Here are some pictures of what I am doing in the outer sub cowl area to accommodate the modified wiper assembly and motor mount. The tray had to be pretty elaborate including a removable center section which would have to come out in order to remove the heater core inside the car. This will be sealed and riveted in. Both wells have 3/8" tubing welded into the bottoms sides to provide drainage should water get into this area. The only reason this had to be so complex is because the wiper motor and swing arms are one assembly designed to be serviced from the under hood area of the car. I wanted to keep it this way.

Well nothin sexy goin on here right now just slow tedious stuff. Here are some pictures for those who might be interested in how I am re routing the HVAC ducts from the main plenum under the dash.
The  first thing I had to do was to abbreviate the plastic outlets that go behind the dash outlets and mount them in such a way that they might be serviceable if need be in the future. Once I did that it was a game of connect the dots with some .021 steel. I used this light gauge because it is easier to manipulate small pieces. I laid down a paper pattern for the floor of the duct first then I cut the piece out of sheet metal adding 1/4" to the sides to bend up 90 degrees. That gives me something for the sides to go against. Next I cut out a paper pattern for the side and duplicated it adding 1/4" to the top to bend over 90 degrees to give the top of the duct something to rest on. After making the other side and tacking it in place I siliconed the inside edges and where it connects to the outlets before capping the top.

I then repeated the process for the side window defroster that mounts on the top right side of the dash. I started on the easy side to see how it would go with lots of room. Now the challenge is to repeat on the other side over the gauge cluster area. It's a little tight over there.

Once I installed the modified HVAC ducts I had to fabricate some ducting to bring the defroster air back to the base of the windshield bed. It was a simple angled box with a top flange and some deflectors welded in to hopefully spread the air across the base of the glass. No engineering here just good old fashioned guess work. The only problem with guessing and committing is the possibilty that the air flow will not be correct to do the job or worse will set up some weird whistling noise. Oh well.

These are some pictures of how I slid it into place between the windshield bed and the other ducting and the last pic is of the piece welded up.

To start with on the HVAC ducts I installed the dash wiring harness and the dash face to see what I had in the way of room to work with. With that done I cut the parts of the stock duct work off that interface with the dash outlets. I capped them off and made some brackets to hold them in place on the dash sub frame. There are a total of 4 heat outlets. Two in the middle of the dash and two on either end of the dash. There are also two outlets that connect with the defroster that mount to the dash top left and right. I decided to start with the four forward facing outlets as they require the most room.

Before I could see if the wiper assembly from the donor car would work in the space I now had at the base of the windshield I had to first remove the actuating arms and cut the mount bar so that the centers of the pivot posts lined up with the 68 wiper locations. I had to cut a good amount off of the upper steering wheel stabilization mount and modify it to attach lower in the sub cowl. I then had to make sheet metal closures around the mount and small clearance wells with drain ports for any water reaching the sub cowl area. All of this had to be done to see if I would end up with enough room to install some heavily modified actuating arms. Since I have a lot of items that I need to bench test I made a small box that is just out of frame in the last picture that houses a 12 volt battery wired to two studs that I can easily attach alligator clips to . The positive is hooked to a switch so that I can bump the power to the motor quickly as I knew the swing arms would probably hit a bunch of stuff before I got them to clear.
Since the length of the actuating arms play into the sweep of the wiper blades I made up some wooden mock up blades to see if the swing was in the neighborhood. Some fine tuning will no doubt be necessary but I am satisfied enough to move on to the defroster and heating duct work.

I haven't posted in a while not because I haven't been working on the car but because I have been dealing with some real challenges. After doing a lot of chopping and cutting, installing and uninstalling I got the 06 wiper set up to work. I attached some wood mock up wipers to check out the sweep.

Windshield wiper motor
Well I got really lucky and after some major chopping and cutting I was able to adapt the 06 Charger wiper assembly to the 68 cowl area. I attached some wood wiper mock ups to check out the sweep of the blades. The clacking noise in this video is where some more clearance was needed. I have since cleared those areas and the stupid things run pretty quiet.
Posted by Steve Mirabelli on Sunday, October 20, 2013

The clacking sound in the video is of some areas that needed further clearance. I have since clearanced them and they run quiet now. I am not out of the woods yet though. This is a hot wire set up. I don't yet know if there is a rest mode that will draw the wipers down too far. I may still have some work to do with the length of the pivot arms. I hope not because I am really up against everything right now.

 With some of the dash questions resolved in my head it is time to put that aside and get back to mending the two cars together.The forward lower section of the rocker on the 06 was to fat as it was to allow the bottom of the 70 fender to wrap under and line up with the 68 rocker so I had to cut it out and make a new forward close out piece for the rocker out of .060 steel.

The cut that I made in the area of where the door post meets the new chassis was less than ideal so I had to take more .060 steel and fill the gap and weld the two area's together. Good news is that if this works out I will have a pattern to make this cut a little better for the next one. Next one..... That's a good one.

Well there is a big hole in the inner frame rail where I cut out the four door "B" pillar so that needed to be filled in.  More .060 steel bent up to cap this area and welded into place. 

The problem with car projects is that there are two damn sides so every job has to happen twice. Now I have to do all of this again on the passenger side.

In my quest to get a look at all of the major fitment issues I decided to see what difficulties were waiting for me in the dash area.
The first issue was mounting the dash steel sub-frame. This mounts on the inner door jambs and on the console. With the old body in place it was no longer possible for me to access the mount points as they were now behind the 68 door jambs.  I drilled out some 1/4" holes on the left and right mounting flange and bolted some steel "T" nuts to the back side then welded them on the side nearest the main sub-frame. Once in place I cut along side of them. Once this was done I was able to unbolt them and I had two flanges that could be bolted to the 06 door jambs that allowed me to then bolt the sub-frame to the flanges and the console.  With some relief cuts on the top corners the sub frame went into place with out a fight.

Next it was time for the dash face. I was anxious to see how it would look. I resigned myself to the fact that if I was going to use the stock 06 dash I was going to have to customize the top of the dash to get it down in the car a little better. I cut the top of the dash completely off and will replace it with a much thinner piece of material. This took about 1" of height out of the dash gauge pod area and made the rest of the dash flat with the windshield bed. Although the dash pod is still a little high compared to the old school dash I am not unhappy with it. As of now I kind of like just fine. The real challenge is just ahead with the HVAC ducting and wiper mounting.