Charger donor car. This was a 318 salvage title car that was rough but had no rust. Before you guys come after me with pitch forks, every part removed or cut off of this car was used to rebuild other cars.
The Magnum was a 25K mile car that hit a tree branch that had fallen into the road at night. The driver saw the tree at the last second and ducked likely saving his life as you can see the roof pushed back against the headrest.
First step was to dissasemble the Magnum and section it into manageable size parts. I had to do this because we had shut down the shop and this was now a one man driveway project. I found that by drilling out the spot welds to 1/4 in let me use 1/4-20 hardware to piece it together temporarily for test fitting.
Then the 68 had all of the floor, frame rails, firewall, inside cowl and package tray removed. then any area that was going to tie to the '07 chassis was taken down to bare metal. I wound up saving the top 3" of the inner fenders and the core support to make interfacing to the fenders easier. It turned out that the '68 and '07 frame rails are the same width.
Now came the task of fitting the '07 pan to the Charger. By slicing the magnum rockers at the pinch welds it was nearly a perfect with match with the '68. I started with the rear pan section first as the rear wheels needed to be centered perfectly with the wheel openings. I used this as the anchor point for all other measurements. The '07 has a 5" longer wheelbase so I took 2.5" out of the '07 floorpan just in front of the rear seat and then moved the '68 front fender openings forward 2.5"
Now that the metal work was done it was time to put all of the suspension and drivetrain in so I could start making the steering column, interior and dash work. I did not want to use the modern dash so I had to make the '68 dash fit all of the '07 parts. The only part that just would not fit was the nav radio. You can see how the rear seats needed to be shortened to fit in the'68. I used '07 door latches and harnesses along with the door controllers and aftermarked window motors.
Tere was no room to mount the wiper motor under the hood so I mounted the '07 motor behind the instrument panel and modified the wiper piviots and used the '07 linkage. now I made a mickey mouse sheetmatal dash to mount everything up and drive the car for testing. Primered it black and drove it for several months to work out any issues. Had the car weighed and it came out at 4001 pounds.
Now came the dash design to make it look like a '68 dash but with all of the '07 technology. The aluminum plates for the dash were designed by a shop in AZ and then I made it all fit and created a custom airmanifold and ducts for the AC system. The shop also made the front section of the center console.
Now came body and paint. Also a Procharger stage 2 supercharger system was installed. Car was finished just in time to take it to SEMA. Even got a photo with the lovely Linda Vaughn (Miss Hurst). She looked in the car and said "why the hell doesn't it have a Hurst Shifter in it" !