1976 Duster Parts Car

When you need lots of odds and ends and you'd like to find them all in the same place at a good price - nothing beats a good parts car. You get a package deal, it's all (mostly) attached and intact when you drag it home, and you get to dismantle it in your driveway, with your tools, at your leisure. Much better than pulling parts one at a time form the yard - and paying an arm and a leg for each thing you get. Since Jon needed lots of little stuff to convert his Valiant to front discs and do a few other things, we got a parts car. Sure, we had to drive a few hours to find it, but it was a nice day off work and not a bad drive.

On the other hand, I think Jon may be the first car nut to go out and buy a 2 door parts car for his 4 door project car. (Read it, think about it, shake your head in confusion...) Most people do the opposite, but hey, this is Mopar stuff, so I figure why be normal? While it may be fun to rib Jon about doing this, I must admit that it took a whopping 6 months for this oddity of nature to dawn on me. Still, it's a pretty screwed up thing to do. In retrospect, he should have saved the Duster - it already had disc brakes installed on it, a decent interior with AC, and it was a two door. Oh well. :-)

Here are some accidents we saw on our trip down to Portland to get the '76 Duster that we'd be carving up for parts. Seems people were driving extra-stupid that day...

Here is the car when we got it to my house. Nothing special, but lots of goodies that Jon can use, and a few Jon can sell to someone with this era Duster.

This was the carnage from our dismantling efforts. The first day we got pretty much everything forward of the firewall off except for the hood as well as gutting everything from under the dash - it had factory AC and all of the parts were still there and in good shape. The engine and trans were gone before Jon bought the car, so this was a fairly easy job - we just left it on the trailer and pretty much started unbolting everything in sight. :-) It was somewhat time consuming to get the control arms and torsion bars off - this was my first experience with them. Also, Jon had never torn down a car this far before, so it was a bit interesting at times. We managed to not lose any fingers/toes, to not break any tools, and (surprisingly) to not break any parts we were removing. It was fun, but tiring. Some of the later shots of the car partially carved up are my favorites.

NOTE: Many of these parts are gone, packaged up in storage, or slated to be in use. Some stuff is still around and ready to be sold, so it you are interested, please email me with any questions you have on these parts. Stuff that's long gone is the sheetmetal, seats/door panels, and the suspension/axle/brake setups. Other stuff like the glass and some dash bits are still readily available and for sale real cheap to a good home...

Comments? Kudos? Got some parts you'd like to buy/sell/barter/swap? Nasty comments about my web page so far? You can email Mike or Debbie.

Page last updated 04/26/2008 11:41:08 PM