Mr B Body
Well-Known Member
I bought a new toy a few months back and now it's time to finally share it with you. My brother found a racingjunk ad for the 73 Duster that was built by Dick Landy for the three way shootout with Chebbie and Furd using each of the big three's crate engine. Of course the Duster won the shootout. (all covered in a 1992 Hot Rod article. Then in 2002 Landy sold the car to Gary & Tony Hickman so they could race the car in CA, AZ and NV. In 2004 the 360 crate engine received a shot of Landy steroids and made over 500 HP (2004 HR article). After they put the engine back in (with many upgrades to all of the systems) the car ran high 10's until a valve spring retainer broke and ended up in the oil pan. The valve did not drop thankfully (only about 1/3 of the retainer came off), but the car was put back in the trailer where it set until Mopars at the Strip in 2013 where it finally made another appearance. There is made a photo op for Mopar Action (Dec 2013 article). So I ended up buying the car and drove out to pick it up (I ended up with the Haulmark trailer it was in too.) So I brought it back to IN and took the engine out to see how bad it was. The damage was very minimal, so we started by trying to take the retainers and springs off. The springs bent our compressor (not a junk one, we had used this to put .600" lift springs on my brother's big block), so after we bent the compressor back into shape and carefully adjusted it we got the springs off. As soon as we got the first spring off, we new we had a real problem. The springs were very tall (I mean like way too tall for a stock length valve Mopar. So we started checking the spring and found out "someone" had put big block Chebbie spring on it (1.850" installed height vs 1.650" height on the 360). The Crane solid roller cam in the engine we needed 250 pound of seat force and 500 pounds over the nose force, combine that with the short height, there is only one set of springs that would work (not one manufacturer, one spring) which happened to be made by Comp Cams). We shimmed the springs for proper height, put in new retainers, keepers and put it all back together after a thorough cleaning. We rebuilt the carb and rejetted it for IN (800ft elev vs 5000ft in NV). The engine fired on the first turn and after we set timing, it ran very well. I made a few passes at the last open day at the track with the best being 7.14 @ 99MPH (1/8 mile), so I barely missed my first 10 second pass. Pictures to follow shortly.
