I thought I'd start a build thread for my ongoing 58 Sweptside build. I found this truck for sale a little over a year ago at a classic car dealership in Washington state. I didn't have the funds to buy it but I did have a 1967 Plymouth GTX that I had owned for a few years and was able to strike up a trade for the truck. The GTX was nice but never really was my kind of car as I am mostly drawn to anything 50's MoPar and when I saw a truck with fins I had to have it. There were 975 Sweptsides produced in 58 and supposedly less than 60 still around. This particular truck has the single headlights instead of the normal quad headlight set up. I've read that in some states quad headlights were illegal. The truck had been somewhat gone through by a shop but was in no means restored. It didn't have the original drivetrain so I thought it would be perfect for one of the early hemis I had lying around and have always wanted to build. When I got it, it had a 318 Poly, an A833OD four speed, and a 3.00:1 open 9" Ford. The 318 ran good but had a pretty good front main seal leak and the rear end leaked even worse. I know the 9" Ford is a strong rear end but being strictly a Mopar man I rebuilt an 8.75" with a 3.55:1 Sure Grip third member for the truck. I've also went through and rebuilt another A833OD transmission I had, and also machined out the case to press steel bushings in for the countershaft.
I just recently got my 331 fired up for the first time and after some very helpful advice from some HAMB members, got my leaks fixed and it's running great now. I got the engine about ten years ago. It was sitting outside in a field in Alabama with no intake. Needless to say it was in very rough condition. This was the worst chamber. I really wanted to try to save the heads as they were the famous triple nickel heads and checked good for no cracks. A few years later I was going to trade school to be a machinist and made use of the CNC machines we trained on. Another student's dad had a machine shop with a CMM machine and he took a reading of where each combustion chamber was and wrote a program for me to clean up the chambers. I also cut a pocket for a valve seat insert for the intake valve on the chamber that was so rotten.
I ended up machining .030" out of the chambers. There was still some pitting in some but this was as far as I was comfortable going. I took the same amount off the head surface to bring it back to normal compression. I polished out the chambers and also ran the larger 392 stainless valves to help make up for the rotten intake valve seats. I ported and polished the heads but not too much as nature had already done alot of the work. I didn't take any pictures of that except a few when I was fixing my leaking manifold studs after the first run. I'm running a set of 10:1 Ross pistons and an Isky B777 grind solid cam. I was actually looking for a cam with a duration in the low 230's, and was told this cam was, but it's actually 240 but I decided to run it anyway. It doesn't have much vacuum at idle but it does sound good. About the only thing I wasn't able to run performance wise was headers. It was just too tight in the frame but I think it'll flow just fine for my application with stock manifolds. Here's a few pictures from when I was mocking it up in the truck. Now that I've got it running good it's time to finish welding in the engine bay and get it back in there and everything hooked back up.
Those are just about the coolest trucks ever built...but Mopar really dropped the ball on that tailgate .
Haha yeah it doesn't really match up with the whole finned look of the back. They might should have looked at that some more while it was in the designing stages!
Subscribed! Off the hook in the cool department and you've got some mad skills in the rescuing heads department!
Thank you! I took them to my local machine shop when I first tore it down to see what they could do for them and they wouldn't touch em so I figured I had nothing to lose. As long as it holds the valve seat inserts I put in I'll be happy. One thing I learned after working around some very experienced moldmakers after I got out of vocational school was I didn't know anything when I was doing this! On the matter of the tailgate I wonder since the bedsides are just from a station wagon what it would have looked like if they had used the door off of one too?
By golly you done hit the jackpot ( won the lottery that is, struck gold). I like where this is going love, love,love it.
Glad to see you got the oil leak worked out. I was following along and haven’t had time to check back. Beautiful job on the crusty heads. I have the same pair that are in the same condition. @trwaters here has made a program to do the same thing. I may send them of to him if he’s still doing. And will be following this build.
I've always considered these trucks Dodges' version of Chevrolets Cameo. Neat truck, nice work so far.
In picture two showing the tail gate, is that the tail gate that was built with the truck from factory? If so someone in the design department was sleeping during tail gate hour!
Yes it’s the original tailgate. The trucks were put together quite quickly, it’s the original stepside box minus fenders with station wagon quarters tacked on the outside.
From what I've read that's exactly how they came to be. They were trying to compete with the Cameo and also the Ranchero came out in '57 so they slapped some two door station wagon panels for bedsides and let it run. They were never very popular so they didn't made many of them in any of the years and quit in '59. I forgot to mention that when the truck was headed from Washington state to Tennessee the same dealership had sold a '57 Sweptside that was headed for Florida I believe, so they rode all that way on the same hauler. The GTX I traded him made its way up to Washington, was for sale for a very short time, and was actually bought by someone in Tennessee so it made that trip all the way back down!
Here's a video of the engine running. Just before I started it today I stripped a worm clamp on the hose at the water pump trying to stop a small leak and ended up losing about a gallon of coolant before I could find another one to stop it. Somehow that amount of liquid spread out across Hell's half acre but once I got it cleaned up I took a short video.
Y'all try to unsee that monstrosity of a distributor. I know it'd look a lot better with this Magspark instead but with electronics being where I always run in to trouble I couldn't resist the hot spark and internal coil. In all seriousness though, I understand the purpose of this forum and that certain things of this build don't fit in to the traditional style of hot rodding so if anything needs to be removed I totally understand.
Thank you! I kind of went overboard with making the stand look nice. I would probably be closer to having it in the actual truck if I'd have just started it!
Great looking engine,,,,,sounds really good . I’m assuming the oil pressure gauge was not hooked up at all ? Only drawback I saw was the HEI distributor,,,,,,Mopar made electronic distributors as well ,,,,LoL . Tommy
I've got a manual pressure gauge screwed right in to the block. Haven't tried screwing in the sending unit for the electronic gauge yet to see how close it is. Like I said earlier the cam has a little more duration than what I was looking for so it has pretty low vacuum at idle but picks up pretty quick right off idle. Right now I've got it set at 30 degrees total advance which put me at about 11 degrees initial.
The Jalopy Journal
