griswold00
New Member
Hello Everyone,
I've been lurking here for a while finding all kinds of information that has helped fix up my Son's 66 Polara. I appreciate all the help you have given people in the past as it has helped me immensely.
So my son is currently 15, will be turning 16 in early September, and we've been talking about his first car for about 4 or 5 years now. He decided last summer that he wanted to get a "classic" car and fix it up. Neither of us have done anything more than an oil change at this point in time, but we decide what the heck let's get an old car. There was a local auction in our town a couple months later and we went to look at this 62 dart. Well it was in pretty rough condition, and the brakes seized on the way to the auction block, so we got scared away from that one. However my son had seen a 66 Polara about 3 cars after the dart. Needless to say after bidding, and extended haggling (it didn't meet reserve) we walked away with the Polara. It was a 2 door hardtop with the 2bbl 383 in it.
Since that time we've put in a new fuel pump, filter, Carb (standard 2bbl), replaced the distributor cap, ignition coil, and other misc projects. After the carb we took it to a shop that fixes our "normal" vehicles, and he diagnosed that cylinder 4 was missing. So he recommended a valve job and getting the heads checked. Needless to say taking off cylinder heads was beyond what we expected to be doing as a new wrencher. Well after some encouragement from our shop owner, we went to town. Sure enough one of the heads was cracked, and we luckily found a replacement head on ebay in pretty good shape. We got the engine put back together and it actually fired up right way the first time!
We are now done with all the mechanical issues, we've moved on to interior stuff. We've pulled out the front seats (crappy aftermarket bucket seats), carpet and headliner. We've got to get some new floor pans installed, three point seatbelts, finding a new seat and installing that, then carpet, headliner, radio and we should be good to go!
I just wanted to post this journey to remind everyone that not all of the current GenZ is lost, there are still a handfull of kids who want nothing more than to wrench on cars all weekend.
I've been lurking here for a while finding all kinds of information that has helped fix up my Son's 66 Polara. I appreciate all the help you have given people in the past as it has helped me immensely.
So my son is currently 15, will be turning 16 in early September, and we've been talking about his first car for about 4 or 5 years now. He decided last summer that he wanted to get a "classic" car and fix it up. Neither of us have done anything more than an oil change at this point in time, but we decide what the heck let's get an old car. There was a local auction in our town a couple months later and we went to look at this 62 dart. Well it was in pretty rough condition, and the brakes seized on the way to the auction block, so we got scared away from that one. However my son had seen a 66 Polara about 3 cars after the dart. Needless to say after bidding, and extended haggling (it didn't meet reserve) we walked away with the Polara. It was a 2 door hardtop with the 2bbl 383 in it.
Since that time we've put in a new fuel pump, filter, Carb (standard 2bbl), replaced the distributor cap, ignition coil, and other misc projects. After the carb we took it to a shop that fixes our "normal" vehicles, and he diagnosed that cylinder 4 was missing. So he recommended a valve job and getting the heads checked. Needless to say taking off cylinder heads was beyond what we expected to be doing as a new wrencher. Well after some encouragement from our shop owner, we went to town. Sure enough one of the heads was cracked, and we luckily found a replacement head on ebay in pretty good shape. We got the engine put back together and it actually fired up right way the first time!
We are now done with all the mechanical issues, we've moved on to interior stuff. We've pulled out the front seats (crappy aftermarket bucket seats), carpet and headliner. We've got to get some new floor pans installed, three point seatbelts, finding a new seat and installing that, then carpet, headliner, radio and we should be good to go!
I just wanted to post this journey to remind everyone that not all of the current GenZ is lost, there are still a handfull of kids who want nothing more than to wrench on cars all weekend.