So, rewind to about October of 2013. A friend of mine has a bad habit of browsing Craigslist and finding things for me to buy. He finds a '99 Flame Red RC R/T with some engine work, full Hotchkis, and one major selling point; a T56 swap already done. And, it's only about 3 hours away from me.
Naturally, being a Dakota R/T fanatic for a majority of my life thus far, I have to contact the seller. When I first started texting him back in October 2013, the truck had an issue where the clutch didn't work properly so I would have to trailer it home, and he wanted $7500 for it. I believe the master cylinder for the clutch ended up being the culprit. Meh, can't really swing that price right now anyway for something I don't really need, and that needs work to even be driveable. We go back and forth for literally months and he keeps dropping his price, keeps trying to throw in stuff, etc. Still a "no" on my end.
May 2014 rolls around. He texts me and says clutch is fixed, truck has current registration, and he had just bought a new truck so he needed the R/T gone. He said show up with $5k and drive it home. So the following weekend, I did just that.
Here it is a day or two after I got it home:
So let's talk about the stuff that either sucked or was just plain wrong with it when I first got it...
- Clutch fan had been removed and replaced it with two absolutely useless 12" electric fans that pulled a total of about 47cfm combined. It would consistently get hot even just cruising around town.
- It had Edelbrock shorty headers that looked to have had various cracks welded up two to three different times.
- It had a vibration from about 2200-3000 rpm. Claimed it was the trans rubbing on the cab and had wedged some dense foam between the trans and the cab. Brian Whiteley (BLKDAK) contacted me and let me know it was because he had put the T56 in with a 318 flywheel, obviously a no-go on an externally-balanced 360.
- It had no rear bumper or roll pan on it. Not a big deal, just looked unfinished.
- The Bilstein shocks in the rear had been replaced with air shocks. Needless to say, I put the Bilsteins back in it.
- Stickers galore. Those are all gone now.
- "Racing" seats that didn't move in their tracks because they weren't permanently mounted yet. This is a problem for me as I'm 5'6" and need my seats to move. Luckily, the truck came with the factory seats, so those went back in almost immediately.
- It had some monster truck looking all-terrain tires on it, as you can see in the above picture. I had recently gotten rid of my beater '96 Dakota that I had a set of R/T wheels on, so I took the 255/50 Riken Raptors off of that and put those on this truck.
- It had some cheap junk slotted/drilled rotors on it that were shot.
- It was missing about half the valve cover bolts, the gaskets were crap, and the few bolts that were left in the VCs weren't even tight.
- Front wheel bearings were noisy.
Fortunately, it wasn't all bad. Here are some good things about the truck:
- Front end had all recently been gone through with Moog parts
- I may be in Minnesota, but this is a clean truck. I don't believe it ever got driven in the winter.
- Did I mention it's T56 swapped? Plus it has a '70 B-body Pistol Grip shifter for extra cool factor.
- 52mm F&B
- 2bbl M1
- Mopar aluminum heads (P4532900, basically Small Port Commando heads machined for Magnum application from what I've read)
- Comp cam (CRS264HR-12). Baby cam. I believe this is also known as the 210x.
- Full Hotchkis TVS
- Nice fiberglass tonneau cover. Fibernetics Aerosport.
Here's a pic of it from right after I washed it for storage last winter:
And a pic of what could be considered the best part of the truck: