In a message dated 5/12/2003 12:21:02 PM Pacific Daylight Time, mailing-list-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
After you have that Imperial for a while you may loose all interest in
Dodge Chargers.
Aaron has a point here. A couple of weeks ago, I made the trip to the not so local salvage yard to retrieve a pair of swivel seats, one from an Imperial and the other from the same year New Yorker. Let me tell you, they are different!
The seats from both are as heavy as boulders. The Imperial seats are leather and are in decent restorable condition. Once the seats were out of the cars I saw that each car had a center support bracket for the seat track. The support in the Chrysler is bolted to the floor pan. The Imperial support is welded. We had to cut both floors to get the supports out (not a great loss since there was a lot of rust in each car!)
It was interesting to see the very definite difference in the gauge of the sheet metal. The New Yorker, which is unibody, has a much thinner gauge metal floor. The Imperial, body on frame construction, was definitely thicker. No wonder these cars weigh as much as they do. I would have thought the unibody car would have thicker gauge steel. The boy at the salvage yard was thoroughly impressed with the old hulk of the Imperail. We talked a lot about the car and its proper place in history. Can't say I converted him over, but it was a pleasure to provide a little education to the lad.
So when Aaron states there is a reason an Imperial is better.... here is one piece of evidence!
Happy motoring!
Dale
68 Crown Coupe
60 New Yorkers (not quite Imperial, but nice!)
71 New Yorker
78 LeBaron T&C
79 New Yorker
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