This shot posted at the Cohort by Foden Alpha really grabbed me. It’s a terrific composition, and the Gold Metallic (I assume, as there were three similar colors offered that year) pops out against the silver and gray of the building and the Nissan SUV. And then of course there’s the name: Dart Swinger Special. Or is it just a Dart Swinger? Either way, it’s very special.
And of course it reminds me of my father’s ’68 Dart, a stripper two door in the same baby-shit lustrous gold color. God forbid he’d have bought a hardtop; the other doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital might have thought he was getting uppity.
By 1972, the standard 170 inch slant six was gone (since 1970), replaced by the 198 inch version. Why did they make that other than additional cubes? Since the 198 used the raised deck block of the 225, now they only had to cast one block instead of two different ones.
First car I drove beyond inching my parents’ 122S back and forth in the carport. When I was 15, my grandfather let me drive his green Swinger (like the ad) on county backroads in Virginia, paved and dirt. Not sure if it was a Special. This was in 1972 and the Dart was quite new. I wish I had a picture!
This actually is my car with my don in it, he didnt know this was taken, its at the wharehouse where he works in Pitt Meadows, in body shop for restoration, stay tuned Pitt Meadows
The 1970 facelift (which carried through to the ’73/4 big bumper) got rid of the two-door post, leaving the Dart only as this hardtop and a four-door sedan, and Dodge dealers clamoring for a version of the Plymouth Duster which arrived for ’71. C-P shops got the Scamp with this body as a consolation prize for losing exclusivity on the hot-selling Duster.
At that point the Dart=111″ wb, Valiant=108″ wb rule only applied to four-doors; in 1974 the Valiant sedan moved to the Dart sedan wheelbase and bodyshell (because the 108″ Valiant sedan body dies had worn out?), leaving the Dodge and Plymouth offerings identical.
The Dodge lost its pillared two-door after 1968, replaced for 1969 by the budget-priced Swinger two-door hardtop.
I heard another story than it was too costly to upgrade the 108″ Valiant sedan for the safety standards of the time.
I don’t think that’s it. There was nothing about the 108″-wheelbase package that would have been harder or more costly than the 111″-wheelbase package to upgrade for safety compliance.
It still would’ve cost more to certify two four-door compact bodyshells instead of one.
The certification process isn’t the big deal. It’s the tooling investment in a very, very old product. Valiant already had the 111″ wb hardtop and Dodge had the short Duster body, so the old short Valiant/long Dart hierarchy had been blown up before 1974.
Not nearly so much as you might have in mind. Remember, we don’t have a type-approval system here. Rebadging the Dart as a Valiant was a cost-saving move, for sure, but safety standards really didn’t present some kind of cost wall. The only difference in safety standards between ’73 and ’74 that would’ve affected the body/structure was that the bumper performance standard now applied to the rear bumper, too, not just the front. Pretty good coverage of this (with an apposite photo I provided years ago when I used to edit Wikipedia) in their bumper article.
All the other changes for ’74 — the unitised front lap/shoulder belts, the ignition/starter interlock, etc — didn’t cost any differently to install in a Valiant-shaped Valiant than in a Dart-shaped Valiant. The other major structural change (requirement for side impact guard beams in the doors) took effect in ’73, and besides, the 108″ and 111″ wheelbase 4-door cars used the same doors.
There were no other structural safety standard changes clear on up through the end of the A-body in ’76, so there weren’t any safety standards written on the wall to drive Chrysler to discontinue the 108″ wheelbase sedan, either.
A 74 compliant rear bumper and likely styling refresh would have had to have been applied to the Valiant’s totally different rear end design, I can see why they consolidated it all into the Dart body. The basic 1970 Dart rear end sheetmetal was conducive to it since the original slanted styling used end caps that could easily and cheaply be reconfigured to blend in the bumpers better, not so for the 67-73 Valiant rear end, which was pretty long in tooth in addition.
I agree making Dart/Valiant the same wheelbase was a cost cutting move. Just as they made the ’74 Monaco and Fury C body mere identical badge jobs.
Car fans bemoan the loss of Plymouth, but from this point on was just a “cheap Dodge”, to where they were redundant.
But Chrysler being Chrysler, they made the 74 C body Plymouth and Dodge only *look* like badge jobs to the general public all while not sharing a single outer door, front fender or rear quarter stamping. All of the expense, none of the marketing benefit.
Shades of FoMoCo’s very similar monkeyshines with the original Taurus/Sable, two cars that looked alike and shared no body panels. Derp!
The 75+ B body would be the better example. Fury coupe = Coronet(Monaco) coupe, Fury sedan = Coronet(Monaco) sedan, Cordoba = Charger (relevant because the Cordoba was intended to be Plymouth).
The 71 B body sedans were like the 74 C bodies, you’d think they’d be identical aside from their front ends until you look closely and discover their very different wheel openings. Ironically, the 4 door Dodge body carried over just like it did the A-body 4 door, which was a mistake since the square wheel openings looked better.
I have no way of knowing how to tell a Swinger Special from a Swinger from this distance. Maybe inside? I think you are right on the color.
After the Duster/Demon/Dart Sport came along, most Swingers and Scamps were equipped better, on average. The true tightwads would buy the cheapest you could buy so depending on whether they wanted a 2 door or a 4 door, the Swinger/Scamp was usually not that car. Vinyl roofs and full wheel covers were not often absent from these. My 71 was quite well equipped with those things and even the extravagance of power steering!
The Special was a low-trim version, rubber floor etc, for people who thought the regular Swinger too decadent.
I’d drive one of these now if i could find one with a slant 6/manual transmission.
While growing up, our elderly widow neighbor had one of these for the last 25 years of her life. When I was old enough, I did all of the maintenance on it for her since she was in our church (and we were allowed to cut through her back yard if we were late for school).
My favorite part was the italian tuneup on the bypass highway around town, kicking it down into second gear at about 50mph to blow all of the carbon out of it (it never got driven on the highway). It was also harder to work on the points in the distributor with the engine leaned over the right side, as opposed to a straight six like GM and Ford used.
For all I know, it’s a survivor car out there somewhere even now. As much as I love old cars, I find it hard to get too nostalgic about most of them because I am old enough to have driven and worked on them quite a bit. And every time I get into a new car, even the cheapest, basic econobox rentals, I marvel at how good today’s cars (even the really bad ones, by today’s standards) really are in comparison. That still doesn’t stop me from really wanting a 1968 GTO 400/4-speed though!
You’re absolutely right—today’s cars are low-maintenance marvels in ways we could scarcely dream of back then. But good god, man, it’s masochistic to try replacing the points on a Slant-6 without pulling the distributor.
Leave distributor in place: an aching back, a sore neck, dropped screws, and you have to kind of do your best and hope you got the point gap close enough to right. Take you 40 minutes or so if you’ve done it before, you’ve got a lot of light, you’re working indoors or the weather’s good, and your luck holds. Double or triple that or more if any of those conditions is not met.
Remove distributor: 20 minutes start to finish, point gap dead-on-balls accurate, and any screws that drop just fall on your work surface.
Preach it, Brother Stern! I learned this method after I dropped a screw down into the distributor while trying to install points with the thing in place. After that day the distributor came out and got clamped in my vice, giving me two free hands and a perfectly comfy height. And with the dizzy shaft free to spin you could get the point gap set to perfection. That was the day my Scamper went from my hardest car to tune to my easiest.
I’ll go one better. Pull that distributor and swap it for the electronic ignition variety!
@Daniel Stern, in all of your slant six years of experience did you ever try what became my favorite mod – a second thick heat shield gasket under the carb?
I tried it at first to solve hard hot starts on my 71 Scamp. Not only did it solve that issue but it allowed me to advance the basic timing by 10 or 12 degrees with no knocking on regular gas. Gas mileage improved and so did performance. The only tradeoff was poor drivability between the time the choke came off and the time it was fully warm. My spring and fall routine involved swapping the single and double gaskets, double in summer and single in winter.
I still don’t understand the engineering behind it. A friend suggested that it lengthened manifolding, but this is a guess.
The correct carb gasket was about 11/32″ (9 mm) thick. I hesitate a little (see what I did there?) to rain on your recall parade, but double-stacking them doesn’t change the flow dynamics measurably or work any other magic, and it makes problems: the choke no longer closes completely because the choke pushrod is too short, and on a car with automatic transmission the throttle pressure (“kickdown”) linkage is also inadvertently adjusted way too short, causing early/soft shifts, lack of kickdown, and rapid transmission wear. There’s usually enough adjustment range in the kickdown linkage to compensate.
A longer choke pushrod can be made from brass rod stock, too, but there’s little point to the extra work. It wasn’t the double-stacked carb gasket that worked any magic for you, it was that timing adjustment. The stock timing settings were very late in that year range, a cheap and nasty way of detuning the engine to squeak the cars past their new-vehicle emissions type-approval tests so they could be legally put on the market. Depending on the engine configuration and emissions package, timing settings were from 0° (TDC) to 5° ATDC, that is after TDC. Compare that to the pre-smog settings on the same 225 engine: between 2.5° BTDC and 7.5° BTDC. Advancing 10 degrees or so would take you from the retarded smog setting to the pre-smog setting, and yeah, you betchya, the engine would run a lot better and more efficiently. There would be no ping as long as the gasoline quality were half-decent, the fuel mixture weren’t too lean, and the spark plugs weren’t of too high a heat range. The only difficulty this adjustment made was too high a curb idle speed. That could be adjusted back down at the throttle crackscrew, but doing so positioned the throttle plate improperly with respect to the idle transfer slot and spark advance port, so it could cause other, relatively minor driveability faults.
Bigger driveability faults were related to overheating of the carburetor because it was directly above the exhaust manifold’s central collector. Blocking off the manifold heat was a sloppy, ill-advised thing to do; it ate into driveability and economy no matter what the weather. The factory issued great big heat shield carb gaskets that covered most of the intake manifold starting in the late ’70s, and that helped some. My favourite driveability mod on a Slant-6 is the fuel line mod to stop the engine dumping heat into the fuel before it reaches the carburetor, and the HEI upgrade makes things a lot better, too.
Interesting. All I can report was that the car would not support 10-12 degree timing advance with a single gasket without a lot of detonation. I do recall that the shift points were a touch different.
It’s completely reasonable that you don’t understand the engineering (or physics) behind an extra gasket suppressing ping because there aren’t any—not really. There is no direct connection (see what I did there?) between the one and the other. In fact the shift points would’ve been well more than just a touch different, and that is pretty much certainly the cause of your not hearing ping with the extra gasket: the altered shift points happened to keep the engine out of the speed/load range that resulted in ping with your driving style and conditions.
If Dodge ever brought back the Swinger nameplate today, I think it would appeal to a much different crowd than the original one did.
What crowd do you reckon a Swinger would appeal to today?
I’m a big fan of this body, I prefer the 67-69 rear end over the slantback 70, but I like everything else about the 70-72 better. I like it even better than the sleeker Duster/Demon. The Swinger name confused me for a long time, as I had assumed they were a stripper performance package ala Roadrunner, but that turned out to only be the Swinger 340 package.
I’m of two minds on that first comparison. Functionally, I like the ’67-’69 rear end; its trunk space is vastly bigger. Aesthetically, I like the ’70-’73 slantback styling much better. Both designs get a black mark in the safety department; the ’67-’69 inward-facing taillamps are shrouded from view by drivers in the next lane, and the ’70-’73 lamps are small, recessed to collect snow efficiently, and easily damaged in the bumper location.
Cool sighting! I prefer the 4-doors over these, but I prefer these over the Duster/Demon/”Dart Sport”. And I like the ’70 Dart/’71-’73 Scamp larger single taillamps rather than the dual miniature items on the ’71-’73 Darts. But with a few equipment exceptions (seat belts) I also like a ’72 better than a ’73, and much better than a ’74-’76.
Oops, I had always assumed the Dart used the smaller duals and only the Scamp ever used the larger singles, and all this time I thought the 70 Darts I’ve seen with them had mismatched bumpers. I agree that the larger singles are preferable, and find the 74-76 kind of ugly, but then again those not helped by the mid-70s color pallet they all had.
On the other hand, my ’71 with its dual tails allowed me to do this what I couldn’t have done with the single-tail setup:
Oh, and also: the ’70 Dart and ’71-’73 Scamp tail lenses are physically interchangeable, but aren’t the same. The ’70 Dart lens has Fresnel optics (central round bullseye surrounded by concentric rings, amplifying and distributing light by “looking” directly at the bulb filament) while the Scamp lens has dispersion optics with the light amplified by the reflector bowl behind the bulb. The Dart lens is the only one that’s reproduced, though, so Scamps, when they’re seen, are often seen with Dart lenses.
The amber inboards look right at home, very neat! I like that it gives the two slots a purpose, whereas the dual reds just seem a little contrived. Never knew about the illumination note either, next time I spot a Scamp in the wild I’ll have to look, if not grab them if they’re at a junkyard.
A very talented lens-reproduction wizard in Australia (this guy) made those amber lenses for me, because reasons.
The original inboard lenses were not stop/tail lamps, they had an outer perimeter red reflex reflector and a very small inner white reversing lamp. That’s why you see the separate reflex reflectors tucked under the trunk lid lip on my car. The previous owner, who had the same ideas as I do about the correct colour for rear turn signals, had cobbled them together by hacking out the middle of the inner lenses and crudely screwing on some amber trailer marker lenses; I had to clean that up. He’d also moved the reversing lamp function to an auxiliary fog lamp mounted to the rear valence panel. Didn’t look too awful, and I never got round to tidying it up; if I had, I’d’ve done up the rear lights Australian style as you can see I did on my truck, here:
The Dart Swinger/Valiant Scamp were, by 1972, the upscale two-doors with the Duster/Demon at the low end. However, you could equip either one with virtually anything in the option book, and Chrysler offered several option packages to make it easier.
My brother had a 1972 Dart Swinger with Slant Six/Torqueflite, thus loaded up. Power steering, power brakes (disc front), wheel covers (the same ones as on the featured car), whitewall tires, remote control side mirrors, three-speed wipers with electric washers replacing the rubber bulb on the floor, radio, air conditioning, pleated vinyl upholstery, carpeting, vanity mirrors, fender-mount turn signal indicators, glove box light, ignition switch light, ash tray light, and an exterior decor package with chrome trim on the bodysides and vinyl roof. It seemed quieter than other Valiants/Darts so there was probably some extra sound insulation included with one of the packages.
This was a “luxury Dart,” sort of predecessor to what came three years later: the Valiant Brougham and Dart Special Edition, which added badges and velour seats.
Optioned with Mopar’s still under-rated today 318 V8 engine, 3 speed “Industry Reference Standard” Torqueflite automatic transmission, the often chosen 3.23 final drive ratio and the other options chosen by G. Poon’s brother, the Dodge Dart Swinger 2 door hardtop was a very solid driving, satisfying, peppy, roomy car.
The back seat and trunk actually had lots of usable space, unlike the car’s competition (maverick & Nova.)
More than a few “Sporty” cars had their headlights sucked out by this properly optioned car.
The 318 V8 gave was within a mile or two of the Slant Six around town, but could still approach 20 mpg on highway driving (if you stayed around 60 mph).
As with so many Detroit cars of this time period, one had to “work the option list” to get the best example possible.
I would be quite pleased to add a Dart Swinger, optioned as I have specified, to my driveway!
I would argue that an A body with a 318 was beyond “peppy”. A college friend had for awhile a 73 Duster with a 318 and a 3 speed on the floor. That damned thing was *fast*. One with a 340 must have been scary.
Agree, J P Cavanaugh!
I’ve owned several V8 powered Mopar compacts.
My ’72 Dart Demon, equipped with the 340 4BBL engine, 4 speed manual transmission and 3:55 final drive ratios (but also white wall Sears/Michelin radial white wall tires and wheel covers) was the ultimate Scary-Fast “Plain Wrapper Sleeper” that mortified more than a few Mustang, Camaro, GTO and Grand Prix drivers.
Unless the hapless “Muscle Car” driver noticed the discrete “340” emblems on the front fenders or the oval shaped, factory issued chrome dual exhaust tips hanging down below the rear bumper; they assumed some kid in his Ma’s slant six Duster was messin’ with them. 🙂
My all time favorite was a ’72 Plymouth Scamp (hated that name!) 2 door hardtop, 318/Torqueflite and about every conceivable option available, dark green/white vinyl top and matching green pleated vinyl seats. It was a more “mellow” car …. but still Quite Quick.
A friends brother in law, who was older then us, won enough money playing poker while in Vietnam, to pay nearly cash for 1971 Demon from Highland Chrysler Plymouth, in GR Michigan.
It was white with a black hood. It was the 340, rated at 340 HP. 4 speed, Carter Dual Quad carb, and dual point ignition. A freaky quick and fast Mopar.
He won trophies at Martin US-131 Dragway for the the stock class.
Scamp was a silly name, agreed, should have just been called “Valiant 2 door”. It never caught on like Duster.
Another thing with names, by ’74-’76, ‘Swinger’ was left over 60’s slang.
“… in the same baby-s**t lustrous gold color…”
This is why we cant have a range of car colors anymore, buyers play it safe to avoid comments from “friends” and others.
One thing’s for sure: it isn’t a Dart Special Edition as these were only offered 1974-76. And they were quite nice with plusher interiors, vinyl roofs and colour-keyed accents. Make mine a 4 dr SE thanks. Saw a dart 2-dr a year or two ago waiting in traffic and it was a big shocking how upright and boxy the greenhouse was compared to modern vehicles. I liked these cars 40 yrs ago and still do.