1971 Super Bee Dodge Charger

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   Mike DAmico - EV2 HEMI ORANGE 383, Auto

LOOKING FOR MY SUPER BEE

By Mike D'Amico

Bill of Sale I'd like to find out if my old 1971 Super Bee is still rolling around somewhere in Florida. The VIN was WM23N1A102472

I had the car repainted a light rust colored, or dark orange metallic in Emron paint; jams and all. The original color was V2, or "Hemi Red". All the chrome was dented up real bad when I bought the car so I left it off. The underside of the rear window glass panel (where the rear speakers mount) was a lime green color for some reason. My mom also made me a new black nagahide cover for the rear speaker panel since the old one was pealing.

I installed a Streetmaster Edelbrock manifold with a Holly 3310 vacuum secondary carburetor and that combo worked out great for the street. In 1977 I had the Torquflite transmission rebuilt and a flow-through belly pan put on the bottom. The belly pan of the transmission had tubes welded in it so cool air could help cool the transmission fluid. Back then I was stupid and was drag racing the Bee at an old drag strip near Montgomery Alabama. I would burn up a "Guaranteed" AAmco transmission in a week....I drove those AAmco guy's crazy! Finally they beefed up the transmission so even I couldn't burn it up. Shortly afterward though I decided the Bee was too big and heavy to beat drag racing cars. That's when I started fixing it up. I rebuilt the engine in 1979 and switched to solid wire spark plug wires.

Wow, what a difference! You gotta try it! Seemed like I had a choice between fantastic performance and no radio, or good radio reception and mushy performance. The distributor and ignition was also changed out with a $79.00 Mopar conversion kit; No more changing points for me.

In 1980 I got rear-ended going to school one day and I had the car repaired by the same guy that did the Emron paint job, but a sharp Mopar fan would notice that the weld seams at the rear of the right rear quarter panel, just below the end cap are different than the left side. About this same time I began experiencing a bad vibration coming from the drivetrain somewhere. I couldn't go above 60 MPH without the weirdest resonance shaking the car apart. It's this reason why I sold the car. AAMCO blamed it on the engine, but they really had nothing to go on cause it could have been the transmission or the engine. Maybe a connecting rod end was about to fly off.

So AAmco didn't want to pay to pull the transmission and replace it, and I didn't have the money at the time to pick up that tab should the transmission not be what was causing the vibration. So that's when I sold the car to Steve. I never told Steve about the vibration though since he only test drove the car around our local Vero Beach streets, a place were you couldn't go above 50 without getting flagged down by a cop.

I'll send you a picture of the car as it looked when I sold it. My old pictures are in storage right now and too hard to get at this minute. My dad always took pictures though and I'll get one from him so you can have it for your site.

Thanks for your friendship,

Mike

'71 Super Bee

 
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