I decided to look at the 06 frame rail to see if I could eliminate at least the 1" pinch rail at the bottom to help the body profile. I have decided to accept the 2"  hanging below the stock rocker as this is only a little more than stock and helps me retain a sleeker body profile. Whether I go with the original paint scheme or the yellow and black the pinch rail will be blacked out.
After reinforcing the rail to the inside with .060 and welding up the inner at the front of the rail I cut the 4 door post base off level with the top of the rail.

The one thing that DID actually seem to work out in my favor was the height of the 06 package tray. I did not have to cut it out and re position it as I have seen done on stock Charger bodies. This of course is due to the high window on the Daytona plug. This might not seem like a big deal but in order to place it at the same level as the stock Charger dutchman panel you have to cut 3" out of the back seat support. No big deal until you have to cut down and re apholster the seat itself.

The only thing is by the time I mount the seats you probably won't be seeing much out the back window. That's what side mirrors are for any way.

Well I have started to weld both halves together and set the car down to see what it looks like. I think it will be fine once I lower the front suspension.

So this is what I am thinking now. I am favoring the matte black hood inserts.

Well I did a little more mock up work . I made some rocker extensions and hung the left front fender to see if everything would work together. I am pretty happy with everything at the moment. The proportions don't look to bad. As for the rake angle I found some aftermarket adjustable coil over shocks that will allow me to wind the front down another 2" if I want to . This should get me pretty close to where I want to be. Well it's time to take off all the fun stuff and get back to the boring work that takes a lot of time but doesn't look like you did anything. Nature of the beast.

Well I took the day off yesterday and visited some friends in South Carolina and put some space between me and my disappointment with the body height issues. Time to make the best of things so it is as low as it is going to go which is 2" higher than I wanted it to be. I plan to blend the rocker in. It has as much front to rear rake built into the body as was possible which is none since the hood with the inner liner removed is about 1/4" away from the manifold and bottomed out on just about everything in the engine compartment. I tried setting the hood and nose in the stock location front to rear and the darn thing looked too stubby so I pulled it forward 2". I may pull it back just a bit but this is the anti F & F car right now. 2 inches longer than a stock Daytona.

Well the excess metal removal on the 06 continued getting down to the final pinch weld flange. I did not need to get into removing the windshield bed at this time but since I was cutting stuff off I decided to rough trim the area down 3".

Once I got the frame rails boxed in on the 68 with .060 steel it was time for the good stuff. Lowering it down to see how everything was going to fit.

Once I got the body down low enough I made the pinch weld on the 68 parallel with the bottom of the pinch weld on the 06. This allowed me to see what I had to do in the way of correcting my rough cut on at the door hinge post. I will first correct the angle the cut off  increasing amounts until the rear wheel hole looks visually correct.  I hate to leave it there but I won't get a chance to work on it again until the weekend.  I don't usually work on this project during the week as there are too many distractions but there was finally something to get excited about. 

Once I got the body off of the frame it was clear to see some areas that needed some more work . I ended up replacing the rear right side upper wheel opening. Took some time to go over and clean up some rust issues I couldn't reach also. I cleaned and treated the inner rockers and added a new pinch weld flange in a location that would be plumb to the door sill pinch weld as the new car chassis has this arrangement. So weird that the distance between the door sill pinch weld  on the 68 is the same width as the 06 Charger. I am not complaining. The pictures show the added flange which is stepped 1/4 inch and over laid on the inside of the rocker and counter welded on the outside. This will be seam sealed. The picture of the right side of the car and the completed flange show it dipping down at the back. This is an intentional little custom tweak I hope looks good in the end. It mimics the old Nascar flared quarters.

The first picture is of the inner rocker rust primed. Kind of working back and forth on the old and the new right now. I hopped over to start clearing the rest of the material that would be in the way on the new chassis. Some of this is a rough guess from measurements as I will have to see where the exact interferences are as I lower the shell down on the new chassis. 

Old time hot rod guys probably never had to clear expansion foam out of the frame rails. The stuff gets everywhere. The last pic is the frame rail cleared down to where it is plumb and the new shell will be able to slip over it. Sounds easy anyway.

Well time seems to really fly these days. In a couple of weeks it will be 1 year since I went down to Georgia to pic up my 68 Charger shell for this project. I saw a discussion on another thread about the cost of these projects and did a little cypherin' my self. I was feeling pretty good about how much actual money I had spent on the project thus far and then I started to calculate the hours. I started to work in earnest on this thing in January of 2013 and as you can see I still have a long way to go. Conservatively I would say that I spend about 12 hrs on average a week working on it so thus far that comes to about 700 hrs give or take. Now if you calculate a low shop rate of about $50 per hour that is about $35,000.00 worth of labor. I could have saved a lot of time by buying AMD replacement sheet metal but that would have been real money I would rather spend on things I know I can't do. So the way I am figuring if you wanted to go into business building these things you could build them for about $100,000.00 and sell them for about $50,000.00. That fits in with all of my projects in the past which are based on the theory of negative profit.

There are still lots of annoying little rust repairs that I am having to make. Here is the right side door pillar at the base of the "A" post.
Also I removed the center supports in the roof to clean the surface rust under them. Here they are ready to be re installed.

And we have lift off. I was hoping to have a 2 post lift installed before I got to this point but monies a  little tight so the redneck method will have to do.