Crossing over, the 65 rebuild.

[NEWFISHER]

I'm going to try and stick with a build thread for the first time in my interwebs life. Cudos to those who have the time to post all of your builds, tech info and general help. Without peeps like you, this forum andothers just wouldn't exist and us non techy, don't own a camera, hate photopail click and post from our dumb phone type guys would watch a heck of a lot more tv. Thank you

Back to our regularly scheduled thread.

This is my first post on the 60-66 forum ( go easy ) I'm crossing over from the 47-54 lifestyle. A little background and then ill spring my plan on you to get some much needed feedback from you square bodied guru's.

I know how we all love pics, so I will try to take them, load them, drop them in the bucket and paste them here. I have been a car guy al of my life, no $h!* right we all are. Been a slave to a GM dealer or Harley dealership for 26 years. I have owned mostly chevys, restored chevys been cut by chevys and occaisionally even sleep in a chevy. My current daily driver is this 50 burb that I trailered home and overhauled in a year. Runs a built 250 inliner, 700r4 , 12 bolt 373 combo and gets 19 mpg on my 75 mile commute every day.
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My wife had always wanted a Dart Swinger. Her besty in high school drove one and was taken by cancer before she graduated. We searched over a year, driving the dually/camper/car trailer combo through 4 states on the weekends loking for the right car. A clean one owner 40,000mile survivor that I immediately converted to disc, huge sway bars, suspension, elctronic ignition and some other light duty upgrades.
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She hasn't driven it in the last 2 years and I'm just not a Dodge guy, so its taking up real esate in the garage. I've been lurking over here and watching the builds, purchases etc and have been bitten by the 60-66 bug. I like the 65s for some reason and with a really convincing discussion with my wife about how cute she would look driving an older truck, she can haul the dogs to the park in the bed, they get the same fuel mileage and cost the same to insure etc. I had her warming up to selling the Dart and me looking for a truck. Well, after what seemed like months I found a truck. As I get older I remeber the primered $1000 deals that turned into me getting a night job to pay to restore them and taking several years to finish. I respect those who still do this, but I've taken a different approach this time. Buy a nice one and tear it down to make it how I want without the grease, the rust and the broken bolts.
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I leave on a 10 hour adventure to pick it up sight unseen other than a brief description, these pics and a deposit. I will document the journey and the teardown/resurection here as it unfolds.

My first plan is to assess its driveability , repair what's needed for a 10 hour drive home and jump online at fuel and meal breaks to order things as I think of them. Its a 6 lug truck with 5 spoke torque thrusts and I'm thinking 17 or 18 steelies, small caps, thin whites ,bag it , custom cab trim with side mouldings an off white insert and two tone upper cab. Do an instrument cluster overhaul with the air gauge tach combo, a tilt column(I'm 6'4" 250) and a redo of the interior. He says it clean and nice, but I'm imagining 80s 90s cloth, carpet and something funky, but again I have only seen these 3 pics.

Thanks for following along and please help me with some feedback on this truck. I could walk you through a straight axle drop, 700 swap and the right combo to make a 250 inliner run like a scalded dog, but am starting to get confused with crossmember mods/choices, air systems and who to go with etc. So far I'm fortunate to start of with a clean rust free slate that has a nice 350/700r4 combo in it and other than a body off chassis clean and scalpel, its mostly cosmetic cool stuff to throw pay checks and residual Dart money at. The trip to get it with limited knowledge , a few pics and a one way ride should be intersting...stay tuned
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