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WELCOME TO THE WEBSITE FOR DUSTY, MY 1993 PLYMOUTH DUSTER!
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Dusty was my very first car. I got him way back when I was still in high school. (Actually, my mom originally bought the car. She got it because she didn't want me learning to drive in her precious Monte Carlo.) I later purchased Dusty from her.

I have lots of memories with Dusty. I learned to drive in this car. I passed my driver's license exam in this car (and to this day I swear Dusty parallel-parked himself). I took this car to both of my high-school proms and graduation. I drove this car to my first job. I took my wife on our very first date in this car!

I credit three things with giving me a love of cars and modification. First of all, owning my own car was a huge step. Second, Gran Turismo 2 for the PlayStation was huge. It's one of my favorite games of all time. Finally, and I hate to admit it, was the movie The Fast and the Furious.

I started modifying Dusty when I was a freshman in college. The first thing I did was install a K&N filter and some platinum spark plugs. After saving up all summer, I bought the gold rims that are on him now.

It, as they say, was all down hill from there... :-D

Dusty originally had the 3.0L V6. That was a very good motor--it had loads of low-end torque. When I was in college, the motor started leaking a little oil. Turns out several of the gaskets were getting old and needed to be replaced. (At that point, the motor had over 100,000 miles on it. And the only major thing I ever had to replace was the coolant pump!) I decided that if I was going to have to rip apart the engine, I might as well do an engine swap to the venerable 2.2L Turbo instead. I found a donor car with the 2.2L Turbo on eBay. I "built" the motor before the swap, and finally managed to get the motor running well. (Let me tell you, it was a LOT more work than I originally thought!)

And that's where we are today. Dusty is no longer my daily driver (that's what Rudy is for), but I drive him every chance I get when the weather is nice, and I love going to car shows, cruising around, and embarrassing the local rice boys. That's right. I drive my show car. I don't understand how people can put so much time and money into a car, trailer it to shows, and then park it in their garage and never drive it. IT'S YOUR CAR! ENJOY IT!

Anyways, thanks for reading the history of me and Dusty. I plan to keep this car forever.

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RECENT UPDATES

7/8/08

AAAAAAAAARGH! My fuel pump crapped out! I ordered a new one, and a new gas tank, as well. I figure I'll coat the new gas tank in spray-on bedliner to protect it and install the new tank along with the new 67 gallon/hour fuel pump. :-D

Unfortunately, Dusty will be down for a few weeks. :-(

5/23/08

Dusty wouldn't start the other day. The key did nothing, the lights didn't work. But the battery was fine. It turned out to be a corroded positive battery terminal:

You can see that it was quite corroded and dirty. I replaced it with a gold-plated model:

This fixed the problem, and it actually made a bit of a difference in performance. (Having a poor battery connection can hurt performance.) The motor also starts easier. I'm going to replace the negative cable with a gold one, too.

And, best of all, it matches my wheels!

4/26/08

Dusty has left the Ohio!

Here he is in his new home:

4/18/08

Well, it's official. I've accepted a new job back in Frederick, /Maryland, where Dusty and I grew up. :-P I will be towing Dusty back down there next weekend (the 26th).

Good riddance to Ohio and it's crappy roads and ridiculous winters.

3/26/08

It hasn't been 50*F out since last year. It still hasn't warmed up.

Screw it. I'm sick of this cold weather. It's barely above freezing today, but at least the roads are dry and the sun is sort of shining. Dusty hasn't seen the roads since November.

I live close to where I work, so I usually go home on my lunch break. I drove Dusty back to work. I even got a chance to make a riceboy evacuate his bowels.

3/14/08

Well, I think winter is almost over. It got up to 45*F yesterday, and the sun was shining. Unfortunately, there was still saltwater all over the roads due to melting snow. (We got 24" of snow last weekend.) But since it was (fairly) warm out, I decided to start Dusty and drive him around the parking lot. The poor thing has been sitting in his garage for almost 4 months now. Anyways, he started right up!

Now I really can't wait for spring. :-D

12/7/07

According to this website, Gran Turismo 5 will feature over 10,000 cars, one of which is a 1993 Plymouth Sundance Duster 3-door! I don't know if it's true or not, but if it is, it would be really freaking cool to be able to play as Dusty in a video game! :-P

12/3/07

And now it's snowing. There's salt all over the road, and nasty frozen white stuff everywhere. That means it's official. Poor Dusty won't be coming out of his garage until the spring thaw. :-(

11/27/07

I hate Ohio.

It's freaking cold out. Already. It's too cold to drive my Duster. I tried today. I really did. I took Dusty around the parking lot at my $#*tty apartment. But I don't have a heater in my car (it broke a while ago, and I bypassed the heater core "temporarily"). By the time I did one lap (less than one minute), I couldn't feel my hands anymore. So, I pulled Dusty back into his room. I would fix the heater core, but, again, it's too cold out.

I hate Ohio.

11/13/07

ARRRRRGH! Mother &#$)%R!

Right after I fixed that stupid electrical problem (see previous entry), my radiator cap blows up! That's what I get for using a cheap $3 NAPA radiator cap. That thing lasted me all of 3,000 miles. I spent a whopping $13 on a genuine Mopar cap. Last Mopar cap I had lasted 120,000 miles. I expect no less from this one. :-D

11/12/07

Dusty barely started on Saturday. WTF?! I thought. Even with my battery charger, the battery went dead? And after starting, the voltage level was fine, so the alternator wasn't the issue. Still, after running the motor for 15 minutes, after turning it off and trying to restart, the voltage was too low. I tested the battery, and it was fine.

Hmmmm.

I measured the current being pulled with the car off. It was almost half an amp! On a hunch, I disconnected the sound system and measured it again. Less than 5 mA. So, the problem was in the trunk. I measured the voltage at the capacitor (still disconnected from the battery). It should have been around 12 V since it was just hooked up to the battery. It was at 3.4 V! So my capacitor was fried. In the space of 10 minutes, I disconnected the capacitor and 2400-W Power Acoustik amp (just to make sure it wasn't the problem) and reconnected my old Sony XPlod 1200-W amp. Car starts up fine again.

So, be careful of using capacitors in your vehicles! They CAN go bad! And, honestly, they're really not necessary unless you're competing at insane dB levels.

I like the sound quality of the Sony amp better anyway.

10/18/07

It's starting to get colder outside. Pretty soon, Dusty's going to have to start hibernating. That makes me sad. :-(

Anywho, I'm thinking of swapping that racing cam out for a stock one. I'm sick of the low engine vacuum, crappy idle, and no low-end power. What do you think?

9/10/07

Most people disconnect their battery in the winter. I would do this, but it would require re-programming my sound system and discharging and then recharging the capacitor. So, last winter, I just left Dusty's battery hooked up.

And it was dead in the spring.

So, to keep that from happening this year, I purchased a Battery Maintainer from Sears over the weekend. This sweet piece of hardware plugs into the cigarette lighter inside of Dusty and keeps his battery "topped off." It also keeps it warm during the winter.

Unlike most chargers, which just pump a constant amount of current into the battery, this one is "intelligent." It's microprocessor-controlled. As the battery nears full charge, the maintainer puts less and less current into the battery. Once it's fully charged, it only puts a small amount of "trickle charge" current into the battery.

Sweet.

8/22/07

As anybody that watches the news already knows, much of Mansfield and the surrounding suburbs have been hit with nearly a foot of rain and are now underwater. (And, there's more rain on the way.) My wife, myself, and Dusty have been very fortunate, however. Our apartment complex is unscathed.

However, the flooding came quite close. This is a picture of a park about half a mile from our apartment:

8/18/07

I couldn't locate a bracket yet, so here's what I did instead. I took a piece of the old radiator hose, cut it, and wrapped it around the new hose. Then, I used a zip tie to hold it to the front motor mount. That should work fine until my lazy butt decides to make a bracket. ;-D

8/17/07

I talked to one of my friends who also owns a turbo Mopar. Apparently, there's supposed to be a bracket attached to the front engine mount. This bracket holds the lower radiator hose to keep it from hitting the fan. I need to see if I can get one of these brackets or make one myself.

8/14/07

As promised, here are carnage pics of the lower radiator hose:

You can see that the fan chewed through the outer layer and weakened it enough for the coolant to burst through.

8/11/07

I replaced the lower radiator hose. Dusty seems to be running good again. I'll post a pic of the carnage when I figure out where my wife put my camera. :-P

8/8/07, Part II

It's the lower radiator hose. The bump I hit was so hard, it knocked the hose into the fan. Coolant was everywhere because the pressurized antifreeze was hitting the fan and getting slung all over. I picked up a new hose this evening.

8/8/07

I took Dusty for a drive last night. Much to my chagrin, I turned down a road that they had just started road construction on. There were no signs at all. I went over a bump hard. At the next red light, I noticed my engine running a little hotter than usual. Then steam started coming from under the hood near the base of my windshield. Then I smelled the sickeningly-sweet aroma of coolant. I managed to get my car home (I was only about 2 blocks away at this point) and into the garage. I shut the engine down. Steam was everywhere. Hot coolant was puking all over the garage floor. I opened the hood to find antifreeze all over my freshly-detailed engine. It looks like that bump flexed my radiator enough to crack it. It was too hot to get underneath the car, though. I'll have to do that later today. I'm hoping that it's just a blown hose.

I am so pissed. This wouldn't have happened if there would have been some signs up warning about the uneven pavement and bumps.

8/3/07

Cam timing was spot-on. I advanced the ignition timing a teeny bit also. The Dusty's motor is running smoother, but I still only have about 11 inHg of vacuum at idle. I called up a friend of a friend who's a master Chrysler mechanic. He said that it's the cams causing that low vacuum. Apparently the previous owner of the car put some ridiculously-high-profile cams in. I guess that explains why I have so much top-end power. :-P

8/2/07

Arrrgh. So I found out that my idle vacuum (which has been around 10 inHg ever since I got the new motor) is too low. Apparently it's supposed to be closer to 20 inHg with stock cams and 16-17 inHg with the high-profile cams I've got. So, that means my cam timing is probably off. Grrr. That probably explains my complete lack of any low-end power, too. And here I just thought it was turbo lag...

7/3/07

Car Domain groups have started! Do you drive an EEK? Join my group!

The EEK! Group

7/2/07

So I was driving along the other day and hit a monstrous pothole. (Typical of Ohio roads.) Ever since then, whenever I open up Dusty's throttle, there's a thud.

Bad front motor mount.

Ever try to replace a front motor mount using only jackstands? Not any fun. Plus, it's beautiful outside, and I want to go cruising. So, on my lunch break, I took Dusty to the doctor to get a new motor mount.

WOW. What a difference. The mechanic said the previous mount was probably the original from the factory. It took him 20 minutes to get the previous rubber bushing out. That mount had been worn out for quite sometime. The pothole finished it off. Wish I would have known the condition of the mount sooner. It's made a HUGE difference. Since the motor and drivetrain are more stable, more power is being put down to the pavement and transmission shifts are much smoother.

6/30/07

Dusty and I just got back from another car show, Cruise in at the Airport, in Mansfield, OH. There were over 200 cars there, mainly older muscle cars and classics.

One of the coolest things was that a guy with a '73 Duster parked right next to my '93 Duster:

More pics of the show on Page 6.

Go to Page 5 (Mods) for the complete specs on the motor...

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