NUTS & VOLTS DEPT
A bonanza of battery info from tray restoration
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OME TECH ARTICLES take many months to plan and execute. Project cars, which can encompass years’ worth of tech, tweaking, testing, and road trips, can obviously take even longer. There’s another category, though, which pops up occasionally: Tech that just sort of happens. What you’re about to delve into falls into that latter category. Mopar Action’s first
conceals a moderately tweaked 451 stroker 400. With the massive RV2 “Thumper” cast iron Airtemp V-twin air conditioning compressor, and no attempt at weight reduction, it’s never going to be a serious track car. Still, down through the decades it has proven to be a reliable, fun, good handling cruiser. The paint, sprayed on nearly 25 years ago by our own Tony “Little Ant” Crecco, has held up well—with one somewhat annoying exception: battery acid has eaten away both paint and primer on a large portion of the battery tray, and the now-bare-and-exposed steel was pretty rusty and nasty looking. Butt-ugly, in fact. The plan was to remove the tray, clean it up, and find some reasonable touch-up paint solution (after all, it’s a battery tray, not the middle of a door or hood.) Still, this would be an ideal way to test the validity of online claims from companies that purport to sell exact-match paint in pressure-packed shaker cans. Supposedly, if your car is a stock color, all you need to give them is the year and paint code, and a few weeks later, a package arrives in the mail with aerosol cans. Sounds too good to be true, but we’ll find out.
36 MOPAR ACTION
If you’re nervous about painting your battery tray, Ebooger will create a one-of-a kind signed painting of it and frame it in a Louvre Museum gallery quality heirloom frame to be enjoyed by you and future generations. Price on request (not cheap).
Like all 1972 Chrysler products, our car was Lynch-Road painted in single stage acrylic enamel, which is not very different from what Crec laid down when he repainted it circa late 1990s, with one exception from the factory process: not having a toaster oven quite large enough to fit a 1972 Road Runner, Tony added a chemical catalyst (“hardener”) to the brew to speed cure time. We unbolted the tray—a 2-minute process if you are slow. Removed, and once the roofing felt was scraped off, its condition was way worse than it appeared at first blush—corrosion scars were deep and covered the inside almost totally. While it could have, no doubt, been repaired if there was no alternative (think: Bondo), reproduction trays are inexpensive, so we whipped out the gold card and had a new one in a short time.
