My name is Russ W. Knize and have spent several years putting this site together. After years of owning, driving, and working on these cars, I thought I'd share some of the know-how. There are some tricks to solve a few of these cars' weak spots as well as tips for getting more out of them. You can read about some of my cars on my personal website.
Much of the information on this site comes form other sources as well, and I have documented them as much as possible. My eternal thanks goes to those who have also spent years with these cars and have been willing to share their knowledge. Many of these people post on the Turbo Mopar Forums and a few still hang around the Shelby Dodge Mailing List (SDML). If you are interested in discussing topics concerning these cars, feel free to join in. Also, if you have access to IRC and are brave enough to venture into IRC-space, be sure to check out #Shelby on Effnet. It's pretty quiet most of the time, but hopefully we'll be able to rally more people. My nick is "MiniMopar".
The philosophy behind this site is to provide as much info as possible without interjecting my opinion too much. :) It's hard not to do that and many times I simply have to in order for the suggestions to make sense. Otherwise you just have a big pile of information that may or may not help. I try to make my opinions, when needed, to be as accurate as possible. Just remember that I am only human. The motivation behind this whole project is to document and bring together the plethora of knowledge that is out there on these vehicles. The SDML needs much more than just an FAQ because there is simply too much information out there.
My initial attempt at this site was the "Mini-Mopar Site", which was hosted by my personal provider, then became the unfortunate victim of GeoCities when it got too big and I exceeded my bandwidth limitations. It earned its name after I asked the SDML members for a term that would cover all of our cars. The Shelby-Dodge moniker causes too much trouble (what is a real Shelby-Dodge, etc.). Someone by the name of Ben Boganwright said that he and his friends call them "MiniMopars." It seemed perfect to me, because the name "Mopar" evokes memories of the pre-80s muscle cars in most people. These MiniMopars also have a lot of muscle, but are smaller, more practical modern cars. So, the name stuck. I then found that I had no time to work on it because my college curriculum was sucking the life out of me. Also, I didn't have my car or any decent tools with me at SIUC, so I lost that motivation as well.
After I graduated from college, I decided to start over and dubbed the new site the "MiniMopar Resource Site", because that's what it is: a resource. Now it is simply "MiniMopar Resources". After a very brief stay on GeoCities, it moved to XOOM, which was free and offered no annoying banners, pop-ups, or branding. I moved all the information from the old site into a new format on the new site. I used tables extensively on the old site, which made page loading and rendering slow, and needlessly fattened-up the space needed by the pages. The new pages are much more browser-friendly with simple text and pictures on an eye-appeasing color format with no frames. I hope these pages work better for everyone. After XOOM's performance went down the toilet, I moved to Simplenet which was very reliable but cost money. Then Yahoo! came along, bought them out and jacked-up the prices. Once again, I was forced to move and chose 50megs.com (even reasonably-priced hosting was getting hard to find, never mind free) and bought this domain name. I then got an offer from Dr. David A. Zatz of AllPar fame to host the site there. I have been there ever since.
My initial intention was to create a site for troubleshooting, repairs, and technical information. I began to realize, from the letters I was getting, that were was a lot of confusion over the many performance upgrades available and no one had sat down and tried to put together a complete guide to help people decide what upgrades were best for them. Everyone has their own ideas of what is best and I wanted to give everyone the opportunity to decide for themselves. In order to do that, they need to be given as much information as possible before given suggestions for what is best for what. Gary Donovan's Dodge Garage has become a more up-to-date resource for performance-related information, as he races these cars as a hobby and owns a business selling performance parts. I hope to continue with the original mission of this site: to help people with car problems. :)
|
Return to MiniMopar Resources |
Updated 10/22/2003.
Copyright © 1996-2003 Russ W. Knize.