The Willomet Charger

[Willomet_Motor_and_Fab]

It took me a while to find this forum, but I'm glad I did.  There are great cars and people on here, and I've picked up a lot over the last couple of weeks cruising the builds.

My car - I sold off my 1955 Chevy advanced design truck, and picked up this 1970 R/T about 5 years ago, but have only been seriously building on it for the last 3.  I needed to figure out my direction and plan, and there have been a few changes made as I took apart the car and learned more about it.  It came to me as a roller, sans the factory 440/727, with a swapped rear end and a lot of body filler.  Goals for the car are simple - it's a no-compromises personal build.  It will be built for road trips, the occasional autocross and road course, and be comfortable enough for Power Tour or a trip to the grocery store - it will be driven.  It's also my business card.  I have a small custom fab shop, and this project acts as a demonstration piece, and it's the first thing everyone sees when they visit.  I'm going for a rigid chassis and a suspension that doesn't just roll and rely on one outside tire to maintain grip.

I'll catch up with y'all to get this current.  There's 500+ photos in my Google photos folder, so I'll distill it down to the key moments.



The day I started taking it apart:


Up on the body cart, this is one the last moments the car looked like a Charger:


Originally, I had what I believed to be a solid body and floor, but that turned out not to be accurate as the 3M scotch brite pad and DA would go on to reveal.  I'll quickly admit I overpaid for a primered car, whose sins were well concealed.  This is the moment when I started to figure out I was in for a full on build.  Nothing was going to be easy, and I got my mind right about it.


I sanded as much of the body as a could easily access, and took the car to get the rest of the body blasted.


Back in black.  The rails are relatively solid, if a little pitted, and the floor and trunk aren't in great shape.


It escalates from here.  Let's roll.

David

[Birdflu]

Nice! From one 'newby' to another....welcome! 

[Lennard]

Welcome to the forum.  I love custom builds!

[Willomet_Motor_and_Fab]

Nice! From one 'newby' to another....welcome!

Welcome to the forum.  I love custom builds!

Thank you both.  I hope you enjoy the build.

With the car in epoxy primer, I started to remove sections of the floor and rockers and rails and...like I said.  It escalated.  I braced the internal structure in anticipation of building out a heavy duty chassis.  The idea was to have a rigidly framed unibody, and that required locking the car to a frame table.  I called the guys at US Car Tool, and got their general dimensions for their tables before building my own.





Out comes the floor.



4x4, stacked, with 1/2" threaded leveling feet.





Blocked up, and ready to level.



Next, locking it down, and figuring out how to build a frame inside the unibody.

David

[Lennard]

Beautiful welds

[tan top]

:2thumbs:looking good

Beautiful welds

   

[VegasCharger]

Welcome aboard to DC.com

Great community in here.

Nice skills you have there.

[JR]

Nice work, I look forward to seeing the rest of your build.

When you say build a frame inside the unibody, how far exactly do you plan on going? Are you going to remove the factory floor, and create your own floor atop your custom chassis? What suspension do you plan on using?

[Willomet_Motor_and_Fab]

Beautiful welds

Thank you.  After replacing the potentiometer in my Hobart, I feel like I've really got it dialed in.

looking good

Appreciate it.

Welcome aboard to DC.com

Great community in here.

Nice skills you have there.

Glad to be here, and thanks for the welcome.  I'm summarizing, but I've made plenty of mistakes and learned something from most all of them.  Practice, practice, practice.

Nice work, I look forward to seeing the rest of your build.

When you say build a frame inside the unibody, how far exactly do you plan on going? Are you going to remove the factory floor, and create your own floor atop your custom chassis? What suspension do you plan on using?

I'll have more detailed photos coming, but think of it as a Roadster Shop or Art Morrison chassis built inside the unbody.  Everything is replaced and built new, including about 20% of each of the 4 frame rails.  Custom floor will go on top of that.  Suspension is Magnum Force transformer up front, and Chris Alston torque arm in the rear.

I'm sorting out the next batch of photos, and will post shortly.

David

[timmycharger]

 

looking forward to this build!! Looks great so far 

[Willomet_Motor_and_Fab]

Going back through my photos, I remembered this slight detour of rust repair and rocker exploration.

The car was home to at least a couple of mice.  I found a rattlesnake skin in the trunk shortly after bringing it home.  I'm sure the two are unrelated.





The rockers were fairly boogered up on both sides, but not enough to do a full replacement panel from AMD.  Knowing my general plans for a larger inner rocker beam, I decided to build my own patch panel and abandon the convoluted factory shape toward the rear in favor of something simpler that will (eventually) do a better job draining moisture that comes down the quarter glass.









Just another patch.  Still have to do the other side, but I'm putting it off until I get the chassis to a better pausing place.





One more.  I actually ended up ordering the AMD panel for this - much more time efficient, but this was fun to make.



I would go on to trim the rockers even further.  I did it one small slice at a time as I refined the rocker beam design, which will be in the next batch of photos.



Up next, Rev0 of the inner rocker beam, it's abandonment, and the Rev1 that superseded it and is on the car today.

David

[Willomet_Motor_and_Fab]

From the start, I knew I wanted to significantly reinforce the chassis on the car, but that concept evolved as I started taking it apart.  Initially, I segmented a 4x3 piece of rectangle tubing, intending to sandwich the existing inner rocker between the two pieces of (now) C channel.  That didn't work, as the tubing lost its shape and was a bear to straighten.



I wasn't convinced I could make the chassis square using this method, so I abandoned the design, and went simpler, but slightly heavier.  I press-braked a piece of .120 plate, and adjusted the profile to match the bottom of the rocker lip, adding dimples in line with future cross members.



Small gussets internal to the rocker plate.  Likely overkill, but I took out a lot of the original reinforcement to make this fit.



The rocker panel was then tied to a fully intact 4x3 rocker beam, measuring about 77" long.  These are the centerpieces of the newly fortified chassis, and why I would still call this a unibody.  They extend forward of the pinch weld by about 4", and allow for a large torque box to marry the front rails to the rocker beams.











Next up, tying the rocker beams together and integrating them into the rails.  Sorry for the slow pace, but it take some time to download and resize the pictures.

David

[WHITE AND RED 69]

Looking real good! Can't wait to see the progress on this one.

What's the plan for wheels and paint?

[Back N Black]

Man nice work! 

[Willomet_Motor_and_Fab]

Looking real good! Can't wait to see the progress on this one.

What's the plan for wheels and paint?

Planned tires are a 305/30 on a 19x11 and 325/30 on a 19x12.  Wheel style will be in line with a BBS CH, but since that's not available in the size I need, I'm thinking more along the lines of the US Mag PT.3.  They make a good forged custom offset wheel that will powder coat to most anything in the PPG catalog.  But candidly, I'll be running 26" plywood wheels before any of that.

The car was originally F8 green, and I'd like to keep in the green family if a little bit darker.  I'm still a ways off from settling on the exact details, but a dark green is almost a certainty.

Man nice work!

Thank you.  I'm learning a lot as I go, and am glad to share the progress.

David

[Birdflu]

Impressive 'fab' skills! 

[Willomet_Motor_and_Fab]

With both rocker beams in place, it was time to start reconnecting the rails to the rockers.  They'd been apart for 18 months while I worked on two large client projects, and that time really helped me figure out how to integrate this new rectangle tubing assembly into the factory 14ga rails.  In short - overlays and frame plating.

Both rockers were level and square and held in with dozens of tacks in the plug weld holes and along the bottom of the rocker.  I favor using a lot of small tacks to hold things together and in square prior to burning it all in.  I measured across the pinch welds way back before disassembly, and took a lot of other dimensional notes so everything would go back together as original.  It didn't take much finessing to hit the 62.25" from the outside of each pinch weld, and the 4x2 crossmember captured and held the dimension.





The new floor profile requires both front and rear rails to be trimmed.





Again, 4x2s slide into the newly cut rails.  Overlay plates and some internal gussets will make the 14ga sections more closely match the torsional rigidity of the .120 tubing.


4x4s close out the torque box shape.



Burned in, and I'll blend these later as I start integrating the rear overlay plates.





Next, integrating the rocker beams to the rails.  We're getting close to caught up.

David

[gtx6970]

Some killer fab skills.

Damn nice welds to I might add

[67440chrg]

Your work looks great! Keep it up. Thanks for posting it. What are some of your other builds you have done?

[Willomet_Motor_and_Fab]

Some killer fab skills.

Damn nice welds to I might add

Hey, thank you. I'm always learning more as I go, and I'm fortunate to have a good network of coaches and mentors.

Your work looks great! Keep it up. Thanks for posting it. What are some of your other builds you have done?

Appreciate it. I have one more batch of photos to catch up, and we'll be current.

I've done quite a few small fab projects - bumpers, garage doors, a mailbox, etc. Prior to the Charger, I built my suburban over the course of 20 years, but it was never down for too long. This car is my first "from scratch" build, and it makes me want to do more. I'll probably build my wife a tri-five next.

David

[Willomet_Motor_and_Fab]

With the rear of the chassis welded and tied to the frame rails, I started work to duplicate up front.

Torsion bar crossmember is out, firewall removed, and ready to start templating torque boxes.


Torque box cutaway.


Blended, ready for install.


Rails are trimmed flush with the boxes, and just a small amount remaining at the bottom.


Burned in.


Each box is 5x4.


From stem to stern, the chassis and rails are all connected again.


Next, frame plating.

David

[CDN72SE]

Very nice, love to watch this type of build, very interesting.

[Willomet_Motor_and_Fab]

The front frame expansion is intended to improve the beam strength between the shock towers and the torque boxes.  Rather than fabricate new rails, I took a page from the dune fab playbook, and designed overlay plates to improve the 14ga sheetmetal rails.

First overlay plates on front outside rails.  Plug and perimeter welds will make these act together as one.


I take time to make sure that the rails are smooth and level before applying these overlay plates, which means lots of small TIG welds to fill pick marks and other imprefections.  Details like this matter to me.


Inner rail flange trimmed and TIG welded.  Now ready for the interior plate.






One more plate connects the torque box to the shock tower, and that's what I'm working next.


There we go.  All caught up.  I'm back out in the shop fitting the passenger interior plate, and future updates will be real-time.

David

[moparstuart]

    WOW

[Lennard]

That's going to be a rigid and BEEFY Charger.