1965 Dodge Coronet

Great Dale 2.4 is finally completed 3.5 years later.

If you remember back to the early COVID days and months; we weren’t supposed to travel and go to public restrooms. The Great Dale 2.0 had the tiniest pull-out camp toilet, which was fine for emergencies and tiny people like Lina Dennison.

However, if we were going to use it full time while camping, we needed a regular-human sized toilet.

So we bought the toilet and I made the space as big as I could without building new doors. In that process, I disturbed the glue under the floor, which made the carpet feel lumpy and forced us to replace the floor.

Now that the carpet is gone, I had a lot more room, so I made a custom-sized sled for the toilet, put glider tape on the bottom, and made a false façade when showing off.

To use the toilet:

Pull of the false front that is held on by magnets

Pull the retaining bolt

Pull the sled out

and get to business.

Adding the new toilet opened a can of worms. I had to extend the cabinet opening, which meant lifting some of the carpet. That released some glue and patches of the glue started disintegrating, which created craters under the carpet that made it weird to walk on.

So we removed the carpet with plans to clean and re-install it. That 70-year old carpet turned out to impossible to clean, but we LOVED it. So we took some pictures and tried to re-create it:

We have a digital version of the design, but every test print got worse and worse, so we finally gave up:

So we changed plans and stripped the floor to the original marmoleum, which was in surprisingly good shape:

There were a couple of patches that couldn’t be saved, so all the marmoleum had to go:

Then we filled in some screw holes and installed new-vintage marmoleum:

Then I had to make some trim to cover the gaps created when we transitioned from carpet to marmoleum, which I made out of mahogony:

Then we decided to redo the interior to clean up the gap between the old and new trim location, which meant I also had to polish the trim:

One more thing to add and we’re done!

I decided that I would do a quick project every year to update it. We decided to replace the entire steering system from the column to the wheels. I loved the loosey-goosey 1965 steering, but Lina has always hated it, so we decided to get a more modern steering box. The job looked too big for me, so we hired the alignment guys to switch it all out.

Now the Great Dale steering is a lot like a normal car. However, I miss the old steering.

Do want to camp in the middle of a racetrack, look at hundreds of classic cars, and listen to rockabilly music? If so, this is the event for you!

We have been trying to get to the Rock & Rumble for years, but it was always the same week as the Denver Modernism show where we show off the great Dale with a bunch of other trailers with our Friendly Average Campers group. We finally bought tickets a couple of years ago, then COVID happened. Then we bought tickets for last year, which was just in time for another COVID surge. But we finally made it this year.

We went around the track a couple of times before setting up camp:

We were told that anyone can race on the drag strip, so this is our goal for the weekend. We tried to get on the track on Friday, but something was broken. So we gave up and setup camp literally in the middle of the race track right beside the drag race strip…dreams crushed.

There was another brand of housecar parked along with all of the other vintage cars that Lina wanted to race…for pinks, which scared the owner off. However, he did suggest that the two of us could make a coupe of runs around the track together, and that motivated us to break camp and try to race again.

He never showed up, but we did get a couple of races in. We ran both 1/8 mile races in just under 12 seconds and got up to around 65mph by the end of the track.

Here’s the photo as we head out to race:

Here are the Videos from Race #1, that we lost:

We took a couple of laps around the track and it turns out that a couple of Mitchel truck campers followed our lead and raced each other. We got back in line and hoped that they would too so that we could race one them and they agreed. This race we won!

I had a switch that connected the two battery systems together so that I could charge one with the other, but this wasn’t an ideal system because the coronet battery is lead-acid and the RV battery was lithium. They run at two different voltages and the wire between them was just a long #12AWG through some switches, so I’m not sure how effective they were.

I was watching the Humble Road van building Youtube channel where he installed this unit and it seems like exactly what I needed. So I re-arranged the services area and ran some #6 AWG wire between everything so that the lithium batteries will charge properly while we’re driving automatically. I re-used the existing switch in the dash console so that I can turn it off if I want.

The height adjustment for the great dale has always been maxed out from the day we bought it, but we never did anything about it because I always thought that replacing the torsion bars was going to be really expensive and hard to do. Turns out it should be really easy, so I decided that replacing the torsion bars would be the big Great Dale project for the year.

The guy who helped me with the brakes last year recommended I contact Firm Feel and they recommended replacing the stock 0.88″ diameter torsion bars with some 1.12″ racing bars because of the weight. I took his suggestion and started researching how to get the old ones off. This post (https://www.racingjunk.com/news/how-to-adjust-mopar-torsion-bars/) perfectly described the process so I went to work getting the old bars off.

Turned out to be easy, it was barely an inconvenience. Tapped each side with a hammer, juiced them up with some penetrating oil, and heated each side up a little before clamping my harbor freight vice grips to the bars. There wasn’t a lot of room for the hammer, but they came out pretty easy.

The bars are labelled left and right, so I did some more research to find out that left and right for car parts are determined by sitting in the car and looking left and right. Once that was sorted, I greased up the new bar and inserted into the hole and started tapping the end to push it through. Things were going smoothly until it just stopped a couple of mm shy of where it needed to go. No amount of Hulk-Smash would make it go in any further.

I didn’t know what the problem was, so I decided to try the other side to see what I did wrong. I thought the first one might not have been aligned correctly, so I asked Lina for help on the second one. It did seem that the bar wasn’t wasn’t quite aligned properly, so I adjusted the lower control arm side until it seemed to align perfectly. In went in like butter and was actually a little too far in.

So I went back to the first one and tried to knock it back out so I could try the alignment trick. IT WOULD NOT BUDGE! I went to Harbor Freight to get a bigger vice grip that didn’t help at all. Then I kludged together a clamping system using U-bolts and aluminum angle iron, but that didn’t help either. I was starting to panic.

I had to wait until Monday to contact Firm Feel, who said that the problem might be that there was too much powder coating on the ends and that I just had to beat on it harder to get it out, sand the ends, and then put it back in.

They make specialized torsion bar removal tools like this one:

But I was a little scared that this would never come free and didn’t want to wait another week, so I made my own.

And it worked like a charm! I was able to get the bar out and then I sanded the edges:

I greased up the ends and they went in like butter.

We were able to raise the front end an inch and it hasn’t bottomed-out on the speed bumps and dips in the neighborhood. It also doesn’t bottom out coming on and off the driveway’s California curb, so it seems to be working great!