VanDerBrink Auctions will be auctioning off a crazy collection of cars when it liquidates the Soneff’s Master Garage Collection this Saturday (June 10). The collection features dozens of coveted MoPar project cars that will certainly have restorers drooling. The sheer number of incomplete and partially restored cars is staggering.

For this week’s “We’d Buy That!” we’re going to opt for one of the Soneff Collection cars that doesn’t appear to need any work. This 1969 Plymouth Road Runner convertible is quite a prize! According to the listing, this rare droptop has “undergone a 3 year restoration from top to bottom. It runs and drives beautifully and what an investment car and fun to drive. The car is B3 blue metallic in color with white vinyl top and boot. it has Rally Stripes. Rally Rims. The car is powered by a numbers-matching drivetrain and is a 383 V8 with automatic transmission. There are 67,851 miles showing on the odometer. It has dual exhaust. The interior is white vinyl bucket seats with blue carpet. Headrest option on the seats. Power steering and 8 track tape with AM radio, manual windows and locks.”

Only 2,128 Roadrunner convertibles were built in ’69. This one has been restored to a high level and is a numbers-matching car. There’s something gnarly and unrefined about Roadrunners that just makes them eternally cool. For some top-down fun on a summer day, this muscle machine would be hard to beat!

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Fabricating patch panels made simple

By Angelo Van Bogart

Even on the West Coast and in Texas, it’s getting more difficult to find a 30-year-old or older project car without a case of the tin worm. Chances are, a project car is going to require some metal replacement, and when that metal isn’t available from a reproduction part producer or a parts car, there is but one alternative — make the part yourself.

The subject car here is one of those cars for which limited replacement sheet metal is available. Reproduction companies haven’t quite caught up to the subject project car, a 1973 Plymouth Road Runner, and there is only a limited amount of new metal available. To bring back this tin worm-infested ’Runner back to show condition, master metal man Leonard Schrock is prepared to cut and bend plain flat-stock sheet metal into the curves of the 1973.

In this case, he’ll be replacing the quarter panel around the rear wheel opening on the ’Runner. For this task, Schrock cut two separate panels — one for the inner fender lip and another for the outer quarter panel — from sheet metal stock and welded them together. Using two separate pieces and welding together will make the piece stronger and also make it easier to shape the metal than making the piece out of one piece of metal.

To begin, the profile and body lines of the rusted outer quarter panel that will be replaced must be recorded with templates. Three thin pieces of metal were formed to the shape and contours of the quarter panel around the Road Runner’s wheel opening and their locations on the car marked. Since there are multiple contours to the wheel opening (top, front and rear of wheel opening), all of their shapes must be recorded with separate strips of tin and marked for their position on the fender.

The overall shape of the wheel opening must also be marked. Schrock placed the flat sheet metal stock he will use to form the replacement panel against the wheel opening on the car and traced its shape on the new sheet metal. Schrock had already cut out the rust from this area, so he used the inner fender as a guide, because these two panels (inner and outer quarter panel) must meet and be welded together.

Once the shape of the wheel opening is traced on the oversized flat piece of stock, Schrock highlights his cut line with painter tape and uses a power shears to cut the metal.

Next, Schrock prepared to cut the metal that will form the lip inside the wheel opening. He repeated the previous step, placing a piece of flat stock in the wheel opening to trace the shape of the lip. Tape was placed on the drawn line and he cut the metal to shape. The width of the lip was originally 1-1/4 inch, but the owner will be running wider tires, so Schrock cut the lip to 3/4 inch wide, the minimum width Schrock suggests to maintain strength in this part of the car.

This metal strip forming the lip inside the wheel opening bends around the tire, from in front of the wheel opening to above the tire to the back of the fender. As such, it must be bent, so Schrock begins bending the cut piece of metal at its end to avoid kinks. He works the strip over his knee to the center of the strip to avoid kinking the piece. He frequently compares its shape to the outer quarter panel it will meet until he is satisfied with the shape.

With the two pieces cut to shape, Schrock was ready to begin pounding the contours around the wheel opening into the outer quarter panel. Schrock secured thick bar stock with clamps at the edge of the new panel where he’ll be forming the contours. It will allow him to bend the metal at sharper angles using a duckbill pliers. (For smoother bends, it is not necessary to support the metal with a bar stock guide.) The thick bar stock will act as a guide to where he’ll be bending and shaping the contours, but also braces the surrounding metal so it, too, does not bend until he’s ready to address it.

At this point, he estimates the shape of the contours around the wheel opening, frequently comparing it to the thin metal templates he formed earlier from the body line.

To pound the template shape into the outer quarter panel, Schrock uses a body hammer with a convex face to further shape the metal. The convex-faced body hammer also helps keep the sharp bends in the quarter panel, all the while leveling out the panel for a smooth surface.

Once the new outer quarter panel is shaped with the original fender’s contours, Schrock lined up the new lip against the shaped outer quarter panel. Some bending was required, so he bent the new outer quarter panel by hand to match the lip piece he created. Once the pieces were lined up in the ideal location, Schrock drew a line across both pieces to mark the proper place to tack weld them together with a wire-feed welder.

Welding the two pieces together can be tricky at the lower part of the fender, due to the size and contours of the metal. Schrock slowly tack welded from the top to the bottom of the fender, bending and hammering the outer quarter panel to match the lip as he worked down from the top of his new patch panel.

His tack welds were widely spaced and were intended to simply hold the pieces together until they would be completed wire-feed welded together. The weld was then grinded smooth, and the new panel was ready to be mounted on the car.

More images of the process:

Source:
Kasper Automotive
Waupaca, Wis.
715-258-9206

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By Brian Earnest

As an unabashed fan of 1974 Plymouth Road Runners, Steve Wexel is pretty sure he is enjoying the best of both worlds. On the one hand, the Delray Beach, Fla., resident gets to drive his favorite machine almost every day — his rebuilt blue ’74 is his regular transportation.

And Wexel has the other extreme covered, too. His spectacularly original Silver Frost example has just 7,200 miles on the clock and might be the most unmolested ’74 Road Runner on the globe. He rarely drives his low-mileage Plymouth because of its amazing past and unrivaled originality, but he doesn’t mind. The car has turned out to be more than he bargained for and he’s glad to be its caretaker.

“I had never seen the car in person until [it arrived], I really wasn’t expecting anything special,” admitted Wexel. “I knew about the car and I wasn’t worried about it, but I was really, really surprised about how it looked when I saw it in the sun for the first time. It was actually much better than I was anticipating.

“When I bought the car… I had never been to a car show, and didn’t really care much about going to a show and looking at other cars. I was just thinking this was my chance at a Road Runner. But by the time I got it here and looked at it, I knew what I had and knew I shouldn’t be driving it.”

Wexel said he found the car while searching on eBay for parts for his other Road Runner, which he has been driving regularly since 2006. At the time he said he didn’t have the money to buy the gray car, so he had a couple of friends buy it temporarily “as an investment” before he set up a corporation — Road Runner Boynton — to be the car’s legal owner in 2009. Since then, the car has gone on to earn Bloomington Gold Certified Fingerprint Survivor status.

It’s doubtful the northern Indiana man who owned the car originally had any such intentions for the car when he bought it new in 1974 for his son. The car’s title was soon transferred to the 19-year-old, but instead of doing what most teens would do with such a fun, sporty machine — take it out and pound on it — the young man simply parked it.

The car was titled in Michigan in 1980, but from that point on, accumulated only 5,700 miles on the odometer before it was eventually put up for sale. Wexel later talked to the son about the car, but never asked him why he was parting with it after preserving it so faithfully for so many years.

“My viewpoint on that … with these things, No. 1 there is either a health issue involved, or No. 2 he had money, and then he didn’t have money,” Wexel mused. “Put yourself in that position. If you wanted a new car and kept it for 35 years, why would you sell it? I can’t even imagine me selling it, and I’ve only been showing it for 3 1/2 years. It had to be a money issue, and I didn’t want to ask him because it had to be a sore subject.”

Wexel was able to verify that the car was indeed original and that the few minor paint touch-ups that had been done were actually performed at the factory before he ever took ownership.

“Actually, he said they offered to repaint the car for him,” Wexel said. “They ordered the car because they didn’t want to buy one off the lot. … It had some chips in the back edge of the header panel, and they touched it up and it looks bad, but he never had them repaint it. It was the best decision he ever made … because it wouldn’t be an original survivor car without original factory paint.”

The previous owner had painted the underside of the Road Runner black — “mufflers and everything,” Wexel said — but hadn’t touched anything else. Under the hood is the car’s original 318-cid V-8 and floor-shifted automatic transmission. The build sheet shows it came with a Deluxe Interior featuring white seats and door panels with a black dash and carpeting, AM/FM radio and no air conditioning.

Wexel said the young owner never really put the car in long-term storage, it was more a case of just not driving it very often, for reasons unknown.

“I really don’t know his intention. He never drove it in the rain or the snow, so that means he was intent on keeping it a long time,” Wexel said. “I don’t know if it was going to be his show car. I doubt it. When you’re 19 you probably aren’t thinking about shows.

“He just plain wanted to keep the car forever … My first car was a 1974 Road Runner, and I would have liked to do that with my car, but unfortunately it was my everyday car. It was my only car!”

Every car lover has a favorite make and model, and Wexel’s was the ’74 Road Runner, right from the beginning. He was the opposite of the young owner of the gray car, however. He used his Plymouth for everything and piled up the miles on it — and on many other Mopars since then. “The real reason I like the Road Runner is that when I got my first one new, I lived in Michigan, and I’m a fisherman,” he said. “We’d throw a canoe on the roof and drive across the fields and look for ponds … Now I fish out in the ocean in a canoe — the same canoe, actually — and I still put my canoe on the roof of the car and put everything in the trunk and it all fits. The trunk is huge. People say you can fit three bodies, four bodies in there… That’s why I like the car, that’s why I keep driving it. It has nothing to do with being a classic car or anything. They’re just such great cars to drive.”

Plymouth’s popular, budget-priced muscle machine had won over many fans by the time the second generation of the car came to a close with the 1974 model year. That would be the final season the Road Runners were based on the Satellite/Belvedere “B”-bodies. The following year, the 1975 Road Runner would utilize the Fury platform.

With a long nose and aerodynamic profile, the Road Runner still looked the part of a muscle car in 1974, although the monster mills were long gone, joining a long list of casualties resulting from tougher stances by insurance companies and the gas crisis that gripped the early part of the decade. You could still get a de-tuned 400 or 440 under the hood of your Road Runner in ’74, but the base power plant was a 318 rated at a modest 170 hp. A three-speed manual transmission was standard, but the option list included a four-speed manual and three-speed TorqueFlite automatic.

Unlike GM’s body-on-frame mid-sized cars at the time, the Plymouth B-bodies feature unit-body construction and you could get your Road Runner, Satellite or GTX in a wide range of personalities and price ranges. The Road Runner was part of the Satellite series and included a few extras that the base Satellite did not, including a heavy-duty suspension and brakes, beefier sway bar, “performance” hood, Rally gauges, white-letter tires, floor shifter and dual exhausts. A base model would set you back $3,545.

Wexel’s Road Runner was one of 11,555 produced for the model year. It now has a reproduction battery and correct set of Polyglas tires, but is otherwise almost completely original. “I think it’s even got the original spark plugs in it, and I haven’t done anything with the engine seals,” he said.

Silver Frost was a relatively uncommon paint choice at the time, and it is set off by red stripes that start behind the headlamps and wrap over the roof. Wexel admits he worries about the condition of those stripes as much as anything on the car.

“I don’t take it to many shows, just charity shows,” he said. “Because if I keep taking it out in the sun that stripe will crack, and if the stripe cracks, it’s going to need to be repainted.

“The color isn’t really a standout color, but people seem to like it because it’s different.”

Wexel’s desire to keep the car pristine and preserve its authenticity helps him stave off the desire to take it out and drive it more often. Having another Road Runner to use as his daily wheels certainly helps, too, but he’s driven the gray car enough to get a feel for it. “It drives fine. It drives like a brand new car with 7,000 miles on it,” he said. “The carburetor needs to be rebuilt because the float doesn’t work right, but when it warms up it drives like a brand-new car… It’s got reproduction tires on it, Polyglas tires, so it doesn’t handle that great around corners, but everybody knows that. I don’t drive the car like that anyway, so with this car it’s not really relevant.”

In addition to winning its Bloomington Gold certification, the Road Runner has appeared three times at the Boca Raton and Winter Park Concours d’Elegance and also won numerous awards at Mopar shows around the country. For a relatively inexpensive car from a decade that is still fighting for respect in collector circles, Wexel’s Plymouth gets plenty of attention wherever he takes it.

“After the very first show I went to I started getting calls from people wanting to know if it’s for sale, but it isn’t,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what kind of car you like, when you see this car … you think, ‘Wow that’s the original paint and it’s 38 years old!’ A lot of people will see the sign that it’s all factory original, and a lot of people will stop and look at it that normally wouldn’t stop.

“My plan is to have it go to somebody in my will. It’s not a car I can replace. If I sold it for $100,000, what would I do? I’d buy another car and it would be special to me, I’m sure, but it wouldn’t be different from every other car.”

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The post Car of the Week: 1974 Plymouth Road Runner appeared first on Old Cars Weekly.

The original owner installed Keystone wheels and new tires
immediately after buying the Road Runner, but kept the original
Polyglas tires and steel wheels. Larry Fechter, the car’s new owner,
has reunited the car with the original wheels and tires.

Larry Fechter of Iola, Wis., has wanted a 1970 Plymouth Road Runner since his big brother bought a new Lemon Twist (yellow) hardtop nearly 40 years ago.

“They have a 150-mph speedometer and we got close to pegging it,” Fechter said. “It’s the fastest I’ve ever gone in a muscle car.”

That’s saying something, because Fechter has restored many muscle cars through the years. His current stable includes a documented Daytona Yellow 1969 Camaro Rally Sport Z/28 nearing the end of a body-off-frame restoration and a 1967 Pontiac GTO sport coupe wearing a very presentable older restoration. There’s also a 1969 Ford Mustang Boss 302 in his past and a 396-cid 1965 Impala convertible in his future, but memories of his brother’s Road Runner never went away.

“I wanted a ’70 — I didn’t want any other year,” Fechter said.

Less than 50 miles away, another Larry (we’ll call him “Larry Smith”) also wanted a 1970 Road Runner, and ordered a new Plum Crazy (purple) hardtop from Clark Motors, a Chrysler-Plymouth-Imperial dealer in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis. The 335-hp, 383-cid Road Runner was optioned with the Dust Trail Stripe, hood performance paint treatment, black vinyl top, fresh air pack carburetor (Air Grabber), light package, vinyl bucket seats and a solid-state AM radio. These options, plus the four-speed manual transmission and performance axle package (3.55, heavy-duty Sure-Grip 8-3/4 rear axle), brought the final price to $3,934.55 after the destination charge. All told, the final price was quite a bump over the Road Runner’s $3,034 base price.

After taking delivery, Smith immediately removed the original steel wheels, poverty caps and the F70x14 fiberglass-belted tires and put a new set of Keystone wheels on the Plymouth. Smith didn’t care for the factory wheels, and planned to install aftermarket wheels well before he checked the first box on the order sheet.
“He didn’t like the rims they had, so as soon as he got the car, he took the rims off and put the Keystones on it,” Fechter said.

Smith also immediately mounted a Sun tachometer and a statute of Jesus Christ to the top of the instrument panel and took his future wife on dates with the car.

“[Smith] dated his wife in the car and installed red lights under the seat with a switch for when they parked,” Fechter said.

All of that cruising and parking was done in the summer months. Wisconsin weather can be brutal, and the salt used on the roads can be devastating to sheet metal, but this Road Runner never saw the street in the winter. But even with all that care, the Plum Crazy Road Runner’s 383 developed an oil leak after six years and 55,000 miles and was pulled from the road.

“In ’76, the car had a rear main oil seal leak, so he pulled the engine out and never got to it,” Fechter said. At that time, the transmission was also removed and the car was placed in a barn.

The meeting of two Larrys
Even though the two Larrys were less than 50 miles apart and shared an interest in ’70 Road Runners, they didn’t meet until a few weeks ago, when Larry Smith had a friend list his Road Runner for sale on a local Web site. Larry Fechter was the first to spot the ad.

“I was working in the shop on a Saturday, took a break and went in the house,” Fechter said. While looking on the Internet, Fechter stumbled onto the Road Runner and called the phone number and left a message. Like the Coyote chasing the Road Runner, Fechter left another message on Sunday, even though the ad had been pulled from the Web site. The Road Runner could run from Fechter, but it couldn’t hide.

It took until Monday evening for Fechter’s phone to ring. On the other end was the person who listed the car for Smith. Apparently, the seller had been deluged with calls and pulled the advertisement after four hours. Smith knew interest in the car was high, but since Fechter was the first to call, he was offered the first chance to see the car.

“Someone had offered them [more than] the asking price,” Fechter said, “but the person in charge of selling it had integrity and honesty and said, ‘You have first dibs.’”

But the chase wasn’t over. Fechter had to wait until the following Friday to see the car, and since interest was strong, he wasn’t sure the deal would go through.

“With these things, you don’t even talk about them with other people until they’re settled,” he said.

When Friday arrived, Fechter and his wife, Rhonda, had their cash in hand, but it was hard to tell if the Road Runner was worth the chase.

“It was so dusty, you couldn’t even tell what color the vinyl top was,” he said. Underneath the dust gathered from years of barn storage, Fechter determined he was looking at a solid, one-owner car that wouldn’t be hard to get back on the road again. On top of that, the car came with all of the right documentation, and like other muscle car collectors, Fechter appreciates a car with proven provenance.

“It’s unbelievable what documentation he had,” Fechter said while holding the original window sticker. In addition to paperwork, the car also included an original bottle of partially used Plum Crazy touch-up paint and an extra set of Dust Trail Stripes. Since the car arrived with a defect in the stripes, the dealer had included new a set with the car. Smith never applied them, and they remain in the original blue-and-white MoPar boxes.

“I couldn’t believe I found it, and one with a four-speed, Air Grabber [hood] and High Impact Paint,” Fechter said. “It’s one of those things you dream about. To find a car like that is like getting hit by lightning — it only happens once.”

Knowing the price was not negotiable, Fechter looked over the car with its engine and transmission parked nearby and contemplated its value. Smith said he’d throw in a set of manifolds and carburetors removed from an old street racer’s Chrysler engine to seal the deal, and Fechter finally had caught his Road Runner.

“It wasn’t easy for Larry to sell it,” Fechter said. “When we saw the car, his wife was gone, and after I said, ‘I’ll take it — here’s the cash,’ his wife came back. She started crying because they dated in it.”

The Road Runner meets its second owner
Fechter wasn’t prepared to haul the car, so after completing the deal, he returned home with original parts that Smith had removed from the car when the engine was pulled. Smith had kept track of all the removed parts, including the long-handle Hurst Pistol-Grip shift handle, barely used original wheels and tires and other bits. Fechter loaded those parts, as well as the odd intake manifolds and carburetors from another MoPar, took them home and returned Saturday for the car. That day, the dusty Road Runner slowly rolled into the sun’s rays for the first time in more than three decades, courtesy of an Oliver tractor employed to pull it from the barn.

Once he got it home, Fechter sprayed off the years of dust from the exterior and engine compartment. He also cleaned the cobwebs and dust from the black vinyl interior and found it to be in like-new condition. Likewise, the vinyl top quickly returned to its as-new luster. Fechter removed the back seat and found two build sheets that confirmed everything in the paperwork he already received on the St. Louis-built car. The glove compartment revealed more documents of the car’s history, such as period road maps and a registration sheet.

To check the electrical system, a battery was hooked up and all of the headlamps lit up; even those bulbs under the seat emitted a red glow again.

Now that the car is cleaned up, Fechter isn’t sure what to do with it. Should it be restored? Should the engine and transmission be cleaned up and returned to their place otherwise untouched?

“I want to solicit ideas from people what to do as far as restoration,” Fechter said. “You don’t want to devalue it [by restoring a good original.]” Noting its overall good, solid condition, he noted, “It’s a good problem to have.”

In the meantime, Fechter is doing his research before he tears into any part of the car, a process he expects will take about two years.

“I’m going to gather as much information as I can,” he said.

Some of that information may come from the original owner, whom Fechter remains in contact with. After cleaning the car, Fechter took photos to document it and included one photo at the end with a 12-pack of beer on the roof. He sent it to Smith and told him the beer and car would be waiting for him if he ever wants to visit.

“I don’t call it a two-owner car, I call it a ‘Two-Larry car,’” Fechter said.

And what about those odd intake manifolds and carburetors from the street racer that Smith threw in with the deal? They’re rare and desirable 1961 Chrysler 300-G long-ram manifolds, valuable in and of themselves. Not a bad bonus in a deal that already included a new friend and a great car.

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