Kind of a slow week on the old Charger but I got some more done.
About wrapped up the entire brake system now. Went ahead and rebuilt the back brakes and did the parking brake cables. Now I just need to pull the master, bleed it and then bleed the entire system and we should have brakes.
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The back half of the car is pretty much done.
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I ran the new wiring out to the back but can't finish until I find a usable tail panel. I could have all that done in a day or 2 when/if I find one. Need to wire up a relay for the electric fuel pump and run that too but that's easy.
I went out to visit my Dad last weekend. He's over 70 now. When I was a kid my old man was, like so many people in the late 1970's, big into CB radios. He had some really cool setups. I don't know very much about them and he doesn't really talk about his hell raising days but the rest of the family has told me plenty of stories about him causing trouble with his over powered home base unit system. I just remember the thing always sounded so much more badass than anyone else's. He'd talk right over you. He'd key up, it'd ping real loud. He ran linears on all his stuff and so his system was over powered as hell and I'm sure the FCC would've rung his neck but he liked to get people riled up. It was like a hobby. When he wasn't home I'd get on there and mess around, people always noticed you that's for sure LOL. My uncle said he could key up and burn up other peoples units but I don't know how true that one is. I do know he had a massive antenna out back and lightning struck the house once. About scared my Ma to death.
Anyway I knew he had kept a lot of his old CB stuff so I asked him if he still had any of the CB's he ran in his cars. He pointed to an old dusty box and I looked in there and sure enough he had a few. I've never had a CB but again, always thought they were cool so I asked him if I could have one to run in the Charger. He shambled over and looked in the box. He has a really bad *** Cobra somewhere that's tricked out but we couldn't locate it. Instead he pulled this one out.
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This one is about as old as I am. Probably from 77-8. It's pretty trick too. Originally a 23 channel from what I understand but he took it to his CB guy who modified it to a 40 channel. Not only that but you flip a switch, 40 more channels. I think they call it sideband. He said his buddies had the same mods in their cars CB's so they could get on frequencies no one else was on and they'd talk with less chance of anyone listening in. They might have been involved with some stuff that no one needed to know about. I mean one of my 1st clear memories was the SWAT team kicking in our front door, must have been '83, and hauling him in for something that was in his safe but we don't talk about that. We moved shortly after and he calmed down a bit.
So anyway he told me to take it and see if I could get it to work. It was looking pretty rough as you see there. I opened the case and yup... Dirt dobbers nests. I sat there and carefully removed the hunks of old dried mud out of the circuitry. Then I dumped all the bug pieces that the dobbers had left behind out and carefully cleaned all the boards inside. It was easy to see this thing had been seriously modified. No longer had an internal speaker, another circuit board had taken its place. Anyway I cleaned the innards up as best I could and stripped the case down to bare metal to get rid of the surface rust, then I repainted it. The mic he gave me was not going to work. Some of the interior plastic had dried and split leaving little capacitors loose. So I ordered a new mic, a new fuse holder, an external speaker, a coax with a 90 degree mount and a 4' whip antenna for it.
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I put it back together and timidly hooked it up to power halfway expecting a sizzle and poof reaction from it but it lit right up and that old familiar crackling sound came from the external speaker. I don't have the antenna yet and from what I've learned you have to tune your antenna right or you'll screw up the radio but I keyed it once to make sure it was actually working and it was. I was so stoked. I called the old man and he was too. The antenna will be here next week and the old guy said he'd come over and show me what to do to get it tuned correctly and we'll have to figure out what frequencies it's on with another gadget he has.
My Dad never really was into cars like I am. He always liked a fancy new car. When I was younger he could never understood why I would want an old POS old car that "wasn't that good when it was new" and then spend hundreds of hours working on it. His Dad died young at 27 in a 57 Dodge so my Dad always hated Dodge. Over the years he's accepted my choices though and has learned to appreciate what we do. Probably more so just the work it takes. Anyway I thought this was a cool way to incorporate a little bit of my old man into my car. I think it'll be a real neat "conversation piece" if you will.
