I recently started rebuilding a motor for my 71 Dodge Dart Swinger. The car currently has Slant Six, that while running fine leaves a lot to be desired in terms of power. The idea with this build was to freshen up a 440 I had sitting around. I bought the motor out of a 78 Dodge pick-up and decided to drop it in my Dart. I’m planning on making this a regular blog post moving forward as I continue to work on this motor and restore the car.
Step 1: Come up with a plan.
The hardest thing for me is to come up with a plan and not get in over my head (or more precisely my wallet). When I first started looking at doing this build I was looking at doing a 545 cubic inch stroker motor, that probably could have powered my car down the drag strip in 8 seconds. The biggest problem with that motor is it wouldn’t have been very street-able, but I did not want a race car. I want to be able to go out and drive this car to work, drive it daily and even in the dead of winter. So I began to scale back my plans…
Rather than building a stroker motor that would have required me to take a costly trip the machine shop I decided to just change a couple of key parts and hopefully make this motor a lot of fun. I invested the majority of my funding in what I believe is the most part of any motor, the cylinder heads. I ordered a set of TrickFlows new 440 cylinder heads. These heads are supposed to out flow all other cylinder heads that maintain standard intake and exhaust ports.
The next thing I upgraded was the camshaft. I went with a Hughes Whiplash camshaft. This camshaft is designed to help low compression motors like mine build cylinder pressure. Based on my calculations I should be around 8.77:1 CR with aluminum heads. Just to give everyone an idea of just how low of a compression I will be running I could easily run 87 octane!
Be sure to come back often as I will continue to update this build as I move through this process.
