Thread: 1955 Chrysler 331 Hemi build for '34 Plymouth Coupe

Tweet

Well, let me make an introduction here. 69Bee here is my friend Dave who runs the machine shop up the road. I’ve know Dave for I guess going on 30 years now. We were both assigned to Ft Huachuca back in the late 80s and also neighbors a couple of blocks apart. I was building my 58 Chevy at the same time Dave was building his 69 Super Bee and we ended up becoming pretty good friends because of a common automotive interest.

Dave Got reassigned and moved on for a while and I ending up retiring here and eventually opening up my own garage. After Dave got out of the service he moved back and opened his first machine shop. After a few years he moved to Colorado and eventually Florida but came back here and reopened his machine shop.

Dave is the machinist I have been using ever since he moved back. I don’t use him because he’s a friend, of close, or an honest business man……..I use him because he is simply the best damn machinist I know (no offence meant to the other machinists on the board).


Let me provide a little history on the pile of parts Dave is working on. That is my old mockup/parts Hemi I traded Dave for the transmission that is going in my 37 Dodge. While it looked pretty on the outside if you look close you can see the insides were pretty weathered.




That old engine was actually my first Hemi. I picked it up in the early 90s…..before I even had a computer. A long story short it had been taken apart and left outside for at least a few years. All the major casting were there, but absolutely no hardware or small parts. I got it basically for hauling it off. After getting it home and doing a visual inspection (as best I could) I decided to just sandblast the outside, throw some paint on it and set it up as a display engine until I could get the parts together to have Dave do the machine work and I could built it.

As I said I got this engine in my pre computer days and at the time support for the first generation Hemis was very minimal. Hot heads was just starting up, PAW (remember them) had a few pats but had not gotten into doing the HEMI kits yet. E Bay was even a few years off. You’re options were basically buying parts when and where you could find them and Egge’s. So basically the old Hemi was definitely going to be a looooong term project. As luck would have it within a short period of time I ended up with 2 more complete HEMIs and another parts engine. So this engine became a really back burner project and was relegated to being a display engine and eventually the mockup motor in the 37. As I have 2 running HEMIs I figured I’d keep it around primarily as just a parts engine in case I had a catastrophic failure on the other ones.

When Dave asked about it probably about a year ago I told him I wasn’t interested in selling it but would trade it for the transmission I needed for the 37. So that is how Dave ended up with the engine and I got my transmission.


Here’s a little history on the water crossover Dave is showing, which to me looks great now! I got into the HEMIs just as parts were starting to become available again. One day I saw an advertisement for a company who had just developed adapters to put a BBC water pump on an early HEMI. Up to that point the only choice you had was sending out an original pump to be rebuilt. These adapters were basically the hand made prototypes and the guy wanted $90 for them. That was high even at the time, but it opened up a lot of different water pump options. I went ahead and bought a pair because I didn’t know if they would ever be available again (as it turns out they became hugely popular and with mass production the price dropped to about $35 at one point).

Now this was before I had a computer or E Bay and after I got the adapters I needed a water crossover/thermostat housing. The later HEMIs had a separate water crossover, but I couldn’t locate one locally. Soooooo, I figured I could just cut off and seal the crossover from an original water pump.




I rough cut the crossover off (I'm talking chop saw rough cut here) and brazed the bottom water passage closed. It’s kind of hard to tell from this picture, but there was a lot of material that needed cleaned up on the bottom of the housing.



I eventually found a factory crossover that didn’t need any work other than to bolt it on so I never got back around to this part.

I really like what Dave was able to do with it…..it makes a neat custom one off part.


.