Wheels Make the Van!
As the Dodge A100 Hell Project proceeds in fits and starts, I’ve been so wrapped up in making the thing streetworhy that haven’t gotten around to doing anything about the external appearance… until now!
Yes, that’s a full set of Cragar S/S clones, in the proper anachronistic 14″ diameter and shod with big fat Grand Am Radial GTs (225s in front, 245s in back).
I got them from the owner of the cleanest ’74 AMC Javelin AMX I’ve ever seen; they came with the car and he decided he wanted to go with real Cragars.
The van looks so much better than it did with the white steel spokes that I may have to jump right to the Cherry Bomb exhaust upgrade, because a van that looks this mean needs to sound mean!
The Grand Ams are pretty old and I don’t quite trust them on the highway, so I’ll be shopping for some Mickey Thompsons in the near future; there’s room in the rear wheelwells to go to at least 255s out back. And for you aficionados of annoyingly vintage features, left-hand-thread wheel studs are right up there with mercury-based syphillis treatments and radium-enhanced toothpaste when it comes to the “dumb stuff they did in the old days” department. To make things even more fun on my van, only the left rear wheel has lefty studs; either the previous owner upgraded to righties all the way around and then did a rear axle swap, or he replaced the front studs and then lost motivation for the project.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Was there some engineering reason for LH threads on one side of Chrysler Corp cars?
Damnit, get out of my head; my own resto-rod project uses Cragar 62s as well.