The last time we saw the 1963 Dodge Phoenix that Street Machine was building to take to the Running On Empty festival, an event in the town of Cobar that raises money for a WW1 monument and has a bitchin’ car show on the side, we saw the teardown, assessment and the first stages of a cleanup effort in getting the early B-body back onto the road, using a 440ci mill and a TorqueFlite that still used the pushbutton system to run through the gears. Mercifully, the car is metal-solid. Sadly, it’s like any other desert car you’ve ever seen…it needs just about everything before the team can take the car to the Australian vehicle departments to get it registered for street use. If you thought your day at the DMV sucked, we can only imagine what those guys fear when they take a car for registration and testing.

Here, work progresses on the Phoenix, which has included a de-molding of the interior, suspension work so the big Mopar doesn’t rattle out some fillings, more work on the engine and transmission, custom made headers, and more. Safe to say that not everything is going to plan…where would you expect to find a LHD, left-side header for a big-block version of a Dodge 330 body shell that fits off-the-shelf? Oh, and in the middle of all this is Scotty’s twentieth anniversary. We’ll mention that he mentioned that because we hope that his time in the doghouse over that has come to an end. It might not, but at least he mentioned it. That means he remembered!