so my valiant is in a state of moderate disrepair, and has been for a few months, but now i'm about to come out of school and now have the time and money to make this baby roll. but before we get fixing heres a quick recap of how i got here:
alright, about two years ago my mom was looking to buy my first car and stumbled upon a guy who drove this sweet old 1969 plymouth valiant signet 200 (225 slant 6, white, 4 door, almost all original). we bought it from them right away and it served us well through my senior year, i learned how to change oil and do some very basic stuff in it, wooed the ladies with it. it ran super well through the winters and all the way up til about 6 months ago.
the first thing that happened was the little connector to the horn melted a little bit one summer day and made it so that the horn would sound whenever some internal steering wheel business would touch when i turned the wheel. but we just unplugged the horn and chugged on.
later my mom noticed the muffler was hanging a little bit low, and naturally, as a teenager, did nothing about, figuring the problem would solve itself. of course the hanger had broken and eventually the muffler split, so i just reattached what i could and drove it super loud. (i'm not proud of that).
eventually, the alternator went out, and, foolishly, i replaced it myself. i mounted and reattached it right, but the new alternator was missing what i later found out to be the grounding plug, i got the car running again noticed the alternator output was jumping really high on the reader and again, nievely, i just ignored it. and basically, right around when i went more than 30 miles an hour i blew the distributor and again the car was down.
at this point i was just ganna take it to a fix it shop. but my mom (a school teacher) said one of her student's dad was a mechanic and they would hook us up with cheap work. "what could go wrong?" i asked myself. "alot" answered the mechanic.
to shorten what happened with the mechanic, i was there the first day and he installed a grounding plug on the alternator, which was cool. but then nothing happened the second through sixtieth or so days, despite my attempts to help or at least inquire what was going on. it got really tension-us, and then one day the car was back at my house! and it ran! but when i went to but in my spare key, i noticed he had replaced the tumbler because (i later found out), he lost the key, so he just replaced it, i immediately looked under the seat where the key was, angry.
i drove it around again and fried the new distributor he put in there, cause he didn't fix the source of the problem.
so you've read this far, thank you. that brings us up to about a few weeks ago. i replace the old distributor and the voltage regulator, but that doesn't seem to be regulating the alternator output at all.
now for my questions in what i think is descending order of importance:
also, the distributor clamp he used is for the V8 version of the car, so i need to know which clamp would work for this distributor:
http://www.autopartswarehouse.com/sku/Plymouth/Valiant/A1_Cardone/Distributor/1969/A1303610.html
first and foremost. you tell me which and i'll buy it.
since i replace the old distributor and the voltage regulator,what else needs to be replaced so that i can actually regulate that voltage, or at least not have the output spike when i accelerate.
i saw the guy who creates replica exhausts for the old mopars, does anyone have any opinions about them? personal experience? things i should know about it?
do you have anything i can clarify? i'll post some pictures of it tomorrow, and thanks for any help in advance, also for reading all of this, it was a long post.
