tech

No, I tend to acquire drivers-cars I can commute in and, ostensibly, fix up as time and finances allow. Such cars usually come with worn-out original suspensions and sub par drum brakes unfit for Southern California freeways. Thus, rebuilding the suspension and updating the brakes is more or less necessary for regular road duty. Also, nuts-and-bolts chassis work is something I can do myself rather than paying someone else. Besides, I learned long ago that even a stock car with cool wheels and tires and a nice stance will turn heads, so at least I'll have that going for me even if other custom plans take time to materialize.

Which brings us to the project at hand. My latest acquisition is a '64 Plymouth Valiant convertible-admittedly not the most conventional project choice, but that's one reason I dig it. Additionally, I think early '60s compacts like this have a lot going for them. They remain some of the most affordable '60s cars around, have distinctive styling, and hold a lot of potential as practical daily drivers. Many also share a mechanical lineage with more common musclecars and ponycars of the era, making upgrade parts easier to find.

My Valiant, for instance, is part of the Mopar A-body platform, which includes Darts, pre-'70 Barracudas, Dusters, and the like. Chassis on these cars remained little changed from 1960 through the mid-'70s, so there's a lot of parts interchangeability and, as it turns out, several available aftermarket disc brake conversions. The Master Power Brakes kit I selected is basically the same as the common practice of adapting discs from a '73-and-later A-body vehicle (Duster, Dart, etc.), except it uses all-new components put together in one convenient package. This includes new spindles, upper control arms, steering arms, and caliper brackets. The upper control arms came with new bushings and ball joints installed, and the steering arms also had new lower ball joints, which minimized the number of parts I had to buy to complete the suspension rebuild. Naturally, the kit included new brake components like rotors, calipers, and wheel bearings, but I was impressed with all the supplied "little" pieces: hoses, fittings, dust shields, hardware, and so forth. Manual and power master cylinders are both available; I went with the manual setup.

Like any good project, this one snowballed a little. It only made sense to replace the remaining wearable parts (tie-rod ends and lower control arm bushings) while the suspension was apart. I also opted to replace the original torsion bars with stiffer V-8-spec bars from Mopar Performance. In the rear, the sagging original leaf springs were replaced with new de-arched versions from Eaton Detroit Spring, which were designed for a 3-inch lower stance than stock. To help all these new parts work as well as they could, I got a full set of adjustable Stocker Star performance shocks from QA1 Motorsports.

An added benefit of the brake kit was that it converted the front wheel bolt pattern from the stock 5x4-inch to the more common 5x4.5-inch arrangement, thereby increasing wheel selection and allowing me to get rid of the puny stock 13-inch rollers. I had an old set of 14x6-inch chrome reverse wheels sitting around that seemed like perfect replacements. The deep-dish wheels turned out to be too tight of a fit for the Valiant, but fortunately Wheel Smith was able to cut out the centers and weld them into new hoops for a better fit. So I ended up with 14x5- and 14x6-inch, non-reversed chrome wheels, which I had wrapped in 185/75 and 205/75 skinny whitewall BFGoodrich radials for '60s flavor.

As you'll see, installation was a pretty straightforward remove-and-replace process with no real surprises. Once I get the suspension aligned and dialed in, my plan is to do 60-0-mph brake testing and some handling evaluations to assess the improvements. We'll be sharing those results with you on the Custom Rodder Web site, www.customrodder.com, so be sure to log on and check 'em out.