Car Of The Week: 1971 Plymouth Duster 340

Ralph Michaels can’t put a finger on exactly why, but he just had to have that little white MoPar. The white 1971 Plymouth Duster 340 was tired and didn’t look all that great. Michaels didn’t know who owned it, how it had been driven, or where it had been.

But he kept seeing that Duster, and for some reason it kept calling his name.

“I was pregnant with our second daughter — this was back in 1989,” laughs Ralph’s wife, Ann. “We were taking a ride down by the lake and … he sees this beautiful car. ‘I gotta have that car.’ So he stops and puts his business card on the car. ‘I wanna buy your car.’”

“Well, I’d always see it on the drive over to my mom’s house,” Ralph recalls. “And I put a number of notes on the car. ‘I’ll buy the car — cash.’ ‘I’ll give you a car’ … whatever.”

Eventually, the owner cracked and cut a deal to sell the flashy Plymouth to the couple from Milwaukee, Wis. It was a moment of triumph for Ralph, who could celebrate a car-chasing victory and also land himself a fun future restoration project at the same time. And that’s exactly what happened a few years later.

“It needed everything, but it wasn’t rusty,” Michaels adds. “I’ve had a number of these that were rusty. 

“I’d say it was a couple years after I got it, a buddy of mine has a Charger, and he blew the engine at the race track, so I let him use this, because he had a garage to keep it in and I didn’t at the time. And he scratched a quarter panel on it coming home one night and I said, ‘You know what, we need to paint it anyway, so let’s do it,’ and that’s when we took it all apart.”

A lightweight contender arrives

When it arrived for 1970, the Duster was a derivative of Plymouth’s Valiant compact. Both cars were built on the same platform and shared the same front-end sheet metal, but they were different from the cowl back. The Duster came only as a two-seat sedan or coupe. Prices for the new model started at $2,172. It cost $11 to add a V-8, but the high-performance 340-cid engine brought the base price up by $375.

Plymouth certainly couldn’t have anticipated the public’s response to the redesigned compact Valiant as production increased from 107,218 in 1969 to 268,002 in 1970. Of that number, most of the cars that sold were Duster models. The regular Valiant Duster found 192,375 buyers, while the Duster 340 went home with 24,817 customers. 

The Duster 340 had a distinct role to fill in Plymouth’s “Rapid Transit System” — it was the entry-level muscle car for young enthusiasts. 

The Duster replaced the rather staid two-door sedan in the Valiant lineup. Its body styling followed the prevailing design trends of the time, with bulging lines from the firewall back and a semi-fastback roof. This was known as the “Coke bottle” shape, of course. The same 108-in.-wheelbase unitized chassis was used for both models, and both were 188.4 in. long. Standard V-8 for these cars was the 318-cid V-8. The Duster 340 weighed 3,110 lbs. — considerably more than 2,965-lb. Duster with a 318 V-8. 

Doing for compact cars what the Road Runner did for mid-sized cars, the Duster 340 was Plymouth’s low-priced performance machine. It came standard with a 340-cid/275-hp V-8 that had been used in Plymouths since 1968. It again had a 4.04 x 3.31-in. bore and stroke. The five-main-bearings engine had hydraulic valve lifters, a 10.5:1 compression ratio and a Carter AVS four-barrel carburetor. They were also equipped out of the box with standard front disc brakes, heavy-duty suspension and the robust 8.75-in. rear axle. Other goodies included a three-speed manual gear box with a floor-mounted shifter, a heavy-duty suspension, E70 x 14 fiberglass-belted tires, styled steel wheels, body striping and the obligatory cartoon character — in this case, a friendly dust devil.

When it debuted in 1970, the Duster 340’s bottom line base price was only $2,547. Front bucket seats and other dress-up items were optional, as with the Road Runner. 

For the 1971 model, the Duster 340 was given bolder “340” decal lettering on the rear quarter panels and front fenders, a Carter Thermo-Quad carburetor and an electronic ignition, which replaced the old points-type system. 

A whopping 186,478 total Plymouth Dusters were built for the 1971 model year, but only 12,886 left the factory with the 340 package.

Car Life tested an automatic-equipped Duster 340 and found that it could go from 0 to 60 mph in only 6.2 seconds and that it was a great buy overall. The buying public felt the same, which made the Duster a success in general, and the 340 a definite hit.

Nifty at 50

The Michaels’ Duster 340 really only needed a little TLC to make it a decent driver, but Ralph knew it was going to take more than a little cleaning up if he wanted to make it a keeper. Luckily, he wasn’t scared off. 

“I was pretty familiar with them. My wife drove a Dodge Dart three-speed for a number of years… This one needed pretty much everything. It leaked oil like a sieve … The cam plug came out of the block; there was no cam plug in the block and oil was just running out the back. So we pulled the trans, put a clutch in it and cam plug and so on… It’s still the same clutch from ’89. When we did all this, we pulled the valve covers and it was pretty sludged-up, so we cleaned it all up and put an intake on it, valve cover gaskets, a water pump. From there I’ve been driving it… It was originally gold, but it was a factory 340 four-speed, original engine, original trans. The rear end had 3.91s in there, and I put 3.23s in. It’s just more friendly on the freeway. It was originally gold, but I couldn’t paint it gold—  you’d call it a Gold Duster then. It was white when I bought it and we kept it white when we repainted it. 

“We put a new interior in it. Legendary interior. Door panels, seat covers, new foam. That’s a different dash that I put in. It was all easy … I have new carpet for it, new shift bezel — I’ve been meaning to put those in. The wing I put on it. I just had to have it. That was an option at the time.”

Michaels also said he couldn’t pass up installing a Pistol Grip shifter, which is cool any way you look at it, but admittedly only partially correct. “Most people will argue that they didn’t come with a Pistol Grip,” Ralph chuckles. “But there are sales brochures out there that show them as an option, even if they didn’t put them in.”

Among the more challenging bits to replace were the sport mirrors, which Michaels calls “the last two sport mirrors in the country, I think, when I bought ’em years ago.” The AM/FM radio he recalls buying back in the early 1990s. “I bought it at MoPar Nationals. The guy had a stack of them and I think I paid 25 bucks!”

Michaels says he and a friend did almost all of the restoration work themselves. He says it’s a testament to the simplicity of the Dusters. They weren’t complicated cars — even the muscle car versions — and they were affordable for almost anybody who was in the market for a car.

Even as it turns 55 this year, the Michaels’ Duster 340 remains an outstanding specimen that would be right at home on almost any show field. “It’s just a good-looking car. It looks good, it’s clean,” Ralph adds. “I don’t really think about how old the paint is. It wasn’t rusty, which is the big thing. If you have to start putting quarter panels and things like that on it, it gets ugly. 

“But it drives great. It stops good. On the highway, 60 mph, two fingers on the steering wheel, just as nice as can be. And everybody seems to like it. It’s an attention getter for sure. It’s fun to drive. It’s not obnoxious. It’s not hot. It’s just a nice car to be in.”

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