Dodge Mirada

I just won the eBay bids for two new parts for my Mirada!

I am getting an Offenhauser 360 degree intake manifold that looks like this:

Offenhauser 360 Degree Intake Manifold

I got it off of eBay for $96 and I’ll take a bunch of pictures of it for the gallery when it arrives. To match it, I got an Edelbrock 1405 (600 cfm) 4 barrel carburetor:

Edelbrock 1405 4 Barrel

This is larger than the Mirada needs by about 50 cfm, but since my long term plan involves a much meaner cam shaft, rollers, etc, I figure it will be worth it in the long run. I found this awesome article about carburetors in general that helped me decide on what to get. I really recommend reading it even if you have a decent amount of experience with carbs. Im definitely glad that I put an open-element filter on the car already since I’m most likely going to need it for getting air to the bigger carburetor. I might start looking around for a second hood for the Mirada though so that I can cut a hole in it for a scoop to get colder air to the open element cleaner. I definitely won’t touch the original stock hood from the car though, since it is in far too nice a condition.

Also, the exhaust system is squeaking again, but since the step after the intake system is to replace the entire exhaust, I’m not worrying about it too much. I fixed the electrical problems with the car by replacing a very rotted-away positive battery cable with a new one and it now charges, starts and runs like a charm.

I personally love books in general and have a decent size collection of a wide variety, so I naturally bought some books about my Mirada as well. The most useful book I have found so far is the Haynes repair manual for 1971 through 1989 Chrysler rear-wheel drive cars:

Haynes Repair Manual

http://www.amazon.com/Dodge-Plymouth-Chrysler-Inline-Six-Cylinder/dp/1563920980/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220755607&sr=8-1

I have been looking into performance upgrades for the engine and have been using these two books as resources:

Small Block Mopar Performance Book

On Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Small-Block-Mopar-Engines-Present-273-318-340-360/dp/0895864797/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220755788&sr=1-2

Small Block Mopar Performance Book

On Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/How-Rebuild-Small-Block-Mopar-Engines/dp/0895861283/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220755788&sr=1-4

The first book is targetted toward very high performance enthusiasts. If you are building your Mirada toward being a track car, then that book would be the best for you. This is not to say it doesn’t include good information for street performance, but the second book seems better suited for a street type Mirada. The second book also goes into more how-it-works detail on engine rebuilds with a focus on light upgrades or stock replacement, while the first book goes for a how-to-make-every-part-faster style. Overall, I think the two books together actually complement each other quite well.

About 10 months ago, I had to replace the tailpipe on the Mirada because the original one had finally rusted out to the point of being in multiple peices that just dangled from their mounting brackets. I bought a new tailpipe piece from NAPA in Maine while I was up visiting family, and installed it in snow. I didn’t do the best job setting it up, but it worked fairly well until about 4 months ago when it had wiggled itself loose and began squeaking and squealing like a stepped-on chipmunk (PETA excuse the metaphor…).

Since the car hasn’t been a daily driver for a while, fixing this wasn’t a terribly high priority, but it got to the point where I just didnt want to drive it anywhere because of the noise. So the other day I pulled off the right rear wheel to take a look:

Rear Passenger Wheel Well

After moving the pipe around a bit to duplicate the noise, I found out that it was rubbing on the middle mounting bracket in front of the wheel well. Thankfully it was a nice easy fix; after tightening this bracket with a 9/16ths inch wrench, the tailpipe felt nice and solid and didn’t squeal while the engine was starting up.

Tail Pipe Bracket

While I had the wheel off, I checked the rear brake shoes. I have a lot of shoe left on them, and I tested them out to make sure they are getting pressure. There is nothing wrong with the rear brakes, so I’ll have to track down other causes for the massive front wheel brake dust.

I’ve seen some images of very fast Miradas online before, but this is the fastest one that I’ve seen a video posted on YouTube for. Here is an in-car camera view of a (very modified…) 1980 Dodge Mirada running 12.54 seconds at 104 mph. For anyone going for a big block swap, this is a good starting target; he’s running a 440!

Enjoy!

I’ve owned the car for a while now, and am finally at the point where I have to fix lots of small things.

1. Windshield Wiper Motors / Gears - I’m not exactly sure what is wrong with this mechanism right now, but they don’t work quite right. First, even at their highest setting the wipers move very slowly. Second, when they are in intermittent mode, they pause in the middle of the windshield rather than at the bottom of the swipe like they should.
2. Gas Gauge - I have not yet determined if this is a problem with the gauge itself or the sender, but probability says it’s going to be the sending unit. I’ll post a how-to on fixing that as soon as I do, since it looks like it might be a pain in the butt and any tricks I figure out may help. The problem is that at a full tank, it registers as 3/4s of a tank, and anything below 3/4s of a tank registers as empty.
3. Rear Brake lights - they don’t turn on when I hit the brake pedal. This fix should be simple.
4. Tail Pipe Squeaks - I had to replace a completely rusted-through tailpipe last November, and I must have done a poor job mounting it because since then, the rubber pad surrounding one of the metal pieces disintegrated and part of the tailpipe now rubs on metal, making for a very annoying sound whenever the car rumbles to life or hits a slight bump in the road (aka, whenever I drive it!)
5. Pitman Arm - my original pitman arm died about a year and a half ago. I replaced it with a cheap one from Autozone (only $30….), but that one is now dead too. I have the new arm to replace it with, and all of the tools, so I’ll make a how-to for that as well. The new arm is slightly more expensive from Advance Auto, and has a lifetime replacement warranty. I’m going to measure out the alignment for the front end just to make sure it isn’t totally out of whack and causing the pitman arms to wear faster than they should.
6. Electrical Leak - somewhere in my electrical system, something is draining my battery even when the car is off. I’ll be using a meter to track down where the problem is, and posting explanation of where the problem(s) is/are and how to go about tracking down the issues.
7. Brakes - the brake dust accumulates on the front wheels of this car way too fast and the brakes squeal. I tried replacing the stock brake pads with ceramic ones, and that has not improved it at all. Granted, it is a very large car, so I might just have to live with some of the brake dust, but I’m going to do some testing / repair on the rear drum brakes to make sure they are pulling their own weight to take some of the load off of the front end.

I’ll keep this blog updated with everything that I do and include as many pictures as possible since there are far too few pictures of Miradas on the web.

About a year ago the Mirada started having funky issues with the turn signal switch. When I pulled it pushed it upward for a right turn, it didn’t lock into place, so I had to hold in place for the duration of the turn. This was fairly bearable, but then about 6 months ago I started having issues with the left turn position in the same way. And finally I lost all electrical connectivity whatsoever through the switch and I was unable to do any signaling at all. Not only is this dangerous, but it’s also against lots of traffic laws and all that bad stuff so I decided that I had to repair it.

First, I did some testing to make sure that I was going to repair the correct part. I used some wire tracking and trial-and-error to find the three wires in the large wiring harness under the dash that handle the turn signals (interestingly, the emergency blinker is a completely different wire, and throughout this time the emergency flashers remained fully functional). The harness and the turn-signal wires is shown here:

Steering Column Wiring Harness

After proving that jumping the wires worked just fine and made my blinkers blink, I was pretty much positive that it was an issue with the wiring in the turn signal itself. You can see from this picture where the turn signal switch handle enters the steering column and thus where the electrical problems must be located:

Turn Signal Switch

But in order to access this area, I had to remove the steering wheel. Since I love collecting tools anyway, I bought a steering wheel puller from Advanced Auto. The first step is removing the center-cap / cover from the steering wheel. These are held in place by some light springs, so you can safely remove the cap with a flat-tip screwdriver or other flat tool:

Steering Wheel Center Cap

Then remove the nut from the center of the steering wheel. Make sure that the steering wheel is locked in place (the key is out of the ignition and the steering wheel has little to no room for movement by the locking mechanism built into the steering column). I had to use a breaker bar to get enough leverage to break this loose. You may want to use WD-40 or PBBlaster on this to help break it loose.

Before proceeding, be sure to take some chalk or soap-stone or similar and mark a line between the steering wheel and the center bolt. When you reattach the steering wheel, you will want to make sure all of the splines line up exactly as they are now, otherwise the wheel will be off-center.

After the nut is removed, hook up the steering wheel puller to the two threaded holes in the center of the wheel. Tighten the puller with the breaker bar or large wrench until the steering wheel comes free. This will provide you access to the blinker switch mechanism. The white plastic piece (called the blinker switch cam) is the one that I had to replace:

Mirada Turn Signal Switch

Turn Signal Cam

Squeeze the center of the swivel point on the cam and remove it (this works with a forked pinching-type connection to keep it locked in place and swiveling). You will have to cut the wires attached to the old cam. The new cam comes with wire tails on it. Connect the proper old wires to the correct tails and solder the connections. Remount the new cam with the screws where the old one was. At this point, you can test both the electrical and mechanical connections by using the blinker switch as normal. Note that you will have to turn the ignition to the “on” position to see the blinkers blink.

At this point the system was all working electrically for me, but I was still unable to make the cam latch into position when making right turns. By examining the mechanism in action while I moved the lever, I found that the top latch on the cam was not springy enough and not grabbing onto the nob when it was put in place. To tighten it up some I made a shim out of wire and inserted it into the lower end of the upper latch. At that point the device was able to latch in place.

The only difficult part about putting the entire mechanism back together was mounting the steering wheel back on the toothed axel coming out of the steering column. The clearance was so tight that I could not push the wheel back on. To help I positioned the steering wheel as best as I could and then used a large (1 1/4″) socket over the center of the hole on the steering wheel and striking the socket with a rubber hammer. A good minute of continuous pounding and it was back in position. Be sure to align the steering wheel using the marks that you made earlier or your steering wheel will be lopsided and awkward and everyone will laugh at you!

I just found this absolutely sick (in the best way possible) sounding Mirada small block on youtube. I’m definitely jealous of the 340, but since I don’t have pockets deep enough to buy one off of ebay and I’ve had no luck poking at junk yards, my goal is going to be to make my 318 sound this good:

I’ve wanted to buy the domain for a while and do something with it, but I just recently had the chance! And it’s perfect timing. I just graduated college, I have another car as my daily driver and now the Mirada is all about what I want to do with it. I own a 1981 Dodge Mirada. The details about it can be found currently at my general blog at http://fugitivethought.com/projects/mirada. I will be migrating the pictures and info from that site to this blog over the next couple of weeks.

Check back for updates, feel free to leave comments or send me email at justin.demaris@gmail.com!

For a quick starter, here’s my car and the original look of the engine when I first bought it in June of 2005:

Grey 1981 Dodge Mirada

Dodge 318 V8 Engine