I have moved on from my 1967 Coronet 440 and purchased a '66 Belvedere from an old man in northern TN about 6 months ago. I drove down from Cincinnati, Ohio to pick it up and drove it all the way back home. I have only slapped some new rubber, new wheel bearings/seals, new front brakes, and a new carb(still new in the box from the 80s lol) on this car. It runs great! Only issue is the dash electric, lights went out, fuel gauge doesn't work (worked when I bought it), and temp gauge works when it wants to. I have tried to mess with it but it's probably all grounding or something. Anyway I will post a few pictures here in a sec.

 

 

Very nice land barge.

 

Haha I figured the picture of my boat on a boat was also a good touch. Mopar inception!

 

I recommend you yank out the dash cluster immediately and go through it from one end to the other. This can be a weekend project, and if you can solder, not very difficult.

The problems these see:

Harness connector/ PC board pins: General looseness/ corrosion in the connector pins and connector, and the pins get loose/ corroded/ break loose from the PC board. You can buy "repop" boards. I re--did the ones in my 67 Dart. Mine were so bad that I abandoned the original connector, soldered pigtail connector wires directly to the board traces, and used "Molex" style connectors from Radio Shack

Instrument Voltage Limiter. Either build a home made electronic regulator or buy one from places like

http://rt-eng.com/rte/index.php/Main_Page

Another IMPORTANT problem with the voltage limiter is the "socket" in which it fits. This consists of brass springy fingers in the board. These may become loose/ corroded, and NOT make contact with the board copper. You must solder jumpers across from the brass fingers tot he copper board.

The gauge stud nuts can be loose/ corroded. Replace them with "nuts, not the speed nuts they came with

Of course either sender, temp or fuel, can have problems, and wiring to the senders. In the case of the temp gauge, the sender wire goes through the bulkhead connector. Read this excellent MAD article on the whys and hows of this problem:

http://www.madelectrical.com/electri...p-gauges.shtml

You can check the accuracy of the gauges by either measuring the sender resistance and seeing what the gauge reads in reference to the following, or you can buy some resistors at Radio Shack and substitute them for the sender. For example, if you buy 4 100 ohm 1/2 watt resistors from RS and put all four in parallel, this should give you exactly middle scale on either gauge.

L = 73.7 Ohms (empty)
M = 23.0 Ohms (1/2)
H = 10.2 Ohms (full)

DASH LAMPS. It is important to understand how these work. The headlight switch gets power to the switch from TWO places. Headlight ONLY power comes off the "in harness splice" (refer to the diagram on the MAD article page, and this is UNfused power which goes through the internal breaker on the headlight switch.

The DASH lights branch off of the tail light circuit fuse, go through the dash lamp dimmer control (twist the ****) and THEN that dimmer controlled dash power GOES TO the dash lamp fuse, through the fuse, and off to all the dimmer controlled lamps.

This is the tiny fuse on one end of your fuse panel labeled "inst". It will NOT show power unless the headlight switch is in "park" or "head."

Of course the PC board can be corroded where the lamp sockets fit, or the sockets themselves loose/ etc, and just plain old "burned out" lamps

And...........the dimmer control itself can be bad. This is easy to check by probing the inst. fuse. If you have power to the fuse (turn head switch **** all the way to left in park or head on) then the switch / fuse should be sending power at least TO the cluster. Look for other lamps like the radio dial, etc.

You can download a free factory shop manual over at MyMopar. Only trouble is that the page numbers do not follow the factory "dash" numbering, so you must "play" with them

http://www.mymopar.com/index.php?pid=31

Der linky

http://www.mymopar.com/downloads/ser...ice_Manual.zip

 

Nice!

I've always like these cars. Clean and straight lines, can be turned into a real sleeper pretty easily.

 

Yeah, gotta fix those electrical issues. Intermittent operation suggests a poor connection, poor connections cause heat, heat can cause fires. Sweet car, any under hood photos?

 

i'm a huge fan of four doors. love that thing!

 

Thanks 440, I actually did make a homemade electronic regulator using parts from RS when I bought the car. I do need to replace a couple of the dash bulb sockets because one was missing and the other (red brights indicator) has one side of the connector broken off so it jiggles around. It used to cause that light to intermittedly turn on when I turned my right turn signal on but now no interior lights work besides the dome, which turning the dimmer all the way to the left will turn it on with the doors shut which is correctly functioning. Just no dash/radio lights. The turn signals do work properly, one is a little slow and struggles to flash off when moving slow but that is a signal switch issue so not really related and I am not worried about that right now. I will check the speed nut thing for my gauge studs. The sending units are good, I have voltage all the way up to the gauges themselves. This should mean that the bulkhead is also working properly? This car only has 80k original miles so nothing is at all corroded, it looks like new behind the cluster. Back to the dash light issue, I was also thinking that the dimmer switch itself might be bad but like I said the dome and headlights work so I didn't think it could be going bad but idk I could be wrong!

--78D200, I agree! I love Belvedere's! After I wrecked my green one when I was 17 I had to have another but I bought the first thing I saw (67 Coronet)

--Mr.4spd, Yes I can get some. I will take some good ones with my tablet later when I get home. Coolant sprayed on the right side inner fender wall so it peeled the paint a bit and it's a bit dirty but overall it's in good shape. I need to clean previous oil leakage off the bottom of the motor and replace my washer bottle :P

--Skwerly, I do too. I have never owned any Mopar that wasn't a 4-door, they're cool cars to own because I think you see more 2 doors than 4's. I'd love to own a '66 wagon!