My 73 Cuda Challenge

[Maclbs]

Hey All, I've been a member here for few years now and it has been and outstanding source of good information for myself and I'm sure many others. I'm starting up this thread kind of backasswards because my car is finished and l am on the road and enjoying the hell out of it already. :burnout. I see so many great build threads on this site that I thought I would share my trials and tribulations of my build with you all. I hope you guys and gals will take a look at it, criticize, applaud, inform and teach, as honestly as I see you all do throughout this website. I have noticed their are a number of people starting builds at this time and maybe they will get some do's and don'ts out of this.
I guess I will just start this from the beginning with the tear down at my house back in June of 2013 not knowing that this would by far be the easiest thing I would do for the next 2 years ( and the cheapest ). I am very much a novice to the car world so this was a huge undertaking for me as I'm sure you all will see as this thread goes on.
I bought the car for my son back in 1998 for 2,500.00 from a neighbor across the street from us. He was asking 4,000.00 so I sent my son over there with 2,500 and he returned a couple minutes later with no car. About 10 minutes later, a knock on my door and my neighbor and his pregnant wife were standing there with her saying they would accept the 2,500. Felt a little bad, but not too bad and now my son had his first car for high school. Sometime in his senior year he slid into a curb and broke the manual steering box and so began the usual story of and old muscle car parked for years in the side yard. We worked on it sporadically over the years, added power steering, a little wiring work but it was obvious we would never turn it into a nice driver at this rate so it sat until I retired and got real ambitious. Don't have any good before pics, but have a lot of the disassembly.
I'll continue to add to this as time allows. Super bowl Sunday an all, go Broncos. I know I just lost half of you.
So with the help of a lot of pictures, here you go..........
OK pics are too big to load, I'll figure it out and get them up   :villagers

[Lbs]

Ok, I hope they come up now!

[shawge]

Looking good.  My car came with the same wheels when I bought it in 1988!

[Lbs]

So, June 2013 I started the tear down and the bagging and tagging and photographing. As good of a job as I thought I did with that, if I do another restoration I could do a much better job. Pictures, pictures, and more pictures.
And finally this pile of stuff...

[Lbs]

So after taking every nut and bolt apart it was time to take it to East Bay Customs and get a little sand blasting done so we could find the extent of the metal work that would be needed.

After we arrived and they looked it over, they decided to blast the perimeter and some suspicious areas to locate the hidden trouble.


Some of this bonds was as thick as a finger or thumb, yikes

[70chall440]

is that bondo or some type of foam? it needs to go regardless.

[Lbs]

Haha, I'm pretty sure it was just sand blasted bondo, but you can be sure.....it's gone.

[70chall440]

whoever did that must have got bondo on sale... I have seen a number of cars that had a lot of bondo and when you got it off, there really wasn't much underneath it to warrant it in the first place.

[Lbs]

I was going to tell you that.......it didn't even have a dent on it. I think it was hung so poorly that they evened everything up with bondo.

[70chall440]

LOL amazing is it.. Had a Challenger once that had about the same amount of bondo on the doors right behind the fenders; found out the doors were not adjusted correctly so they made up the difference with bondo. All the metal was nice. Of course I have seen a lot of the exact opposite as well; lots of bondo w/o any metal underneath...

[Mpdlawdog]

 

[Lbs]

My car has been a California car it's whole life so I was pretty lucky with the amount of metal work that it needed. But that is not to say it didn't need some repairs as these next pictures will show.
Their were also plenty of dents to pull out, and small holes to weld up and holes and other minor repairs on the bumpers to take care of.

[Lbs]

So to start with the deck lid had a fiberglass spoiler on it, and when I removed it I couldn't see any real damage to it but after media blasting  it showed a different story.


We talked over whether to repair the sheet metal or just replace it.


We decided it was going to be too expensive to repair it so I bought and AMD repop. Their was still a long way to go and I didn't want to spend all my money at the beginning.

[Lbs]

With the deck lid in place we moved on to the rear quarter panels. They weren't horrible, just the bottom rear section on both sides needed some new sheet metal.

So we cut out the see through stuff then sand blasted the inner fenders, epoxied them and hopefully protected them for another 50 years.








Found a little bit of stuff rattling around inside my quarters. Be nice to have that out of there.

[73440]

Hey, you found a Fratzog !