“Probably not worth it anymore.”
These cars are getting VERY expensive. This makes restoring even total hopeless cases worth it. They even sell ENTIRE NEW REPRODUCTION BODIES for a Camaro or Mustang, with the doors hung, the whole shot. You can get virtually every part for a late 60’s Mustang or Camaro in reproduction, and some of the reproductions are from the original tooling. Chryslers are not as well supported, but this is improving.
You might have to put 30K into a basket case Camaro, but you might wind up with a car worth 50K and climbing...
Climbing...maybe. People who loved those cars are now in their peak earning years, and there are only so many cars to go around. Who will buy these cars when they are too old to drive or gone? I have seen a “peak” phenomenon in other “collectibles” - for example, Beatles cards. And, other than museum owners, who wants to own an “average person’s car” from the period between 1910-1930? They are hard to drive, can’t really go on all public roads, and take enormous amounts of (very unfamiliar) maintenance by today’s standards.
Chrysler products from that era are a bit unique in the car world. While the Mustang, Camaro, Corvette etc all used body-on-frame builds, where you could replace virtually the entire car pieces at a time, the Chrysler cars back then used a monocoque design. There’s no frame you can work up from or tear down to, because the frame is integral with the body. Once the cancer gets into it, there’s not really anything that can be done.
To make matters worse, donor Chargers from the 68-70 era are extremely rare now, thanks in part to “The Dukes of Hazard”, which destroyed over 300 of them during the show’s run. Any car that’s been rusting in a field for years is almost certain to be too much work to be worth it. About the only exceptions would be Hemi chargers with valid serials, or one of the factory performance option packages like the R/Ts. Anything else, and you might as well just build the whole thing from the catalog, and not bother to try to save the original.
And that also reminds me of the one near-miss I had 20 years ago. I came this || close to buying a corvette that had been sitting in a guy’s side yard for years. It would have been worth it; I checked the numbers on it, and it was a real live 1970 427/435 with a 4-speed stick. Black, and I think had pretty much every option available for it at the time. If I’d had the money and the time to put it back in shape back then, I could probably retire on the proceeds of the sale now.