Here’s an interesting piece of information from the past. It appears that Chrysler had advertised their 1970 Barracuda “4 Door” Cars. If they had mass produced them, they may have looked similar to what we built. Stay tuned for the unveiling coming soon!
This aspect of the project has us baffled in how the Power Brake Booster – Vacuum Hoses were stamped. When we restored the Hemicuda in 2005, we researched many original components and documented them throughout the process. We found an original Hose that had the words “340 E Body” stamped below the main line of information that identified the Hose size. From what we documented, it was printed over & over about every 6-7 inches apart, down the entire length of the Hose. To this day, we still don’t know what the purpose was for specifically calling out the Engine CID & Body Style on this Hose. These Hoses were universal in size and it makes no sense why they would be specific in stamping them with this information. If it was due to the length requirements, why were other “universal” Hoses not stamped with the same identifying information? All of the Heater Hoses (for instance) incorporated the same part numbers and were universally used throughout the various Body styles. Could this style have been a call out for the T/A & AAR Six Pack Cars? One would conclude that stamping a universal Hose in this manner, would add too many inventory entries, on an item that was engineered for just about every vehicle with Power Brakes.
Whatever the reason, we decided to incorporate the “weird” stamping to this Concept Project because it has a 340 Engine and it is also an E Body. It will be different from most of the other E Body Cars that are out there, which adds to the “One of a Kind” mystique of this Project.
Here are a few photos showing the Heater Hoses after we re-stamped them. There were a couple of different Vendors that provided these components to Chrysler and I used a font variation that is not seen too often. They now have the correct Factory appearance that we were trying to obtain. Below are a few comparisons between the originals and the ones installed on the vehicle.