Body Dampers

Q: Body Dampers

What are the body dampers (cocktail shakers) use for found in the trunks of 1967s and 1968s?

A: I heard an interesting history of the cocktail shakers:

When Pontiac was given the Camaro chassis to make their Firebird from, their engineers were unhappy with the way the Camaro convertable would shake around at speed. It was late in the development cycle for 1967 so they had to make a quick fix. They used a classical mechanical engineers solution of putting in dampers. They are a weight penalty, but worked very well. I think Chevy saw that solution and started putting them in Camaros too. I quess that today these little known canisters with weights and springs stand as a tribute to the superiority of Firebird over Camaro!

A: Concerning vibration dampers. Front dampers weight 25 pounds while the rear dampers weight 50 pounds each and are attached by three bolts. In the trunk there is a support brace between the trunk floor and the trunk gutter (there is re-enforcing frame work under the edge that the brace welds to. One bolt goes through the support brace and the other two go through the trunk floor. Under the trunk floor there is a thick steel plate the has nuts welded to it for damper attachment…usually the nuts are rusted away. Im not sure if the 1968 mountings are different.

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