Here are some random pictures of tear down:
A couple of both in the shop.
Here some more detailed pics of the chassis:
I started to cut out some of the cage for door opening access and to allow more passenger room.
Now after doing that, I started taking measurements. The original plan was to essentially cut the entire bottom out of the Aspen, jack up the body, and lower it over the chassis. The chassis as designed could be set up as either with a 105" or 110" wheelbase. That is accomplished by moving the rear end forward or back by changing the truck arms between short ones (105" wb) or long ones (110" wb). The chassis has threaded holes for the wedge jacks to compensate. The issue there is that I wanted to stick as close to the stock wheel base as possible which is right in between (108"). I considered just cutting the rear clip free and moving it rearward to the correct wheelbase for the body. But doing that the chassis still wouldn't really fit correctly because of the location of the firewall. Double checking the cage width and height and I decided that it wouldn't fit inside the car well and would look bad. So the solution was to cut the entire cage off the chassis and threw it out.
In the meantime, I started to strip the car. I had someone ask for the inner front fenders and my wife wanted to learn to use the plasma cutter so this happened:
So now I go back to the chassis and begin to take more measurements as well as on the car. The conclusion I came to was to cut the remaining chassis down until I was left with the front and rear clips.
Some items from the chassis saved for re-use:
So now what's going to happen is I'll clean up the clips and send them out to be media blasted. In the meantime I'll finish stripping the body and cut the floor from the firewall to the taillight panel out. Then I'll weld 2X4 square tubing to the inner rocker panels and the clips will be welded to that with the wheelbase being set at that point. Then I'll bend up and install the basic cage to keep everything square.