My '72 Challenger project

I'd taken a few weeks off doing anything in the Skunk Works from mid December till this weekend just gone. First job was to finish off the transport dolly for the Dodge.. the front upright would never work & I could have made the rears work but that would have needed an angled front upright so I did the right thing & cut all 4 off

The new front uprights have a piece of 6mm plate at the top that bolts to the rear most K frame bolt hole in the chassis, the precision bend you see in the plate was added with my larger precision percussion knockometer  

The rears again just bolt into the front mounting of the rear leaf springs

Barring anything going off the rails this old girl should be going to the painters next month, so time to finish off the last few tiny jobs I had left. I've replaced a lot of metal on this car & some of those panels where the locations that Dodge would stamp the VIN number under the paint. You normally can't see them unless you grind back the paint so I wanted to put them back on the car.

I won't bore you with too many pics here, but the front rad support gets the vin on the inside face stamped upside down for reasons. The cowl in front of the window gets them as does the drip rail in the boot, so I marked out the spots & tried to replicate the crap manor in which the factory applied them, I resisted the urge to make them straight & clear.

I also needed to cut the hole in the boot floor for the fuel filler neck to pass thru, I'd kept the old section of floor to use as a template 

Used a hole saw to make the curved ends & then just trimmed out the middle, thought about making the hole smaller but then figured I wanted to match the factorys work

The big rubber boot seals the inside & I'll do something to seal the underside when I finally get around to reassembly after paint.

There is one final bit of body work that I need to do that I completely forgot about, so I'll get to that mid week or on the weekend.

Work has finally started this week o n the old girl, starting from the boot & working our way forward as you would expect. The boot gaps are not where my painter wants them to be, the panel under the rear window is sitting a little too low for his liking & the join between the Qtr panel & the roof will be completely redone, all of these areas could of course be fixed with a skim of bog, but that's not the right way... so metal finishing is the goal here.

The boot lid had an issue with tin canning on the drivers side, tin canning if you're familiar is when the metal has been stretched probably from overworking & when you touch it will pop in & out like an old tin oil can... the fix is to shrink the metal back to make it tight again.

In this case the Welder shrink gun was used

The bare metal work on most of the rear is done, so a good coat of etch primer is needed as we're getting towards winter here now & bare metal won't last long before surface rust shows up

Dropped off the passenger side front guard at lunch today... the filler work is finished on the passenger side now, don't freak out most of that filler will be sanded off when the whole side is blocked back down. He hopes to have this side finished & ready for high-fill by the end of next week. 

Ok, so due to some non car related stuff going on in my painters life he's been out of the workshop for a while & has only just gotten back into working again. as such the Challenger has sat untouched for 2 months now. But I was around with him on the weekend & he's back on deck & back into the car. 

The boot lid & the surround metal needed a good bit of work done to it to make the gaps right to how he wanted them, I've just dropped off the trim pieces that bolt to the back so that he can work that final section to get that right too.

The section under the rear window was sitting a little low & need to be bent up to meet the deck lid correctly with the boot channel rubber installed. 

We've installed the light clusters & the rear bar too to get their fitment right also. 

Hopefully things move on at a better pace now for the rest of the year.

This side of the car is in what I call fulll Luftwaffe paint now... so this is all finished, the plan for this coming Sat now is that I'll bring the bonnet around & we'll fit that on, the drivers side door & probably the front nose too so he can focus on finishing off the other side.

That's the only upside to having way too many projects on the go at once I guess...

I do a bit of Targa/Road Rally stuff too & that takes up a lot of time so I'd actually be in trouble if these things all happened quicker.

A bit more time was spent this Saturday morning sorting the front end gaps & fitting up the front light panel... shes coming along well now.

Given that I might get this car back in a few weeks I need to get the diff sorted, I want to be able to take the shell off the travel dolly & back onto her own suspension & wheels quickly when she does get back here.

To that end I need to clean off the diff & paint it, fit the big brakes & sort out the fact that it now leaks from front bearing.

I've taken the brake lines off, I'll clean & inspect these but I think they'll be fine to reuse 

The bump stop on the snubber seams fine too so probably no need to replace that either 

The seal at the front is propper fucked... it's pissing fluid, I need to do some research to see how easy it is to pull & replace that...

I want to paint the housing so I need to decide do I remove off the brake parts still installed or just mask them off with tape & paint around them... from memory removing those handbrake shoes is a massive pain in the arse as I've done them a few times.... 

Thanks for hanging in there... I know these project are taking a long time, but sometimes my outside of the shed life takes over. Plus I do a lot of other car stuff that I don't consider a true project so that doesn't make it onto this forum.

Once the car is home hopefully pace should pick up... but no promises

Things are moving along... the boot & doors have been painted now... looks like liquid, so happy.

All of the hanging panels except the bonnet are safe & sound at home with me now, the bonnet is fecking huge so it won't fit in the back of my Range Rover so I'll need to borrow a Ute to get that.