Saturday Night Special Aspen Pro-Touring

IndyDave

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I'm building a 79 Aspen Coupe as a Pro-Touring car that pays tribute to the Chrysler Kit Car short track stock cars from the 70's. I'm taking the frame from a Laughlin Cup / ARCA / BGN chassis and will be installing it in place of the factory frame. I'm on the hunt for a GenIII Hemi to power it and it will be backed by a 5 or 6spd manual transmission to be decided later. The rear end is a Richmond Quick Change that came with the chassis. Brakes I'm deciding which direction to go but I will retain the short track / road course rotors and hats that also came with the chassis. Inside will have a full cage, replica E-body dashboard filled with Autometer gauges and a pair Recaro seats.

The car:
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The chassis:
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The inspiration:
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Darth-Car

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Every home should have one for that quick trip to the corner market.:D
 

M_Body_Coupe

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Excited about the project (potential) BUT your current ride looks to be in a pretty darn good shape as-is...so it is worth it to "dissect" that car?
 

IndyDave

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The car looks good in pictures but it's not clean by a long shot. While most of the body is rust free, the firewall and the front floors are shot, the drivers door needs a patch and there's rust under lead seam where the roof skin meets the quarter. It's also not a real R/T. It's a bare bones /6 car that had the graphics added during a re-paint some time in its life. When I bought it was an abandoned bracket car project. It had a warmed over 318, 727, and 8&3/4 with supposedly 4.10s in it. So it was just one more wrong owner away from heading to the junk yard. So don't be concerned that I'm cutting up a pristine example.
 

IndyDave

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Here are some random pictures of tear down:
A couple of both in the shop.

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Here some more detailed pics of the chassis:
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I started to cut out some of the cage for door opening access and to allow more passenger room.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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Some items from the chassis saved for re-use:
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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.
 

IndyDave

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Pulled the trigger on an engine and transmission for the project. It's a 2010 5.7 with a 6spd manual drop out from a Challenger R/T. 58,000 miles on the combo. Now I need to get my fab on.
 
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