Barn Find '68 Charger Hits The Streets-Finnegan's Garage Ep.77

This is the story of The Death Metal Charger and how I bought it and lowered it. In 1968 this Charger was purchased new from a dealer in Indiana and promptly crashed. As the story goes, the car was totaled and sat in a dealer lot until a local farmer named Joe Barry, who had aspirations of going Stock Car racing, bought the wreck and drug it home that same year. He stashed it in his barn and began searching the local wrecking yard for a front clip, doors and new quarter panels. From 1969 to 1970 he wrenched on his project. He fixed the sheetmetal while gutting all of the inner structure of each body panel. He built a roll cage and his own seat. He lowered the car and fixed the the damaged suspension by replacing everything with Chrysler C-body parts, including the front control arms and torsion bars.
The USAC racing association sent Joe a letter stating he would be invited to attend qualifying at a NASCAR event if his car passed tech inspection. The pass, his Charger needed full floating hubs for the wheels so Joe went back to the scrapyard and grabbed the first parts that fit the bill-a Timken rear axle from a '49-'53 Willys truck and floating hubs and drum brakes a 3/4 Ton Ford truck. the drum brakes were adapted to the stock C-body front spindles and Timken axle.
By 1970 Joe had been through many life changes and the financial toll of building the car had been significant. He decided to attend the last race of the season but after spending his last few dollars purchasing an open car trailer he discovered that the C-body suspension parts made his Charger so wide that it wouldn't fit ton the trailer. He missed the race and his car was deemed illegal for competition. Dejected, the Charger sat in his barn for nearly a decade and never turned a lap and rarely saw street driving. It traded hands several times between 1970 and 2016 but always remained inside barns in Indiana until it was drug out from the last barn and sold to a gentlemen who flipped it to Jason Hillmeyer. Hillmeyer put the car on eBay, which is where I purchased it.
In 2018 I bought the car, Tony Anglelo and I got it running and drove it from Georgia to Indiana to track down and show it to Joe Barry. It was the first time he'd seen the car in almost 50 years.

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-Finnegan

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