74 Challenger Canadian Restoration

[daaboots]

Safety first!




Most of the trunk pan is gone now.




I cut some holes in the floor pan so I could get a good look at the inside of the frame rails. I'm gonna sand blast this weekend, but It looks like I'll only need to replace the rails in the trunk area.

[anlauto]

The world's largest snowball

[Ifixmycarmyself]

Amazing work you are doing and thanks for uploading pics!

[daaboots]

Here's the next video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C-1YHd55n8

[twalker]

Good work man.  You're doing it right.  Although your daughter with the hammer on the new quarter scared me!  Hope she doesn't try that after its painted!!

[roadman5312]

Dedication and determination.  Awesome work sir. And I bet your little one has some great stuff for show and tell at school.

[soundcontrol]

Nice work and great videos! Watched them all today. Same crappy weather as here in Sweden.

[74 challenge]

Very nice work!

Quite envious of your project and hope to see it on the local car show circuit soon!

[daaboots]

Thanks everyone. It will be a while before I hit the car shows with this old car. Yeah I wasn't sure if the little plastic hammer would cause any damage, but it seems to be ok.

I've had a change of heart and I'm going to try and repair the frame rails instead of replacing them. I have the patch cut out and I'm working on restoring the leaf spring mount area. It's a mess but I think I can pull it off.

[soundcontrol]

I always wanted to look inside my framerails also, and possibly clean and treat them, never even had the drastic thought of cutting the floor open to look though  .

[daaboots]

Well I had a bit of a change of heart. I'm going to attempt to repair the frame rails. If I screw things up, I'll just buy the repair sections. If I pull it off, I'll save about $600. I welded in some brackets to hold things in place and then cut out the old patch and the leaf spring mount. I'll fix up the spring mount and then graft it back into the frame rails.














I tried sand blasting the inside of my frame rails, but my compressor really doesn't have enough CFM and the tip kept freezing up. Here's what I managed to get done to the rails.

[Topcat]

Major job you're doing. Looking great!

As far as the blasting: Forget the Black Magic media.
Switch over to Aluminum Oxide.

Also get a Heavy duty filter. The Harbor Freight one worked good enough.
http://www.harborfreight.com/industrial-air-filter-regulator-68247.html

I've used it numerous times painting and sand blasting with great results.

[Gumby]

Get it cleaned up for a weekend cruiser - to this? Thankfully you got it and are taking the right steps to save it.

I wish I had your skills. The pics and the vids are great! you are cheating though. most of us don't have little "helpers", lol. Even for little stuff.
 Best of luck.

[brads70]

    Wow your ambitious that's for sure. If it were me I'd just buy a new frame rail and sleep better about it. Actually if I remember right Dave at Roseville sells/can get assemblies  to suit this? 

[daaboots]

Yeah it quickly went from "do it good enough" to "well, might as well do it right". Oh well. I'm enjoying the work and learning lots.

I was going to just get the new frame rails, but after looking at it for a while I'm pretty sure I can fix it myself and save a bunch of money, money i'll need for other things that I can't fix.