To start off I picked up the car, a 1971 2 door in oct of 2011. Drove it home and parked it for the winter. I bought it off a kid that need a work truck asap, he had bought it off the owner who had done a very poor job of a restoration. pretty bad body work when you get up close. That guy had owned the car since the mid 80's and converted it form an auto to a dogleg 5 speed. All in all the car is rough around the edges but it ran and everything worked and was pretty well all complete.
I should note that this is my second 510, the first one I bought was when i was 15 in 1995, but it had some much rust that it was pretty well junk. kept a few parts off it that were good like grill, trim, doors, hood some other some parts that I still have today. I have had a love for 510's since i burnt my fingers on the exhaust pipe of my dads when i was just a toddler. I'll see if I can dig up some pics of his old cars.
Anyways back to mine, the guy had painted it mopar plum crazy, not a huge fan but its fun. I drove the car around the summer of 2012 when I was not out of town working and it was fun in stock form but scary as the ball joints and tie rods and stuff were worn out and had a lot of play. In the fall I replaced all of that. I also had picked up off a guy in ontario a full set of troy ermish front and rear coil overs that were brand new that he took off his car that he had just bought because he was going a different route. Installed those and made it look so much better. Then come to spring 2013 and go to get it going and start working on it as I had just spent all winter out of town working. The car wasn't too happy. It had some sort of miss fire going on and I couldn't find the problem. In the fall of 2012 I had picked up a ka24de and tranny out a 91 240sx that the kid had totalled off well attempting some fast and furious manoeuvre. So I knew I was going to do the swap but was planing on doing that in the winter of 13/14. I didn't want to sink a bunch of money into it to get it to run when I knew I was going to be gone all summer again for work. so there she sat. I can give all the usual excesses of work, kids, wife, lazy and I haven't done anything to it till now. to start the swap I first want to get the L16 pulled out and fix the rust on the front end. My plan is (on my dads advice) to not go crazy with some full stripped down resto all at once. pick one part and do that and slowly work on it parts at a time, so I can still drive it and not get burned out on a huge project. On to some pictures!
this is how she look when I first got it.
I picked up these rims off Kijiji, 2 are watanabe and the other 2 black racing wheels which are a knock off almost look the same, see if you can tell which side of the car has which on them
coil overs are in and looking good!
so here is how she sits right now and what I have to tackle.
nice resto work, angle iron welded on all getto like.
So I haven't done a lot of body work in my time but I have done some, I not to sure the best way to take this on. In the wheel wells there are 3 layers but from what it looks like the middle layer is just a small piece that goes from the cross member and up to the front, the outer layer is bulged around it. Has anyone done this same repair on their car before? should i just weld it a thicker piece on the outside to replace the middle section? or do it like it was from the factory. Also what gauge of sheet metal are most people using to do body repairs? I was going to get some 20gauge and maybe some 18 gauge. I have a pretty well all the tools and the time right now so I looking forward to getting some work done.
I either have to take it to a machine shop and see if they can retap it or I'll just cut off the top part of my old set of struts and weld it on in place. 
