Thanks for the pictures.

Your welcome! Us guys are having another car day this Saturday and will be doing some test fitting of the fiberglass pieces, possibly the tailgate, and then all of that off again and batten down the bed position if things are looking okay.

So, we had a pretty good day on Saturday. We are now about 74 man hours in on the build so time wise I wish we were further however most of that is my own doing. We are taking care of a lot of the stuff I would ordinarily leave to the end of the build. Notice the cut-in speaker baskets with all of that wiring lengthened. Whoops! You can't notice those, we covered them up with the panels! My tail lights are also fully wired in and ready to go as well. These pic.s show the 3 piece rear roof surround in place just with self tapping screws for the moment. This allowed us to just hang those rear quarter/bed panels. Man, I've got to say....compared with the kits of old this thing is light years ahead. Those big panels there are just "hanging" and look how they fit. We'll be using both adhesives and rivets when it comes to the final mounting. For now we just kind of hang everything and make sure we are ready to rivet down the bed. And, yes, that's next.

Darrel, I'm enjoying following along. Even started looking for a Charger of my own. Who know's, maybe the next project....

BTW, thought if I looked hard enough in your pictures I might find something interesting. I did!! On your post of May 13th, saw the nose of a really good looking Fiero sticking out in the background! What a great car!!!
Mike

So welcome aboard, Mike..... And, yes, I'm tight for space so the Fiero is right there next to the Charger. We've done all most all of our work outside because of the space consideration. Thinking about "testing the water" with putting the Fiero on ebay. One too many cars right now (like I'm telling you about too many cars) so we'll see.

Well, we managed to get in a full truck day despite the crazy turnaround in the weather here. We had been in the 80s with not too much rain, then we have a dip last night, rain kind of out of nowhere, and just around 70 today. Started working in the shop with the heater on and moved out into the sunshine by 11 or so.

So first, I dressed out the fiberglass mounting tab that runs across the rear window top. That's that long black bar thing in the pic. I used 521 epoxy with microballoons (the correct terminology is ceramic microspheres) and carbosil. This got me a nice paste that didn't move much, shoved that into place and used 2 self tapper screws to get my alignment. We have been using the 521 in our wood and metal restoration for about 6 months now. We like it because although it sets up in 10 to 30 minutes it cures a little slower than our old system. This was great doing this header that way because we go back in this morning and rivet across that roof section without breaking any of the epoxy bond. I'm thinking I might carve up some foam to form a slight wing lip to go right over all that with fiberglass. That would allow me to feather the fiberglass attachment further out and reduce the chance of any movement because of the dissimilar materials.
We next pulled those fender boxes back out, doped the interior flanges with structural adhesive and then riveted that all back in. Rivets were then done to the flat flanges into the floor supports.

I already had the Ranger tailgate laid out for assembly so the guys jumped on that and I started mounting the tailgate receiver, cables, and hinge points. After we got the tailgate pretty much where it needed to go and operating we threw the sides back on, aligned so we could go back and set up the roll pan. We then added the cab side fiberglass wings and used the 521 again with rivets. I just need to pick up a few more screw for my tailights. So where are we???? Well, the "build" is just about done. I mean, we might have a few hours of misc. riveting, structural adhesive, door flapper mount, but I'm thinking we are about ready for fiberglass, bondo, glazing putty, etc., from here out.
So take a look and see what you think.......

Wow, you are going to town on this one.
Amazing progress. I guess that is a testament to the kit's quality or is it just your experience making it look easy?

Trust me.....it's a combo....48 years of crapping stuff together does improve your skills. And yes, there's the kits. I can remember sides and flanges being off by an inch or more and instructions like.... "Make sure the body is aligned so it goes down the road straight." And, I give a lot of credit to both Riley and my grandson, Dalton. They have both grown up in environments that revolved around problem solving and quite literally "Git er done." I do really like this Smyth kit though and the fact it is on a car as large as this Charger. We are about 94 total man hours in now so all and all I'm pretty pleased....

That's a really fast custom build I could see a Guy being able to make a little money with those.

Yep, great minds on that Dennis.....might consider picking up one of the police specials for next winter. They are in the $2000 to $5000 range. A little easier build since you don't have the side curtain air bags to deal with and you could throw in maybe some nice sport seats. We've got a local salvage yard that immediately pulls sport seats out of higher end cars and racks them up inside a warehouse. Everyone that has seen this build in person likes the profile/lines of it.