Junkyard Find: 1973 Plymouth Valiant
Chrysler A-bodies are much like VW Type 1 Beetles when it comes to junkyard populations— they’ve been showing up in self-serve junkyards in a steady stream for more than 30 years, and you can usually find one or two in the larger yards. Like old Beetles, I don’t photograph most of the ones I see (though we have seen this ’68 Valiant Signet sedan, this ’64 Valiant wagon, and this ’66 Dart sedan in this series so far). The make-your-neighbors-hate-you band stickers on the decklid of this one caught my eye during a recent trip to my favorite Denver-area yard, and so I broke out the camera.
This generation of Valiant/Dart sedan was once among the most common motor vehicles on American roads, which made it a natural choice for Dennis Weaver’s car in the 1971 film Duel. You still saw quite a few of them around, well into the 1990s, but at some point the beater-Valiant demographic switched over to beater Corollas.
You could get the ’73 Valiant sedan with a 318-cubic-inch V8, or even the 340, but almost every A-body sedan shopper went for the good old quadrillion-mile Slant Six engine. Come to think of it, there were no bad engine choices for this car.
Slant Six A-bodies with air conditioning were rare indeed, and someone had already grabbed the AC compressor by the time I found this car.
I don’t bother getting 5-digit odometer shots, especially when you can’t tell an 80,000-mile car from a 480,000-mile one.
In honor of the musical tastes of this car’s last owner, let’s hear one of my favorite Melvins songs.
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, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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It's early, I meant to say you removed the "front float cover from the carb. You can easily see the one in the photo above. See the big square thing on the front of the carb? That is the float housing. You remove the 4 screws holding it in place, take it off the carb and adjust your float, then slap it back on. Presto! No more stalling in left hand turns.
These cars make the best sleepers. Last summer there was one parked down the street (a 4 dr no less), and apart from the two largish exhausts pipes and the wider than stock tires it looked like the proverbial little old lady car. Then the owner started what, as it turned out, was a solid roller, Demon-carbed 360 stroked to 408 small block. It kicked ass.