Hey Andydodge! I've been looking at those aussie '54 diplomat Desoto's and would love to get one of those grills to bolt into the plymouth just to mess with people.
But yeah frame swaps can be weird looking in my opinion. So one of the goals with this project is to maintain the old styling on the outside...ie interior, stock looking wheels etc. I would like it to pass as fairly stock to the average person.
That being said this car was a little bit of a basket case but had really good bones. The fire wall and tranny tunnel were already hacked up, I think from the engine rebuild. The floors are also rustier than I originally thought considering its a SoCal car. It looks like they put layers of goop(tar like substance? and RTV?) to fix it some time ago, put outdoor carpeting on top of that and then the original rubber floor mats on top of that. So I do know it had a broken mostly missing windshield and passenger side front window. so that being said the firewall, trans tunnel and front floor pan will need to be fabricated regardless. The original rubber floor mat is in really good shape so I will be reusing that for sure!
I'll be adding some pics in the next few days but to your point Andydodge we are grafting the front suspension of the ranger to maintain the stock wheel base. I've seen plenty of frame swaps where the front wheels are too far forward. Thats a hard nope for me on this. The other goal was to be able to run stock wheels without clearance issues. We test fitted the stock wheels while the ranger frame was in the yard still. One of my goals to is to have the ability to put stock wheels because I live in Los Angeles and there is a certain market for old looking cars in TV and Film...so maybe with this build it will get it a job before I do. So just doing a disk brake upgrade makes the front too wide and some kits don't allow for stock wheels.
So we've spent the last 3 days marking out the floor of the shop, checking measurements against what the stock "advertised" wheel base and getting it all square. There is nothing that bugs me more than frame swaps where the track width is too wide or the wheels aren't centered in the wheel wells. We spent a lot of time measuring track widths on a bunch of donors, volare's are rare now, s-10 is ugly and wrong bolt pattern, dakota I think was too wide. When you cast a wide net, use your tape measure and the internet and look at whats available...there are some interesting candidates.
The 2001 ranger is 5/8" wider.....a little over a 1/4" per side. The car I know was hit in the front(judging from the bent front bumper) so in doing our measurements the wheel base is different left to right by an inch. We put the front clip on and off a few times to figure out what looked best and what the "factory" spec was. The front is swayed to the drivers side an inch too. This car was repaired way before we had frame racks to pull everything back square. But we are basically cutting off the bent part and installing a subframe where it should be, it should handle and ride like a new car. Id rather do the sub frame and a rear swap and have it look right.
I look forward to everybody following along. Made a bunch of plates and patterns to graft everything, we tacked it into place. We are wrecked..wil check measurements in the morning
With cars this old the tolerances were a lot wider that what we are used to. I have a side business of repairing vintage (50's, 60's and 70's) tube amps...the highest quality components were + or - 20% soooooooo(military spec)...hey give me a dollar ....you could give me 80 cents or up to $1.20...now a days the tolerances for the cheap stuff is +- 1%. Give me a dollar is now just 99 cents, a dollar or $1.01....very different world.