hemigeno's Daytona restoration - a few more tweaks... again!

[Charger-Bodie]

Heehee, who'd have thought an old farm truck would be the star of the show?

I wish the guys who were working on my Charger put in 1/10 of the effort that Vance and his crew are putting into yours. My car was in the shop for three months and they got a trunk pan an two metal patches partially welded in. Yeah, they were cheap but at that rate it would take approximately ten years to finish the car.

Troy

it just goes to show that not all body resto shops are slow hacks!!

[onemintcaddy]

The old man is at $14500.00 + parts at this stage of the game.

[Daytona R/T SE]

A better question: what was the bill for the truck? It gets more attention any way...

  I had people chasing me down thinking I was taking the Daytona to the MonsterMopar swap meet... 

And one of those "people" would be me

[hemigeno]

I had people chasing me down thinking I was taking the Daytona to the MonsterMopar swap meet... 

And one of those "people" would be me

Yeah Chris, I remember!  By far you were the nicest of the people who asked about it.  Some were downright rude, saying things like "Why'd you bring it if you're not going to sell it?"  Ummmm, it's not IN the swap meet area, so why does it HAVE to be for sale?   

Weren't you there when Rudy Ramon tried to buy it?

[Charger_Fan]

Thanks for painstakingly uploading all those pics for us to drool over!
Man, that trunk lid is a work of art! He wasn't kidding when he said he's save it.

The left 1/4 was sure mincemeat, huh? Is he going to try & save as much good metal there too, versus replacing it?  Great progress.

[Daytona R/T SE]

I had people chasing me down thinking I was taking the Daytona to the MonsterMopar swap meet... 

And one of those "people" would be me

Yeah Chris, I remember!  By far you were the nicest of the people who asked about it.  Some were downright rude, saying things like "Why'd you bring it if you're not going to sell it?"  Ummmm, it's not IN the swap meet area, so why does it HAVE to be for sale?   

Weren't you there when Rudy Ramon tried to buy it?

I don't know who Rudy Ramon is    I just remember alot of people coming up to you and asking about it while I was taking a bazzillion pictures of it!

Thanks for putting up with us "Dreamers"

For those who weren't there - here's a pic of what all the fuss was about:

[Troy]

Hey! I didn't know Gene's Daytona had the super rare 2x4 hood prop! Is it a reproduction or original equipment?

Troy

[Daytona R/T SE]

Hey! I didn't know Gene's Daytona had the super rare 2x4 hood prop! Is it a reproduction or original equipment?

Troy

I'm painstakingly recreating that hood prop for my clone! 

[hemi68charger]

Hey! I didn't know Gene's Daytona had the super rare 2x4 hood prop! Is it a reproduction or original equipment?

Troy

Good One.............   

[69_500]

That is a date coded 2X4 I will say.


Saw Gene's car this weekend. The process is coming along very nicely. I think I shot about 250 photo's of the car in its current state. And I can say this, I didn't realize that we were at Vance's shop for close to 8 1/2 hours. It only seemed like 2-3 hours to me. Then again who can resist talking wing cars? And they humored me a bit too they even talked about 500's every once in a while.

Gen I'm going to sit down and take a look at those tapes this week. I'll get back to you and Vance on what I see, and what I think I can do with them. I wish in the future that when a shop does something along those lines that I'd have the free time to tape it myself, and to use a higher quality camera and such. However if the interviews come through that would be very enjoyable as well.

Thanks for inviting me up for the day as well Gene. Good seeing you, and talking wing cars. I'm going to dig through some of my papers on Daytona's and see about those HEMI 4 speed Daytona's we were discussing last night as well. Maybe Dave will chime in, but I still think there are more than 11 that are known.

[hemigeno]

Yeah, date correct NOS 2x4's are hard to come by.  Good thing for me I hoarded a bunch of them or I'd have been in trouble   

Danny, I'm glad you were able to make it up!  Looking the car over was fun, but it was just as interesting talking wing/aero cars with you and Vance.  I really hope you can make something of those video tapes.  By now I'm sure you've seen that the tape quality isn't anything great after all these years (with it being a copied tape on top of that), but the content of the tapes makes it an awesome resource no matter what.  Maybe once Vance gets my car done or close to being done, you could set up the camera and do a walk-through on some of the details that perhaps weren't as covered in the finished state on Chris Sauer's car. 

So, did you put the tapes in right when you got home like you were thinking you'd be doing?  I got home about 3:30am after dropping all the tires & books off at the office.  It is about 498 miles door-to-door from my house to Vance's shop.

Oh, and I'm probably going back next week too, by way of Iowa.  Talked with Dave H. and he's going to help me load up that rear clip so Vance can nab the frame rails and maybe a few other brackets & pieces off of it.  The trunk floor might not be all I remembered it being, and Dave wants to keep the trunk floor extensions.  But, the frame rails are worth the effort to get.  I could see many pinholes of light showing through the ones still on my car, and the remaining metal was noticeably thinner than it should be at all the holes/openings.

It would be interesting to pool the information together about the 4-speed HemiDaytonas that all of us know about.  Just off the top of our heads we were able to name quite a few of the (supposed) 11 total cars.  There very well could be more.

[FJMG]

I remember having a conversation with a fellow in Quebec about the car pictured on page 36 of mapleleaf cars in barns. He remembered the car being sold at Robert Bedard auto as a V2,C6X, blk wing hemi 4 spd. The car was aparently raced heavily after the first owner sold it. This fellow went to look at it in the condition that is shown in the above mentioned photograghs (when it was for sale around 1975??) decided not to buy it. Turns out a mustang guy bought it because it was unique, stored it for years until the garage burned in the mid-to-late 80's. Not sure if I got everything right as I am going by memory, Anybody else hear about this story??? or is the car on page 36 something different altogether???

[69_500]

Gene I did pop one of the tapes in when I got home that night. Watched about half of it. Then yesterday afternoon I went through the rest of the tapes. The qaulity isn't great, but is definately something I can work with. The audio quality is actually worse than the video quality. A lot of echo, and reverberations. Although I think I can run it through some filters, and make it presentable.

The more I watched those tapes, the more I wish that I had been doing video work back then, or that I was in contact with a restoration shop that is going through a very low mileage car now. That way I could document it, and put it on a better quality system. A lot of glare in a lot of the shots too, but he did do pretty good at staying on parts long enough to get part numbers clearly, and such.

I'm still waiting on someone to do the same thing with a 500. Then again I don't know that any unrestored 500's out there.

I made it home a lot faster than I made it up there, that is for sure. I stopped for about an hour at my buddies house, didn't go and see the 500, but just to chat. And I still made it home by 12:06, not by the midnight I told my wife I would be home by, but hey its just 6 minutes right?

[hemigeno]

Today I got down to business and reduced the file size on all the pictures I took on Saturday.  Again, rather than pick-n-choose which pics are "worthy" of posting, I'll put 'em all up.  There's not as many as last time, but still quite a few - that is until Danny sends me that CD with the 240+ pics he took    

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