Plymouth Fury 1964 426 Wedge Convertible

Wearing factory Sandalwood paint and a 426 Max Wedge under the hood, this 1964 Plymouth Fury represents the final, sharpest version of Chrysler’s wedge-head big block before the 426 Hemi took over for good. With only a few hundred Max Wedge cars built across the whole B-body lineup that year, and a four-speed stick rarer still, every surviving example gets its paint code checked twice.

Very cool, and very original, 1964 Plymouth Fury featuring a Sandalwood (not Mauve) paint color and a hot 426 Wedge V8 under the hood!

The paint code on this Fury’s build sheet apparently caused enough confusion that somebody felt the need to correct the record: it’s Sandalwood, not Mauve, and if that sounds like a strange detail to argue about on a car this rare, that’s because everything about a real Max Wedge Fury tends to invite that kind of scrutiny. 1964 was the last year Chrysler offered the 426 Max Wedge before the Hemi took over the following season, and by then the factory had pushed the “Stage III” version about as far as a wedge-head big block could go. Only a few hundred of these left the factory across the entire Plymouth and Dodge B-body lineup that year, which means every surviving one gets picked apart down to the paint code. So what exactly made the final Max Wedge worth arguing about, decades later?

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The Last, Meanest Wedge Chrysler Ever Built

By 1964, Chrysler’s 426 Max Wedge had been sharpened into the “Stage III” package, offered with either an 11.0:1 compression ratio good for 415 horsepower or a race-only 12.5:1 setup rated at 425, numbers that made it the biggest engine available in any mid-size car on the market that year. It was also the first Max Wedge year to offer a four-speed manual behind it, and Chrysler built shockingly few that way: just 65 Plymouths and 61 Dodges left the factory with the A-833 stick that season, since the corporation hadn’t had a manual transmission tough enough to survive the engine until then. A four-speed Max Wedge Fury from ’64 isn’t just rare, it’s one of the rarest possible combinations Chrysler ever bolted together on purpose.

One Year Only, Then the Hemi Took Over

The Max Wedge program only ran from 1962 to 1964 across Plymouth and Dodge’s B-body cars, Savoy, Belvedere, Fury, and Sport Fury, before Chrysler retired the wedge-head design entirely in favor of the 426 Hemi for 1965, which means this Fury represents the absolute final word on a three-year performance experiment. That short production window is exactly why a detail as small as “Sandalwood, not Mauve” matters to the people who care about these cars: with only a handful surviving in original, unmolested condition, getting the smallest details right is the difference between a nice old Fury and a documented piece of Mopar’s final wedge-era statement.

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