Our budget was $2,000, and we needed to stick to that, so it put a lot of the more well known cars out of our price range. We began our search Easter Sunday, trying to find some decent Mopar muscle car that wouldn't hit us too hard in the wallet. I have wanted a muscle car my whole life, and with the encouragement of my grandfather, who has a 1966 Chevy Nova SS, my dad and I decided we wanted to get a project muscle car. My Dad was into cars, but not new ones he had a Model A, a 490 Chevy Touring car, new cars for him were just a way to get to point B from point A.My father and I just purchased a 1974 Dodge Dart Swinger 2dr Hardtop with the 318 V8 in it as our new "father-son" project car! In this day and age research is much easier, back then no so much. It did not make any sense to him that someone would remove an engine out of a brand new car for no real reason. I myself would probably think the same if I saw that going on at a dealership today. When he asked the shop manager why they were pulling them out and replacing them his answer was not really assuring "i do what I am told, and don't bother asking questions and go home", he even agreed with my father that it really did not make any sense to him either. My father assumed that something was wrong with the engines and did not buy it. There were a few new engines sitting on skids and they were pulling an 6 Cylinder engine out on a new car (I don't remember what the car was) while we were there. I remember it as if it were a few weeks ago.
There was always ad's in the local newspaper by Baldwin Chevrolet (which was the parent company of Baldwin Motion) advertising new Chevrolet 6 cylinder engines for sale. The six cylinder developed an engine knock so my father was going to replace the engine. At the time I never realized that I was looking at piece of automotive history I remember hearing that they started out doing dune buggies and speed boats, and everything just evolved after that.
I have to go back down that way in a few weeks when the cap arrives for my Sierra and I will try to take a picture of it and post it just for laughs. I seldom go down to that part of the Island now but I did drive past it last week. The building is still there now and it is some sort of auto repair shop. When I started my apprenticeship I was commuting to NYC from my parents house and went past it every day on the Long Island Rail Road. When we moved out to Long Island from the Bronx we lived about 5 or 6 miles away from Motion. A fellow 409 guy actually worked on the building the 427's at Yenko back in the day and has built a 427 clone Yenko that he nostalgia races. I believe I showed against one of them or a COPO in 36B out at the Tennessee Grand National a few years ago. Also remember the famous Yenko conversions out in Chamberburg. John: Baldwin built some impressive Camaros back in the day as there were two around here! Both 427 cars but I never knew or cared what they left the factory with. 'CKD' cars usually had their own assembly line. One could be packaged like CKD cars that were to be shipped for final assembly overseas. Oldsmobile had no way to get the cars to Hurst without an engine, and factory engineering documents now prove that the 455s were installed by Oldsmobile on the assembly line. This is like the myth that Hurst installed the 455 engines on the 68-69 Hurst/Olds cars. The disruption to the line would be cost prohibitive. There is a HUUUUGE difference in a big rig manufacturer who builds hundreds or low thousands of vehicles and a mass production automaker with an assembly line that cranks out hundreds of thousands of vehicles. Again, tell me how the car could even be run down the assembly line without an engine to hold the transmission in place? That would require a costly retooling of the drivetrain installation part of the line, at a minimum - which would far outweigh the value of the handful of cars built with the diesel.
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