1970 Plymouth Barracuda 'Cuda

This 1970 Plymouth Barracuda has an interesting story. The owner was kind enough to send along the details, which are posted below.

Off the assembly line it started out as a K5 (Burnt Orange) 225 c.i.d. Six Cylinder Barracuda with a 3 speed auto that shifted on the column.

The car was later transformed into a racer that spent it's time on the track in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

When we picked it up, the car had just rolled over on the odometer and there was no record of how many actual miles were on it when we brought it home. There was 10,000 miles on a rebuilt 1971 block "340".

The car immediately went into the shop for a clean -up. The engine and transmission were both leaking oil very badly as the seals had dried up from sitting too long without turning.

Even so, the motor and tranny ran strong. The plan was to have them both out and back in during the winter of 02-03.

When we checked the codes on the fender tag and found that none of the engine, tranny or rearend components were original, it made our choice to modify this car the way we wanted to, a lot easier.

The plan is to replace the manual steering and brakes with power. Swap out the column shift steering column with a floor shift power steering column and replace the manual steering box with a power box.

The only visible rust was behind and under the battery box, a little on the shock towers and minor spots on the fenders and quarters.

The frame rails, trunk and floor sheetmetal were in excellent shape. The grille was in decent shape except for a small chip out of one of the fins. This was easily repaired.

The hard thing was to find the correct med/dark argent paint to match. Once to motor was out we treated the rust spots with epoxy and spot filler, wet sand, metal prep and epoxy primer.

We have decided to repaint the car code V2 or Plymouth's "Tor-Red" which is the same as Dodge's "Hemi Orange". All of the wiring was pulled repaired and rewrapped.

The interior will also get a major face lift. New dash pad cover, the bench seat was replaced with newly covered buckets from a 72 Challenger, carpet was replaced not long ago, the after market gauges will be placed into a panel.

The current shifter was replaced with a proper"ball" Handle slapstick from a '70 Cuda to shift the 727.

The gears in the rear are currently 3.91:1 and it seems to be a nice combo with the mid stick cam, headers, 750 Carter (Edelbrock 1407) and hi perf heads.