my black interior car was going to be undriveable in the summer heat as well. All the seat belts were gone, and I couldn't even close the glove compartment door because of the broken latch.

Then there was also the "***-hat" factor... like, why was the engine running badly... why was the throttle sticking? Oh, Heeerezzz whyyy...

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Seriously???
They put this gasket on that carburetor???!!!
I'm a dummy and even I know better than that!!

The car was full of surprises like that and that basically ended my Saturday night cruising dreams for 2010.

The driver idea was a bust so I puttered about in the S23 removing parts I could try to restore myself, and setting aside parts I would have to send out for “professional” restoration work when the money came available.

Richy's back yard was a jungle and kept trying to reclaim my car back to the earth, so a lot of time was spend wearing out my step dads trusty Sears Eagle-1 mower on Richy's back yard. Where's Richy you ask? He lives in Florida with his greedy wife in a 10 room McMansion he bought for pocket change. His lazy sister remained in the old family home here in NY while I -in return for yard space... keep up the place. Ain't nothin free in this life.
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As the summer of 2010 went on, the rusting wheel wells prompted me to work on dressing up the engine compartment.

I Pulled the fender wells and blasted them clean for repaint.

Don’t waste any money buying that stupid portable media blaster, it’s a piece of junk. I could not get it to work reliably: it would cough and spit, and dump a load of media like water from a hose, then blast properly for about 30 seconds, then go dry making it necessary to wobble the tank to get media to settle toward the internal outlet only to start the same BS all over again..

When spraying, it drew down the compressor pressure below 40 psi in about 60 seconds, so I would have to wait 8 minutes for pressure to build, then spray for a Minute, then wait another 8 minutes and so on. The media also erodes the stopper block away so quickly you have to change it out 5 or 6 times before you finish with a single item being stripped. Using the media blaster to strip two big wheel tubs turned something simple into a full 2 days

After that ordeal I felt like doing something simple so
I yanked out the instrument panel bezels, the radio, the vents, and dash pad –which was in a lot better condition than the GT dash pad.
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I put the bezels and vents aside for restoration. The instrument panel was in fair condition but the ***-hat factor left a PRND column shift indicator where the black delete plate belonged... the restoration replaced the original speedo/instrument cluster with a later piece from a column shift fury.

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I did some cleaning and detailing on the exposed chassis of the S23. You can see the car was equipped with hum-drum brakes front and back. A look at that firewall and you can see I had already "detailed" the windshield wiper motor with a silver based gold sheen to give it a gold-zinc finish look.

I pulled the power steering pump from the GT, stripped all the parts clean, and painted it up with epoxy primer and standard ‘underhood black’ paint.
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Mom and step dad went to visit friends in Connecticut for the weekend Soooo I ‘kind-ah’ borrowed the use of mom’s oven on the “down-low” to bake the finish on all the parts I was painting…
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Yeh, umm, mom is not exactly on board with the whole ‘rebuild my 440 engine in the kitchen’ thing. Sheesh, women get so grouchy about intake valves in the sink… whats the big deal, right?
 
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Detail work continued...
I took the guts out of a NAPA power steering pump with the later model reservoir and used it to rebuild the stock '70 Fury GT reservoir unit I repainted...
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The gloves are to keep my greasy monkey paw prints from making smudges all over my nice clean power steering pump.

“you better not be making a mess on your grandmothers antique dining table mister!!”
“Maaa-uuumm! Relaaax!”

I burned up a lot of time cleaning parts and painting them up to look good once everything is back together. Brackets, and pulleys, nuts and bolts, and everything else that can rust under the hood.
DSCN0865fix.jpg



Since the S23 A/C compressor was stripped of all its parts by the former owner, I pulled the GT compressor and cleaned it up with a lot of wire brushing, solvent, soap and water, and more solvent. I gave it a paint job then set it aside to send out for a rebuild.
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I pulled the rusty AC lines from the GT and spent a lot of time stripping them to metal and then spraying them up to return some eye-appeal...
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I may redo the tank line; I should have spent more time detailing it because the rust left some pitting I should have addressed. Haste makes waste and I'm chompin at the bit to get behind the wheel of this thing, ya kno?

The 2010 chapter came to a close with an act of fabrication... I needed an OEM style positive battery cable to replace the cheap-sh!@t piece bought from joe-blow auto. Oh for a mere $230, I can get one that looks like the original.

Do i look like friggen Jay Lenno to you? Keep it!
I went to the Marine supply store and bought a length of red #6 cable. I also went on line and found that OEM style cloth tape like the type on what was left of the GT cable.
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I used the burnt up GT cable as a guide: I used the authentic terminal post end from a cheap A-body cable, matched the terminal ends that go to the starter, wrapped everything with the cloth tape just as the original and for $50 I had my $230 cable.

Details details. Its the work nobody ever takes pictures of but its the work that eats up most of the time. Can't imagine the bazillion hours Mr. Mopar spent just wiring his cop car... or the time Dave spent painting every engine component to make a perfect show car out of the blue v-code he brought to Carlisle. And of course, all the other cars meticulously detailed by the members working on their 300's, their New Yorkers, their Polara's and Sport Fury's etc... hero's every one of you!

I don't think I'll ever be able to match that level of skill and detail... So remember, I'm just a joe trying to give it a go and the tale of two furies is for those who just can't help looking at a car wreck as they pass by... believe me, if you're the squeemish type, you're probably gonna want to turn away from this one! So when you see a "oh no he didn't!!" don't tear your hair out, just remind yourself its for entertainment purposes only.

2011 coming soon: the GT narrowly escapes death!
 
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