The Yankee Express.

[Ghostrider 67]

Hello all. Thanks for looking.
The Yankee Express is my 1967 Dodge Coronet 500 resto mod. Dozens of modifications have been done to it by me over a 7 year period. Here;s the list of mods that have been completed:


Starting platform was a 67 Coronet 500, 69,000 miles, A/C car, tinted glass, yellow cream colored, black/black interior, buddy seat column shift 727, 318 V8 2bbl. Complete car missing no parts, drivable. Everything worked.

Mods:
Front to back------ Front bumper sectioned, shortened, turn signal rectangular holes filled, recurved to fit the new fender noses and to hug the sheet metal. Also enlarged the center license plate cut out into a ram airduct.
1967 Charger grill and revolving headlights. Custom elec motors, mounts and linkages.
Front fender noses swept back to a 90* angle ( Think 70 Road Runner).
Front disc brakes swap from a 76 Aspen.
All rubber bumpers and bearings replaced.
Inner fender close out smooth panels to hide wiring etc.
Smooth firewall with relocated wiper motor to under dash as is everything previously on the firewall.
Battery to box behind passenger seat.
Wiring pass through tubes running along outside of inner fender just below the fender mounting flanges and into the cab through the firewall.
Wiring passthrough boots in the door frames.
2004 Audi A6 Quattro dash/console /steering and center pull E Brake. And everything in/on the dash console too.
Audi door panel elements fabricated into new panels that align with the Audi dash.
Puddle lights and rear facing marker light on the rear face of the inner door surface so it can be seen when the door is opened.
Power everything.
Custom steering linkages.
dual M/C and new hoses/lines.
10 way, power/heated bucket seats leather.
1967 Plymouth Sport Fury rear seat topper mounted just behind bucket seat tops and close out roadster type panels from there to the back glass. (Think 59 Corvette)
Audi armrest with 4 analog gauges hidden inside.
GPS speedo
spare tire under the roadster panels in what would have been the center of the rear seat. Close out panel between cab and trunk.
Fabricated shift linkage and lever. Hand made pistol grip and reverse lock out.
Fake quarter panel side scoops opened up.
dual motorcycle pop up gas filler caps, one on top of each quarter near the trunk lid front corners.
fabricate he entire rear face of the car to accept 1966 Thunder Bird tail lights.
Trunk lid on gas lifts
17 gallon fuel cell with dual filler necks.
trunk close out panels
rear wells tubbed
leaf springs relocated to under frame.
center pull E Brake cables
move spring perches
remove spare tire well
1970 Road Runner rear bumper lengthened 4 5/8" and recurved to hug the sheet metal. TTI exhaust to exit through those back up light holes.
Remote trunk release.
'shave gas filler door
ditch the 318 in favor of a built 440 Magnum, and build a 727.

As stated, the car was 100% complete and running/drivable at the start. I was about to retire from the US Army after 30 years service and my wife was on the lookout for a project for me to mess with out in the garage to keep me out of her hair. She saw the Craig's List ad about 20 minutes after the lady who owned it posted it up. I called her and told her to hang on to it because I was on the way with a trailer and cash. She agreed and my pal, Rick and I hit the road to way upstate NY. We got it back to Vermont with no problems and unloaded the old girl.
It was October 2014.

[Ghostrider 67]

I'm going to post up pictures in order from start to today. So, here's how she looked when I rolled her off of the trailer....
Plus one of her in my garage where my pal set a pair of 340 Duster scoops on the hood just for fun. We agreed immediately that that would NOT be one of the mods...lol.

[Ghostrider 67]

Notice that she has all of her trim in place. The trunk deck is covered in surface rust. She has the factory wheel covers and the factory green tinted glass since it's an A/C car. Not a bad buy at $3750. I drove it home from Ricks place, about 2 miles, and into the garage. Drove fine, ran well and everything worked. Not much power being a 318 car and so heavy. Steering was a little loose. Suspension bottomed out. Smelled like an old car. lol.

So after getting her home and into the garage a few decisions needed to be made. First of all, What do I want to do with this car? Then, Do I want to do this myself or hire it done?

In order to answer the second question I had to answer the first one. So, I sat down in a chair in front of the car and put on my thinking/ imagining cap. Over a period of a few weeks I and Rick thought about all of the many directions I/we could take this car in. I settled on a full on , One Off, custom Resto mod. At that time Rick had some issues to deal with on his own hotrods and bowed out except for moral support and to be a sounding board.
I began to make a list of the changes I was imagining and it got pretty long. After a convo with Rick I began to cross things off. It was becoming strange. Too many changes.
I adopted the mantra that the changes that I would make HAD to be ones that blended in with the original design from Dodge, and, they had to be ones that were not so noticeable form the viewpoint of the average onlooker. No gaudy over the top bullshit. No dumb changes that were sticking out like a sore thumb. More like ones that were , "What IF Dodge had done this?"
In that spirit I made a start. First I composed a list of the parts on the car that I no longer needed. These parts were set aside for sale to help finance the build. 1967 Coronet parts are like hens teeth. Very little is repopped. So these parts had value.
Thus started the disassembly.
I took this car apart down to the bare shell. Literally. Bare. Everything got boxed and bagged, tagged and labeled. Pictures were taken of subassemblies. Some parts were traded for ones that I knew I would need to make some of the mods a reality.

[Ghostrider 67]

more disassembly pics...

[Ghostrider 67]

As far as damage to the body is concerned, there wasn't much. More than met the eye at first viewing, but not as bad as many that I see others buying. The right end of the cowl was an inch deep in filler where something round fell against it and they just slathered filler over it. The passenger floor pans were mildly rusted and needed to be replaced. The trunk deck surface and a few other small spots. Both front fender noses had been smacked and also the right rear quarter panel.
The fender noses needing repair drove one of the mods decision of sweeping them back to 90* with the front of the hood. I could cut out much of the worst crinkled up metal this way. Bonus. This mod was about ditching the angled nose on each side where the hood contour lines flowed into the fenders at a 45* angle, I had never liked that look. I wanted them squared off, more like a 1970 Road Runner look.
The spare tire well in the trunk was also rusted and I cut that out of the floor to facilitate another two mods, dual exhaust that would flow out of the back up light holes in a 1970 Road Runner rear bumper.

[Ghostrider 67]

To start at the beginning i'll talk about the front bumper. Since I decided to sweep back to 90* the fender noses the front bumper ends now were hanging out in space, far from the sheet metal. Plus, due to yet another mod, the swap out of the 67 Coronet grill and headlights for a 67 Charger grill and revolving headlights, I no longer needed the turn signal lenses to be in the bumper face. The Charger had them up at each end of the grill.
So those rectangular holes would need to be shaved as well. After studying the bumper and how it aligned with the body I determined that the bend in each side of the bumper had to go, plus the end section on each side would need to be sectioned and reshaped to hug the sheet metal more closely. So, I cut the bumper up. Changing the bumper meant that the mounting brackets would also be needing some work in order for the mounting holes to align with the new sections locations.
So, you see that the initial list of mods doesn't tell the whole story, MANY smaller mods had to be done to facilitate the larger ones.
Anyway, I hung the middle section of the cut apart bumper back on the car and then made many measurements before trimming little by little and trying each section back against the car before tacking it back together. The result is a bumper that looks killer on the car, hugs the fender lines closely and mirrors the contours, and looks RIGHT when looking at the car. Someone who has never seen a 67 Coronet before wouldn't know the difference. Someone who has seen one would scratch their head and wonder, What had changed?
In addition, as an after thought, I widened the center license plate cut out and increased the height of it to form a ram air duct.

[Ghostrider 67]

The bumper bracket ended up being a simple sectioning of the outboard arm.
The turn signal mounting holes got the inner edges sliced away to provide a squared off edge to weld new metal too. Two plates were fabricated and trimmed to fit before being welded in place. Some filler and grinding later and a few coats of primer and Bob's yer Uncle.

My last name isn't Trepanier or Foose so the bumpers will either be body color or chrome wrapped. I cannot afford the chrome work.
Next up was the 67 Charger front end. It's all of a piece with the fender mods and bumper mods so I dove right in. I sold the Coronet items for a great price and bought a used set up from a 67 Charger. The parts are interchangeable with a few pieces being different like the lower grill support bar is model specific, as is the surrounding trim, although both bolt right up to either car. The sweeping back of the fender noses caused the Charger "C" trim on each end to be out of location. I solved this by slicing away a small portion at the rear inside edge so they too could be swept back to match while still being reasonably aligned with the trim section across the front.
The 67 Charger revolving headlights are a handful to get assembled correctly when you don't have another assembled example sitting in front of you. lol. Lots of trial and error.
The way they are manufactured doesn't lend itself to customization. For instance, the center revolving axis/axle is maintained by the clunky 50+ year old motors being bolted to a "donut" through which an axle finger/post protrudes from the each bucket. The motor axle/shaft pins onto this post. I had no desire to use those clunky old motors which caused me to have to design a way to keep the buckets revolving around a centered axis somehow. I burned a lot of brain cells on this mod.

Problems seemed to cascade from each solution. "This will cause that", syndrome. Which, truth be told, is the fun part for me. Figuring it all out, designing from scratch.
I had first to select a new set of bucket drive motors. I searched for a good week or so before finding a set that had three post mounting arrangements that would withstand the initial drag of the heavy buckets rotation. That would fit in between the mounting place and the radiator/transmission cooler and had the umpf to turn the heavy buckets.
There's very little room in there.
Then once that was worked out I had to design and fabricate the linkages to connect them to the buckets while also supporting and maintaining the center axis.
I started with the outer ends, the buckets themselves. Once I had finagled around the many parts that comprise the framing and spacing of the buckets between the grill ends and the turn signal housings on either end I moved on to axis rotation. How to keep that center post that's bolted to the exact center of the bucket end face centered in the "donut" hole? I eventually settled on using hard nylon white bushings. They were hard enough to stand up to the work load, easy enough to resize to fit and drill out the centers to fit the existing parts. I sanded down a set to hammer into the donut center holes so they wouldn't spin and then drilled out the centers to fit the bucket post through them. next came the motor mounting location and distance from the post end.
They would need to be shaft centered, angled body to miss the grill mounting lower bar AND the trans cooler face behind them. Also they needed to be where there was a flat place to bolt up the mounting plate I would need to fabricate both above and below AND be far enough away to leave room for a connecting linkage that I would also have to fabricate. All out of thin air. lol.
After fooling around with several designs that wouldn't work well I found that I didn't have the skills to fabricate a one piece linkage. The main issue was that the electric drive motors have a small "D" shaft that needs to attach to a big clunky 3/8" 1967 era post with a set pin hole through it. Two piece it would be.
I used a couple of hunks of steel pipe that would slid within each other. I made them as short as possible while still being long enough to slid within each other and bolt down the set screws. On one end the ID needed to be 1/4" and the other 3/8". The 1/4" end had to have a set screw hole through with threads and the other end a smooth hole for a latch pin to slid through. The middle had to have holes through both walls to connect the two pieces together. All of this occurs within about 3 1/2"......lol. Keep in mind I'm doing all of this by hand with no computers or plasma cutters...lol. The number of times that I had that front assembly on and off the car blurred after awhile..
The assembly itself also needed to be restored. The buckets disassembled and cleaned, sanded down and repainted, the chrome refurbished the lights and light mounts inside the buckets taken apart and cleaned and oiled. The grill sanded down and repainted the chrome shined up.

[Ghostrider 67]

[quote=Ghostrider 67;7229970]The bumper bracket ended up being a simple sectioning of the outboard arm.
The turn signal mounting holes got the inner edges sliced away to provide a squared off edge to weld new metal too. Two plates were fabricated and trimmed to fit before being welded in place. Some filler and grinding later and a few coats of primer and Bob's yer Uncle.

My last name isn't Trepanier or Foose so the bumpers will either be body color or chrome wrapped. I cannot afford the chrome work.
Next up was the 67 Charger front end. It's all of a piece with the fender mods and bumper mods so I dove right in. I sold the Coronet items for a great price and bought a used set up from a 67 Charger. The parts are interchangeable with a few pieces being different like the lower grill support bar is model specific, as is the surrounding trim, although both bolt right up to either car. The sweeping back of the fender noses caused the Charger "C" trim on each end to be out of location. I solved this by slicing away a small portion at the rear inside edge so they too could be swept back to match while still being reasonably aligned with the trim section across the front.
The 67 Charger revolving headlights are a handful to get assembled correctly when you don't have another assembled example sitting in front of you. lol. Lots of trial and error.
The way they are manufactured doesn't lend itself to customization. For instance, the center revolving axis/axle is maintained by the clunky 50+ year old motors being bolted to a "donut" through which an axle finger/post protrudes from the each bucket. The motor axle/shaft pins onto this post. I had no desire to use those clunky old motors which caused me to have to design a way to keep the buckets revolving around a centered axis somehow. I burned a lot of brain cells on this mod.

Problems seemed to cascade from each solution. "This will cause that", syndrome. Which, truth be told, is the fun part for me. Figuring it all out, designing from scratch.
I had first to select a new set of bucket drive motors. I searched for a good week or so before finding a set that had three post mounting arrangements that would withstand the initial drag of the heavy buckets rotation. That would fit in between the mounting place and the radiator/transmission cooler and had the umpf to turn the heavy buckets.
There's very little room in there.
Then once that was worked out I had to design and fabricate the linkages to connect them to the buckets while also supporting and maintaining the center axis.
I started with the outer ends, the buckets themselves. Once I had finagled around the many parts that comprise the framing and spacing of the buckets between the grill ends and the turn signal housings on either end I moved on to axis rotation. How to keep that center post that's bolted to the exact center of the bucket end face centered in the "donut" hole? I eventually settled on using hard nylon white bushings. They were hard enough to stand up to the work load, easy enough to resize to fit and drill out the centers to fit the existing parts. I sanded down a set to hammer into the donut center holes so they wouldn't spin and then drilled out the centers to fit the bucket post through them. next came the motor mounting location and distance from the post end.
They would need to be shaft centered, angled body to miss the grill mounting lower bar AND the trans cooler face behind them. Also they needed to be where there was a flat place to bolt up the mounting plate I would need to fabricate both above and below AND be far enough away to leave room for a connecting linkage that I would also have to fabricate. All out of thin air. lol.
After fooling around with several designs that wouldn't work well I found that I didn't have the skills to fabricate a one piece linkage. The main issue was that the electric drive motors have a small "D" shaft that needs to attach to a big clunky 3/8" 1967 era post with a set pin hole through it. Two piece it would be.
I used a couple of hunks of steel pipe that would slid within each other. I made them as short as possible while still being long enough to slid within each other and bolt down the set screws. There also needed to be a bushing as a locating spacer between the end of the bucket post and the outer side of the donut face to maintain the correct spacing so that the fins on the bucket face would align with the grill ends for that smooth one piece look across the front. On one end the ID needed to be 1/4" and the other 3/8". The 1/4" end had to have a set screw hole through with threads and the other end a smooth hole for a latch pin to slid through. The middle had to have holes through both walls to connect the two pieces together. All of this occurs within about 3 1/2"......lol. Keep in mind I'm doing all of this by hand with no computers or plasma cutters...lol. The number of times that I had that front assembly on and off the car blurred after awhile..
The assembly itself also needed to be restored. The buckets disassembled and cleaned, sanded down and repainted, the chrome refurbished the lights and light mounts inside the buckets taken apart and cleaned and oiled. The grill sanded down and repainted the chrome shined up.[/QUOT

pics....

[Ghostrider 67]

more pics...

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Two more...

[Ghostrider 67]

Using this design I was able to reuse the limit switches and stop blocks on buckets. Ensuring that the buckets make the proper half turn and stop with the fins in alignment with the grill when open and closed.

Moving on from this big modification I turned to inner fender close out panels. The front two corners being smacked caused the top shelf of the inner fenders above the shock towers to wrinkle a little. Rather than replace the inners I designed and fabricated close out panels to cover a lot of ill's. 20ga sheet metal, bent on an 8' brake and trimmed to fit. They are mounted on hard nylon bushings underneath to separate them from the inners by 1/4" so I can hide wiring under them. Chrome plated Allen head bolts fasten down through the bushings. I have not decided yet whether to paint them body color, paint them body color with an electric blue MOPAR symbol on each one or some other color/design.

[Ghostrider 67]

Inner panel pics...

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More front end pics...

[Ghostrider 67]

Next up , although I thought of it and did it much later in the timeline, are the wiring passthrough lines along the front fenders underneath. I used some old CPAP mask air lines and fittings. I encased the plastic tubes in metal where they cross above the tires to protect them from debris. These allow me to route the engine bay wiring, at least some of it, and the front headlights wiring around the engine bay rather than through it.

[Ghostrider 67]

Another mod at the front of the car was a disc brake swap from drums. The B Body cars are heavy and came with notoriously underwhelming brakes. Since I swapped in a 440 Big Block with massive HP & torque I felt that disc brakes were in order if I wanted to be able to stop this train. Fortunately MA MOPAR had some foresight and kept parts interchangeability through the years so that cars from the 1970's had sub systems that would bolt right up onto mid sixties muscle cars. I picked up a set of 1976 Aspen front spindles & caliper mounts. I bought new rotors, powder coated calipers, hoses and hardware to go on them. Easy swap. Cheap.
Also on the front of the car I wanted to smooth the firewall. I also wanted to shave the wiper motor divot in the top edge of the firewall where the big clunky motor sat like a wart. I moved the wiper motor to under the dash, mounting it in a fabricated mounting bracket that places it upside down near the center of the firewall and allows the arms that actuate the wipers to move freely. No problem. I fabricated a patch to shave the divot and formed a new edge along the top. I also cut out the cowl ends and placed smooth metal on those spots. I cut the firewall out of the car by slicing away everything that protruded out past the base plane of the wall. I then cut and fit a sheet of 18ga steel with a bend across the lower 1/3. It was interesting to place the Master Cylinder mounting holes in the right spots and figure out where to cut a hole for the steering shaft too. I left as much factory firewall metal attached as I could for strength.