Chevy Chassis Swap - Skeletal Transplant

Just by looking at them together, you can see how much stronger and more rigid the Fatman roller is. This car is gonna be fun on the track once everything's back together.

At the factory, shims were used to get the fit right on all the body mounts. When you take your car apart, note which mounts had shims, and how many/how thick they were. This will be handy to know when you put the car back together, with either an original or aftermarket frame.

With the body off the frame, we got a good look at the cancer-ridden rocker panels on both sides-never a pleasant sight. The good news is these parts are easily fixed thanks to the aftermarket. We'll show you how to do it in a future story.

One of the more interesting modifications on our original frame was this homemade trailer hitch. Whichever previous owner in the car's life installed this masterpiece of DIY engineering didn't want it to fail, using plenty of heavy gauge steel for the hitch.

Mounting the body to the new chassis, we're using PST polygraphite bushings, and Totally Stainless bolts, washers, and nuts. The polygraphite bushings mean squeak-free and long-life cushioning between the body and frame, and the Totally Stainless fasteners take care of rusted bolt worries. Both are offered in full kits specific to a variety of applications, taking the guesswork out of getting the right parts.

One of the great things about Totally Stainless' bolt kits is they come prepackaged and labeled to the individual parts of the car they're used on. This means no guessing about which bolts go where, and it's easy to organize all your fasteners and keep them from getting lost. If you don't need certain bolts, just leave them in their labeled bag.

With all the new bushings and washers in place, the body was lowered down onto the Fatman chassis. Even though we noted where the body had shims before, we still needed to do some additional shimming to get everything set.

During our fit check, we noticed the factory pinion snubber was hanging things up. A few minutes work with the plasma cutter and the snubber and its mount were gone. Danchuk offers this part brand new, so we weren't worried about saving this piece for future use or swap-meet value.

The instructions with our new Fatman chassis noted that a notch needed to be cut out in the trunk floor on the driver side to clear the left rear coilover shock. This is one of the things you have to be prepared for with a new chassis, some minor cutting on the body to get everything to clear properly, no matter if you're doing this at home or having a shop perform the installation.

After some quick work with the cutoff wheel, the notch was ready. Because we've got other body work to do on the car, we're going to let this sit as is in case further mods, for any reason, are necessary. In the end we'll box this part out cleanly to match the other side of the trunk floor.

The Fatman chassis features oblong holes in the body mounts to allow for adjustment and varying factory tolerances in the construction of the various bodies, along with their natural tendencies to shift a little over time from driving and chassis flex. On an almost 60-year-old car that's seen a hard life, some things are bound to have moved.

During fitment, we found the rear sway bar mounts were hitting the rear of the backseat floor. With any new chassis/old car combo, you're going to run into these issues. Chassis companies like Fatman take into account every possible variable, and do lots of measurements with various cars to ensure their products are correct. But, there's no way to account for the various production tolerances and variances that happen with 12 different plants producing Tri-Five bodies.

The cutoff wheel was called to duty once again, and the necessary notches cut out of the rear floor area to clear the sway bar mounts. Once all of our floor repairs are done, we'll fix these holes and make them look pretty. The great thing is they're both right under the rear seat, so no one will even know we had to do this.

You can see (arrows) that we had to do some shimming with stainless steel washers (why use regular ones that'll rust?) for this particular body mount. We've also got an issue with the mount on the rocker side, where cancer from the rocker panel has infected the mount. No worries though, this is easily fixed thanks to a plentiful market of Tri-Five repair parts.