I was given this car for free so it became a science experiment to see what we could build with junkyard parts. The car body was really straight but the floors, rockers and body mounts were all gone. We fabbed replacements for the damaged parts. It had the grill and all of the trim that was in great condition. It had a Volare transverse torsion bar front end mounted on custom front frame rails in front and relocated leaf springs in the back with a narrowed 8 3/4 in the back. We made the tooling to narow the rear housing so this was also a test rig for that effort. We put in a cast crank 440 pulled out of a truck at the junkyard and did an aerosol overhaul. It wound up getting several different intake combinations as I had several at the shop to play with. The six pack was the most fun as it had an incredible sound at full throttle. We then took apart a wrecked 2000 Chrysler Concorde and used the interior, dash, wiring harnesses, fuse blocks and center console in this car. This was the first time we experimented with a modern interior on an old car and although it took some real effort to make all of the gauges work it proved it could be done. We chopped the top to give the car some better lines. We took 6" out of the back and 4" out of the front to give it the look we wanted. I drove it like you see it for a long time and it was still one of my favorite cars ever. I ran out of talent and time when it came to finish the rear window, but I sold it to another builder who finished the car and I believe has it to this day.

This was the donor car that all of the interior and electrical parts came off of. I got the entire car so I could experiment with the functional systems before trying to connect them to the '51. The AC box was a task. Pretty steep learning curve but it opened a lot of doors for future builds.

These are photos from the chop top effort. It came out pretty good considering I had no idea what I was doing.

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