It actually looks really good as a crew cab. It certainly pales in comparison to the two-door, but that’s to be expected. Photo from davewaldencollection.comIt actually looks really good as a crew cab. It certainly pales in comparison to the two-door, but that’s to be expected. Photo from davewaldencollection.com
because they never made a four-door version of them. Corvette, Mustang, Camaro, Charger, Challenger, Barracuda, Javelin, etc. How many did I miss? Probably a lot. It should also be noted that the Charger and Mustang have been crew-cabified in recent years, but that shouldn’t tarnish the reputation they were both originally built on.
That being said, if you look back in the most obscure of history pages, way back into the archives of old auto shows, you’ll see almost every car on my list with two doors, on each side, that is. Why? Simply because why not? The tooling is there; it just needs to be tweaked a touch. Why sell a car to only a young person when you can sell their parents a car, their grandparents a car, and then another car if they start a family? For those who like messing around with old cars, I’ve got to say four-doors mostly make great parts cars. The parts are the same enough to swap them back and forth, and in a lot of cases, the wheelbase and suspension are even the same.
When I saw this four-door Barracuda, I wasn’t surprised, but when I found out it was custom-built outside of a factory, I was impressed. I’ve got big, long-term plans (delusions) of one day turning a four-door Pontiac sedan into a two-door by combining the necessary parts of a rusty two-door with the minty shell of the four-door. I’ve measured the cuts, noted the slight modifications, and I’ve got two cars to work with, so it should be a piece of cake, right? In reality, yes, because it’s not uncommon to do something like that nowadays. To turn a two-door into a four-door, however, that’s just nonsense unless it’s really unique, which this one is.
Dave Walden built this car in 2016 because he saw a concept of it way back in the day. It started life as a 1970 Barracuda and the center uni-body cab shell of a full-size Dodge sedan. The wheelbase of the Barracuda was stretched ten inches, and the roof of the Dodge sedan was lowered about an inch to get the proportion and flow right, and he nailed it right down to the kick-up in the rear door that flows into the quarter panel. The attention to detail is insane. All the pieces used are the correct date code, the custom glass has been etched the way the factory would have done it, and all the correct stickers are on the door jams. You can’t tell anywhere that it’s been stretched out, even underneath.
Under the hood is a 340 V8 backed by an automatic, and inside is a front split bench with a column shifter, exactly as one would expect to see. If this were a production car, I honestly wouldn’t give it a second look, but it’s not a production car, it’s a four-door car that has four custom-fabricated doors hanging on it, and it looks so perfect that you’d never know anything was custom at all.
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