I have had quite a long history with the car going back over 15 years. When I first found the dart, it was rusting away in a field in Mud Lake Idaho. I was 15 years old at the time and had always been into cars even though I had never owned one myself. I talked to the farmer that had it sitting there, and he told me he would sell it for $2K. I had no idea what cars were worth at the time, so I agreed and used all the money I had saved up from landscaping work to buy it. It took a while to get it started and when I drove it home it was barely running, not firing on several cylinders of its 225 CI Slant Six motor, lights didn’t work, brakes didn’t have any bite, and I could almost turn the steering wheel one full revolution before the car changed direction even slightly. But I was instantly in love with it.
Years went by and I did what I could to work on it here and there through high school. I paid to have the motor rebuilt, new tires, brakes, etc. It wasn’t until I was about 24 years old and living in Salt Lake City Utah that I got serious about it. I had been using it as my daily driver and it BARELY handled the freeway speed, parts would fall off, RPMS would be maxed out, no AC Etc. That is when I learned I could get a four speed to match up to the slant six. So, I looked on a local classified’s website called KSL for a A833 four speed transmission. Oddly enough, a guy just down the street was selling one. I called him up and we hit it off immediately. He told me he JUST sold the transmission but that he had a 340 CI small block with matching 4 speed transmission that had been sitting in storage for 30+ years. He had planned to put it into an old Jaguar coupe back in the day but never got around to finishing the project and it had sat under the hood of the Jag ever since. This man was in his mid-seventies and went by the nickname of “Tiny”. He was probably 6′ 9” tall and a mountain of a man, but the smallest of all his brothers. Anyways, he told me he would be happy to sell it to me even though I admitted I didn’t have all the money up front and would need to pay him bits at a time. I then asked if he would be able to put the motor in the car for me as that is something I had never done. To this, he told me that his body was getting worn out and he would love the opportunity to teach someone everything he knows about mechanics and offered to rebuild the car with me. I was floored and eagerly jumped on that opportunity.
Over the next years he told me we had to get the car ready for all the additional horsepower and before we could start on the motor, we needed to work on suspension, brakes, etc. So, we dove into swapping all the drum brakes for Wilwood disc brakes front and back. He showed me how to cut the strut rods, thread them and put a sleeve on them so that we could have adjustable toe-in. He taught me how to weld and we fabricated reinforcements for the frame, added thick Hotchkis anti-sway bars front and back, installed a fuel cell, fabricated new leaf spring brackets to relocate them inside the frame, allowing more clearance for wider rear wheels and tires, installed the Auto Meter Gauge Cluster and I finally had a way to view RPMS, Installed thicker torsion bars, Hotchkis shock absorbers, the works… Then, just as we were getting close to finishing the motor, I received a promotion at work which relocated me to St. Paul Minnesota. We attempted to finish the car before the move but fell short with fuel lines, wiring, little odds and ends. So, I loaded the car on the trailer and hauled it to Minnesota. Over the next few years, I was able to get the car running and back on the road, and eventually moved back to Utah, driving the Dart cross country at this point.
Right around this time, Tiny had passed away. He was a legend and a genuinely kind human being that loved teaching all the little tips and tricks of how to make a car go fast and run more efficiently. I’ve never stopped working on the car since then and have since stated teaching my nephews how to weld and begun fabricating new cowls, installing TTI Headers and fabricating a new Z Bar for the transmission, installed a MSD Atomic EFI, Borgeson power steering gear box, etc. Tiny and I never did get around to body work so we the dart is still rusted, dented, and rough around the edges, but mechanically, she runs like a symphony. She feels light and young and runs like a bat out of hell.
