Tuesday, June 27th 2006
10:07 AM
Flogging Molly
is an automotive study.
an experiment on Keeping Your Gremlin Alive In The 21st Century. 
The car is a 1974 American Motors Gremlin 2 door kammback sedan in base trim.
Options are 
258 CID engine, air conditioning, AM radio, luggage rack. Brakes are manual drum. There is no power steering on the car. She is complete and in operable condition. She was purchased in May of 2005 for $700.00, from a friend of mine with the world’s largest Crosley collection. There she was in the middle of this swarm of even tinier, even older cars. I used to think they looked like some kind of tribe worshipping their Auto Goddess. The guy wanted $1500, and nobody would give him anything for a year and a half while the poor thing just sat there in his yard, whispering softly, “Drive me… drive me… yes… drive me…
MAKE A FREAKIN’ DEAL AND DRIVE ME ALREADY, FOR CHRISSAKES!!!” I just couldn’t stand it anymore…
Then I sold one of my Chevy vans, and traded my crapola 86 Trans-AM for a 69 Javelin SST.
I finally had the cash at the right time, and now she’s happy… 
She was originally equipped with a 3-speed manual transmission. After the throwout bearing went out and lunched the clutch’s pressure plate actuating levers,
I installed an automatic transmission from my 232 cid 76 Gremlin Custom, BZL. This car was bought a week after Molly Blue and five miles away for $100.00. I wanted it for the disk brakes and the swing-open vent windows, which are supposed to be very rare. I’m still going to swap the windows into Molly, but this car’s keeping the brakes. Brakes are a direct bolt-in swap among all of these AMC’s. So a disk brake swap costs almost exactly the same as just fixing the drums. I’ll put the later Concord/Spirit power disks on Molly for parts reasons. She’s my driver, after all.
The transmission used in these six-cylinder and 304 V8 cars was a Chrysler Torqueflite A-904, which is internally the same as a 727, but the transmission itself is much smaller.
<— Torquflite Transmission Chapter- 1973 Chrysler Chassis Service Manual at the Imperial Web Pages…
American Motors called their variant of the A-904 and the 727 the “Torque-Command” system.
Molly is a no-frills…
(except the A/C, which really ain’t a frill in Phoenix…)
(Oh yeah, and the luggage rack, AM radio and side stripe were all give-aways to sell the car…),
…common-sense car, perfect for those lazy “two-lane blacktop” tours around the state and region…
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-mike
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Tuesday June 27, 2006 - 10:07am (MST)