My first car, and my show car, my...

1980 DODGE ASPEN  

(Special Edition )

The car's original owner was an older woman.  She rarely drove it, and never drove it in the winter.  It spent part of it's life in the original owners garage, and most of the rest of it buried underneath cardboard at her neices house.  My dad and I purchased the car when I was 14 in the spring of 2005.  It had only 25,255 miles on it, and it was always ran on synthetic oil.  Even though it was only a single barreled slant six car, it purred.  In this time period of 2008/09, this car has only 29,000 miles on it to date.

Originally, this car was much more sedate in it's appearance.  It was only Baron red, and had the granny Chrysler Corpation hub caps on it.

Of course, after my family got our mitts onto it, it didn't stay that way for long! 

The wheels of choice were American Racing Tailgunners, which people always seem to confuse with Craigers.  The wheels are 15"x8's, wrapped with 225 & 275 Futura's.  Cheap tires for a relatively budget street car.  Being on a low budget though didn't stop me from entering the car in shows. 

The picture above was from its first car show.  It didn't place, but when you're competing against a several babied Buick Regal Turbo's, it isn't too easy to win 1980-stock class.  Same guys go every year, and always place the same.  So as you can tell, I don't show there much anymore. 

I continued driving the car a good year the way it was.  Afterwards though, I noticed the paint on the hood was starting to fade.  So, my family and I started having ideas.  We were considering to have it painted back to stock specs, but I wanted this little boxy econo-box from the late 1970's to stand out, even when placed next to expensive performance cars, such as my dad's old '07 GT500 or my brothers 1972 Cutlass S...

After looking over many different Dodge Aspens and Plymouth Volares, I decided to get the car two-toned... but that didn't seem like enough.  It needed something that provided a little more attitude to the little economobile.  It needed... a wing. 

There were several choices though for spoliers.  You could order R/Ts and Roadrunners without them, but it just looked silly.  The original choice though was a single-piece spolier.  It just bolted onto the trunk lid, nothing fancy about it.   Nothing like the complicated spoilers like those of the Superbirds or Daytona Chargers of yore. 

Later ('78-'80?) models eventually offered a three-piece spolier set-up though.  It bolted on to the top of both rear fenders as well as the trunk lid.  Good looking?  Yes.  Complicated?  Yes.  Expensive?  Definitely. 

Eventually, I ended up finding a decent NOS '76 Roadrunner spoiler in a junkyard.  It was only $150, and relatively simple to install.  It didn't match, but it was getting painted anyway.  

Soon after this, the monster Monroe rear airshocks were installed to stop the constant rubbing of the rear tires against the inner rear well.  Not only did it stop that though, it gave it a pretty nice stance.  Some days though I would be tempted to raise them a little too high... which didn't quite exactly agree with the handling, but I didn't really care.  I was used to it.  

So after all of this minor stuff, it was time to get right down to the paint!  It was time to drive off into the future, and leave the past behind.  Time for a new look!

So months went by, and I checked in on the car periodically.  My paintwork was done by a man named Gary Sidowski.  I dropped off the car in April, and after many months of waiting, was finished on July 4th, 2008.  The same morning that I picked it up I brought it to the parade and caught everyone off guard.  The Shelby didn't get too much attention that day! 

I continued to drive her all of summer without a single issue. 

After finishing all of this though, there were several things I had in mind... 

For my future drive train plans, see page 2

For current events / operations, see page 3