1971 Plymouth Barracuda Base 340 4-barrel
Summary:
A good friend through the ages
Faults:
Although I've done a number of planned repairs and upgrades to this car, the only unplanned failure was the original starter needing to be replaced in 2008.
After I first bought the car, I replaced the wheel cylinders, brake shoes, and master cylinder. I completely rebuilt the engine, while adding a matched Edelbrock Performer intake manifold and camshaft, as well as installing the Mopar Performance electronic ignition kit to replace the original mechanical distributor. I also had to replace the original radiator because the Monterey, California salt air had promoted rust of the cooling fins.
When I first bought the car, I installed a new AM/FM/cassette stereo, although I now wish I'd kept the original AM radio. In the early 2000s I replaced the shock absorbers.
General Comments:
I bought my 1971 Plymouth Barracuda in June 1987 just before my 19th birthday for $900. I had arrived at the old Fort Ord in March after driving my 1964 Dodge Polara across the country and was on the lookout for a nice California Mopar. I lusted after a '69 or '70 Plymouth GTX, but when I saw the ad in the paper for this Barracuda in Carmel, I rushed over. I really fell in love with this car at first sight. The old man who owned it had two Cadillacs, so the Barracuda was just a runabout to him. He had a big, fuzzy steering wheel cover and fuzzy seat covers on it, had painted the original white vinyl top black, and said if he couldn't sell it, the grandkids would get it. Sorry, grandkids, but I bought "your" car on the spot!
The car is a base model and came with a 318 2-barrel, single exhaust, 4-wheel hydraulic drum brakes, and a standard single drive wheel differential. And yet, it also came with factory hood pins. I've always loved the foot-pump windshield washer and the dash illumination lights that are recessed under the dashboard, so you don't have to remove the instrument cluster to change a bulb. From the first test drive, I felt like the coolest guy in the world with this car, and it always has made me feel happy just to drive it down the road, even nearly 30 years later. The 1971 Barracuda is distinctive among the E-bodies as being the only model with 4 headlights and has the "shark's teeth" grille. I didn't know any of that at the time, I just knew it was the car for me. After growing up in a small town where the debate was always Ford v. Chevy, neither of which did anything for me, I had never even seen examples of Mopars, and this Barracuda just blew me away.
The original Carter 2-barrel carburetor always was cold-blooded and liked to stall when cold. It wasn't long before I installed a Holley 600 CFM on an Edelbrock Performer intake manifold with dual exhaust, and that woke up the 318 to some extent, at least it felt like it after driving my Slant 6, 3-on-the-tree Dodge.
Within a year, I had blown the head gaskets (I was 19, you will remember) so I was looking to do a rebuild. On the advice of a friend, I went to the junkyard to buy an engine to rebuild while the original stayed in the car so that the chassis wouldn't have to be stored while the rebuild was underway. They had a 1972 Barracuda 340, and I thought, why not get this 340 for my rebuild? The original 318 2-barrel was later overhauled and went into my 1973 Charger, where it still resides. I had the heads rebuilt by a shop, had the block cleaned, magnafluxed, checked for warping, and bored the cylinders 0.30" over. The connecting rods are massive in these 340s, fully double the thickness of a 318 or 360. And they come with a windage tray in the oil pan, the theory being to keep the oil from pooling where the oil pump can't reach it under hard acceleration. I rebuilt it with the 1971 10.5:1 compression pistons, although the intake valves on the 1972 340 are not the huge "coke can" valves of the 1971. I installed a high-volume oil pump, double sprocket timing chain, Edelbrock cam and lifter set to match the Performer intake that was held over from the 318, new pushrods, main and rod bearings, the whole bit. The only mistake I made was installing a concave washer backwards that holds the fuel pump drive eccentric onto the end of the camshaft, which left me sitting in the parking lot all night after an AC/DC concert on the car's post-rebuild inaugural run. A very kindly couple picking up aluminum cans drove me to an auto parts store the next morning, where I bought an electric fuel pump to get me home and correct the eccentric.
I had not realized what the 340 was, and was amazed to find the entire car wreathed in tire smoke the first time I tromped it at a stop light. I thought I was going to race an El Camino, and when the light turned green, I lost my nerve to floor it on a new engine, but just tromped it halfway. The El Camino took off amid a squeal of tires and after several seconds, I realized the Barracuda was just sitting there with the tire spinning and the El Camino hadn't actually done anything.
I drove the car from California to Wisconsin, then from Wisconsin to Texas and back, drove it briefly in college, and then from Wisconsin to West Virginia when I moved there, only to drive it back to Wisconsin for storage when I realized it was too valuable to put on the street every day. I instead used my 1973 Dodge Charger as a non-winter daily driver between 2001 and 2012. Mostly, the Barracuda sat in a shed on the family place, which is ironic considering that was the car I really loved. That's why in almost 28 years of ownership I've put barely 20,000 miles on it. And yet it has always been dependable.
The last few years, I've watched it begin to deteriorate slowly with the mice getting at it, corrosion appearing, an engine fire in 2012 that required a new Holley 600 with automatic choke (so much better than the old 600 with manual choke and floats that you had to set yourself) and new wiring harness (Year One sells great ones). So in December 2014 I decided that the car is beginning to deteriorate at the same time I'm approaching 50, so the time has come to enjoy it. I drove it 960 miles from to my current home over 2 days and the Barracuda ran perfectly, getting 20-23 MPG.
They look nice sitting in museums, but these cars were meant to be driven and enjoyed. It makes me happy to drive my Barracuda and Charger, and I think it makes at least a few people happy to see them going down the road, like an unexpected rainbow over a dreary, drab field. Most of the modern commuter cars that represent the metaphor in that dreary, drab field handle, brake, and accelerate better than the Barracuda, although that wasn't the case until about 10 years ago. I'll always remember having the speedometer buried 3 inches past the 120 mph mark and smoking the tires off, but the car hasn't seen 75 mph in years and will probably never smoke the tires again. It's just a reflection of an owner who's in his late 40s instead of his late teens.
Buying this car is one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me, and keeping it all these years has really been an honor. Plans now are for weekend drives in good weather, and finally after all these years, a trip to the body shop to restore the original white vinyl top and Tor-Red paint.
Would you buy another car from this manufacturer? Yes
Review Date: 21st December, 2014
4th Nov 2019, 17:38
I am the original reviewer, posting an update for my 1971 Plymouth Barracuda. The original review was posted on December 21, 2014 after I had just driven the car home from a prolonged storage of many years. The Barracuda had always been reliable, enough so that I had no qualms about flying to its storage location and driving it the 1,000 miles back to my home. That was by far the greatest usage the car had seen in years. The car was mechanically sound, as I had worked on it during my younger years before parking it to go to college, which was a 10-year endeavor, and then finding that my new home had no external room for parking on the property, other than the integral 2-car garage. Besides my daily driven 1985 Dodge Ramcharger and later, the 2002 Ford Explorer that replaced it, I'd had to make a choice between my 1973 Dodge Charger and the Barracuda, and decided it made more sense to store the more valuable and rarer Barracuda and drive the Charger. Then a time came when the car was no longer safe where it was, and I had finally been able to acquire some extra property to build a garage at my own home.
Upon reaching home in December 2014, I changed the power steering fluid and rear differential fluid at 108,644 miles. During the course of June-July 2015 I changed the heater hoses, and then focused on the brakes in preparation for sending the car to the body shop. I replaced the front rubber brake lines, which showed cracks, and as a result of twisting off the steel brake lines, replaced the lines from the front brakes to the master cylinder with CuNiFer tubing. I did a lot of research on this because there is some skepticism on CuNiFer, but I was convinced because the stainless steel brake lines offered as replacements seemed very difficult to work with, often didn't fit exactly, and if people tried to bend them to make minor adjustments or modify the flange at the fitting, they would crack. I read that CuNiFer had been used on European luxury cars for years and that it's never supposed to corrode, in addition to being easily bendable. So, I tried it, and was really impressed. I was able to bend the straight CuNiFer line to my original, and the end fittings were a match. That was over 3,000 miles and four years ago, and I haven't not stopped yet. Further brake work required re-establishing the middle portion of the parking brake harness, which connects the parking brake sprawl to the levers in the brake drums. That required some specialty steel braided brake cable, and some specialty parking brake parts from YearOne. I also replaced the old, cracked rubber gas line and fuel filter. After that, I drove and enjoyed the car as a nice weather weekend driver for the next two years.
And then, finally fulfilling a promise I'd made since the first year I bought the car in 1987, I took it into the body shop for restoration in May 2017. I did not plan it this way, but it came out of the shop almost 30 years to the week that I had first bought the car. I had to buy a new front bumper and grille from YearOne, as well as trunk and door weather stripping, and other odds and ends like name badges, a washer fluid jug, carpet. It was not a frame-off rotisserie restoration, since I wanted to balance cost against value and use. I wanted a nice weekend driver that would not look totally out of place at a local car show, but as a base model, no-option car, I could not justify spending the money for the nth degree of restoration. However, for the $15,000 that the restoration did cost, I still have a beautiful car that is worth more than what I have in it, a rarity in old cars. And it's a car that I'm not afraid to drive and enjoy. Try that with a million dollar hemi 'Cuda. The body shop did a really good job. They cut out and welded in the rear deck piece that always rusts out under the rear window of MoPars with vinyl tops; they cut out the rusted upper portion of the firewall that underlies the dash pad and welded in a new piece; everything came out until the car was just a shell on the frame with an engine and drive train. The fenders and front grille, and radiator came out, the front and rear window, trunk lid and hood, the interior came out. New carpet went in; the front and rear seats got new seat covers, done separately by an upholstery artiste, who also did the vinyl top. So, in the end, I had a Tor-Red car, which has a subtle metal flake in it, with a white vinyl top and thick dual white pin stripes, with white interior. Once upon a time, I might have added one of the big 340 billboard stripes, but as the years went by, I just wanted to see this car exactly as it came from the factory.
Even though it was a 318 car (I added the 340 myself), it came with factory hood pins and a passenger side mirror--yes, amazingly, the passenger outside mirror was an option back then, not standard, and the thick dual pin stripes is something I've never seen on any other E-body. So, I like the fact that it's not another hemi clone and not tricked out to be something it wasn't, but looks just like it did when it came from the factory in 1971 (or rather, it was actually assembled in late 1970 according to the crayon marks on the hood release).
And so, that was 2 1/2 years ago, and I've barely put a thousand miles on it since then. The 1973 Charger still gets the bulk of weekend driving when we have time for simple old car cruising. The 340 emanates a lot of heat into the passenger compartment, so it's not that pleasant on hot, humid days. The car was never equipped with AC, which was not that common in those days. But these cool October and November days are just glorious to drive it in. The greatest difficulty is finding suitable fuel. The engine has a 10.5:1 compression ratio, so that even with 93 octane pump gas there is some pre-ignition under load. That requires the addition of octane booster, and also lead additive, because it did not occur to me when I rebuilt the engine in 1988 that leaded gasoline would soon disappear. The engine has about 24,000 miles on it, and I've used Mobil 1 synthetic oil for almost all those miles, so hopefully that will reduce wear.
As I said in the original review, I enjoy just cruising along, speed limit driving and country road driving at 40 mph. It still compared favorably to new cars up until the early 2000's for performance, but now it's obvious that cornering is a real limitation, and stopping with the 4-wheel hydraulic drum brakes - that's right, they are not power assisted - takes some forethought and an adequate following distance. On the very rare occasions the car has been in heavy highway traffic and somebody would cut me off, I would think "Buddy, you wouldn't do that if you actually knew how long it would take me to stop!" Still, there are times when I forget I'm middle-aged and need to make a lane change and have to get on it a little, and then the car reminds me that it's like a mad dog on a weak chain. In the wrong hands, it would be a lot more powerful than would be safe. So, it has come through the years and now I appreciate it for different reasons than when I was younger. The mileage stands now at 111,830.
I may not post further updates because I don't anticipate doing anything further to the car, and expect it will just continue to go on as it is. I've had it for over 30 years, and all indications are that I will have it the rest of my life.