finally pulled the trigger, a 1969 Charger R/T 440 off rubi

welcome to the club. XS29L9G is the right VIN for what you paid for. X for special, S for R/T, 29 for the two door hardtop, L for the 440 four barrel, 9 for 69, G for st louis. so the car is what the badge on the tail panel says it is, which is the first thing most people get wrong when they buy a charger. there are a lot of 500s and SEs out there wearing R/T stripes.

the transmission being two years off does not bother me on a driver and it should not bother you. a 727 is a 727. what would bother me is a wrong block, and you already have the casting number and a date code that works, so put those photos somewhere you will not lose them and back them up. while you are under there, look for the broadcast sheet. on a 69 b body it is usually up in the back seat springs or laid on top of the gas tank, and if nobody has ever pulled that seat it might still be sitting there. i have found two in cars people swore had been apart.

one thing i will push you on. get the fender tag decoded properly and keep the printout with the title in a folder. it is thirty dollars and it ends arguments for the rest of the car's life. a seller listing a repaint honestly is more than i can say for most b body ads right now, so rubi auto earns a point from me there, but you still want your own paper.

i have had my 68 coronet R/T since 1989 and there are two things that eat 69 chargers. look at both of them before you fall the rest of the way in love.

the first is the rear window channel. water sits in the lower corners under the trim, comes through into the package tray, and ends up in the trunk drop offs, which is exactly where your patch panel is. so somebody already dealt with the symptom on that car and maybe not the cause. pull the trim and look at the channel itself. if it is solid, seal it properly and you never think about it again. if it is not, you want to know now and not the first spring you park it outside.

the second is heat. a 440 with the factory 26 inch radiator and a real shroud will idle through a parade in july. a 440 with a 22 inch radiator somebody dropped in during the malaise years and no shroud will boil in a drive through line. go look at what is actually bolted in that car before your first hot saturday, because the tag on the radiator support does not tell you what is behind it.

driver quality was the right call. i put 4,000 miles on mine last year and the fellow down the street with the perfect one drove his onto a trailer twice.

lurker, first post, sorry to hijack. i am 34 and i have wanted a 70 chevelle since i was nine years old and i finally have about 45 saved for one. i found this thread searching for reviews of the rubi auction because there are two cars on there right now that i keep opening at work.

honest question though. is it dumb to buy a 55 year old car sight unseen off an online auction if you have never owned a classic? the only car i have ever bought was a used civic from a lot i could walk to. everybody i know keeps telling me you have to put your own hands on an old car or you end up with filler and a bent frame and no way to get your money back. what am i supposed to do, fly out every time one comes up that i like?

nobody has said it yet so i will. the thing that annoys you first on that car will not be the paint or the transmission. it will be what comes out of the pump at the corner.

the carter AVS on a 69 440 was designed in a world with no ethanol in the fuel. E10 swells the rubber accelerator pump cup, chews the tip on the needle and seat, and a nitrophyl float will soak up enough over a couple of years to sit lower than it should. what you feel is a stumble off idle once the car is warm, then a flooding condition on a hot restart, and then somebody at a cruise in tells you the carb is junk and sells you a nine hundred dollar holley you never needed.

a rebuild kit with a viton tipped needle and a modern pump cup is under forty dollars. do that before you touch anything else on the car. while you have it apart put ethanol safe line on it from the pump to the carb, because the old stuff turns to jelly on the inside where you cannot see it, and if there is still a rubber line back at the tank do that one too.

dwayne, when you get in there, set the float cold and then check it again after a full heat cycle. they move.

i am the guy dwayne hired. he asked me to post the boring version for anybody shopping, so here it is.

i own a body shop and i do pre purchase inspections on old mopars and gm a bodies. what that actually means is four hours with a lift, a paint depth gauge, a magnet, an awl and a camera. factory paint on a 69 b body reads 4 to 7 mils. a decent repaint over sound steel reads 9 to 14. anything past 20 is filler and my job is to tell you where it is and how big. on dwayne's car the passenger quarter read 22 in a spot about the size of a dinner plate and everything else came in between 5 and 12, which is what a car looks like after somebody backed into it in a lot in 1998 and it got fixed properly.

then the awl goes in from underneath. floors, both trunk drop offs, the rear frame rails at the spring hangers, the cowl drains and the lower rear window channel dolores mentioned. i photograph the block casting, the pan rail date code, the head castings, the axle tag and both sides of the fender tag, and i send the customer the raw photos and not only my summary, because the customer should be able to hand those to somebody else and get a second opinion without me in the middle.

people ask me what it means when a seller says no to an inspection. it means no. it does not mean maybe and it does not mean they are busy this week. Rubi Auto Sales gave me a lift bay, a set of keys and a cup of coffee and then went back to work and left me alone, and i have been run off a used car lot in my own town for asking for less than that.

dwayne, that rear main is a seep. keep an eye on it and leave it alone. pulling a 440 to chase a drip is how a driver turns into a project car sitting on jack stands for three years.

i will take the part nobody ever writes about, which is the title and the truck. we bought a 70 road runner off the same site in april and paperwork is my department in this house.

what you want on a car this old is a title in the seller's own name, not an open title that has been riding around in somebody's folder for three years. ours came in the seller's name with the odometer statement marked exempt, which is correct on a 1970, and the county office here took it in one visit. the VIN plate on the dash matched the title and the fender tag matched both, and i photographed all three together before the hauler ever backed up. that is a habit worth having whether you buy online or two blocks from your house.

on transport, do not let anybody put a 55 year old car on an open trailer in november. we paid 1,375 for an enclosed carrier, seven days door to door, soft straps over the tires and nothing wrapped around an axle. rubi lined the hauler up and i still asked for photos at pickup and at delivery and got them both times. and tell your driver where the tie down points are on a b body, because a kid with a chain and a rear leaf spring can cost you a frame rail before you ever see the car.

different car, same lot. mine is a 1970 cuda 340 four speed, FE5 rallye red with a black interior, and it came off the rubi lot last november. i went shopping for a 383 car and came home with a 340, which anybody who has looked for an e body will tell you is exactly what happens.

they told me up front that the pinion seal was leaking, the tach was dead and the rear springs were flat. my inspector found one thing that was not in the ad, the clutch z bar bushings were gone, which is a 115 dollar part bill and a bad afternoon on your back. nothing structural, floors solid, correct block casting, and the four speed shifts the way an A833 is supposed to.

dwayne, your buying story reads almost line for line like mine, right down to the honest ad and the guy in kentucky. i wrote our whole first year up with the actual receipts in its own thread here if anybody wants the e body version. welcome to the disease.

pinning this one. we get a first muscle car thread in here about every week and most of them are a phone picture and eleven people arguing about whether it is numbers matching. this one has a paint gauge report with actual readings, a casting number check, an ad that listed the flaws before anybody asked, a title writeup and a transport writeup, and three different cars off the same seller between dwayne, priscilla and bev.

tessa, if you are still reading, that is what doing your homework on an old car looks like, and it is not complicated. it is just paid for. dwayne, come back and post the summer update once the car has some miles on it. people want your brake and cooling numbers a lot more than they want pretty pictures.