Honestly, for the parts you want to put on this car, you need to take every single thing off the car and do a full rotisserie restoration (and expect it to be off the road for multiple years). It doesn't make any sense to throw 10 grand into the suspension and maybe 30k or more into the motor plus the cost of labour and stick it all on a chassis that hasn't been touched since it rolled off the assembly line. I bet you are looking at more than subframe connectors too - 71 440 Chargers at least had extra chassis reinforcements that 318 cars didn't get.
As someone else pointed out, will a base 318 car be worth the money you plan to put into it? Or will you take a big loss? If you look around at what's on the market, maybe you can find a guy who has to take a big loss on what he built. Than you win all the way around.
You said something about putting a Borgeson steering box in - but the QA1 Level 3 suspension includes rack and pinion steering.
There's some debate on the forum about the virtue of coil over suspension conversions vs the factory leaf spring and torsion bar system. Personally, I don't see the value of the coil over suspension. If you want to corner-carve, well, you just spent enough money on suspension to get a C4 or maybe a C5 Corvette. If you can have more than one car, I think that makes far more sense than one do-it-all supercar that's going to get miles on it. Get a Corvette for your performance kicks and do maintenance and reasonable upgrades to the Charger. I agree with the Borgeson steering box and replacing the pitman arm, idler arm, and end links. PST has solid adjusting sleeves that would be worth getting -
Link. I went with the 11/16" sleeves and the C-body end links that go with them.
Modern brakes are a good choice but it can get complicated fast. I haven't thought about it in a while but I'm pretty sure the master cylinder has to be changed as well if converting to discs. Or maybe it's the metering block (or both?). I'm not sure about the lines, but your lines are 54 years old. For the cost of new lines, why put your life on the line with the old ones? You're also going to be looking at adding a proportioning valve and getting that set right.
It goes on and on - expect to take years learning this stuff and building your car up. I've spent 3 years on my 72 and it's still on jack stands. A lot of the time went into cleaning and refinishing. Not even bolting new parts on, just taking off boring existing stuff with surface rust, cleaning it off and repainting.
