I had a '76 Aspen that been overheated badly and the original 318 was junk/barely ran.
I swapped a '68 318 in. (engine came from a free '68 Satellite).
It was metallic black 2 door. I worked really hard on it, but in the end I just didn't like driving the car very much.
Looking back, it seems like the suspension felt driving a bowl of oatmeal, or maybe the chassis was super flexible, or something like that.
I drove it for about two weeks and put it up for sale.
If I did one again it would have to be built up more, at least a 360 if not a big block, and the mushy suspension would have to go.
I still like the way the Aspen/Volare 2 door looks, and think they look especially great as a street/strip or drag car when all done up.
They did a nice job on the styling of those.
Later I got an '83 5th Avenue, it had well over 200,000mi on it but ran halfway decent, and I actually enjoyed driving
it for a few years until I started hauling PA for my band and it was too small for that. I did a bunch of maintenence to make sure it wouldn't
die (timing chain, de-sludged the lifter valley, de-coked the intake heat crossover, stuff like that).
I can't remember if it had 255k or 275k on it when I sold it.
Midstream I hit a deer with it but all it did was break the grille.
It was just a good car.
Solid blocks of aluminum in place of the 4 K member rubber bushings helped the handling a lot. So did reinforcing the upper control arm plate. Chrysler bolted a plate to the K member, curved it up over the frame rail, then connected the upper control are to it without any support. I ran a few of them in the hobby stock class at our local dirt track. The failure point on the cars I ran at the dirt track was the front frame rails at the trans crossmember, if the original floors were rusted, that was the weakest point in the car and would twist, and at some point would pull apart.
