Well, a lot of time went by between now and then. That 68 Nova rear end had been installed in a '62 Chevy Bel Air that had the original spring perches removed and the lower control arm mounts from the original '62 housing were carefully trimmed off and relocated to the Nova axle tubes and the upper arm brackets were cut off and relocated to the Nova as well, and a Panhard rod bracket was fabbed up a well.The article didn't really go into enough detail on all that. The picture of the various 12 bolts we worked on that day will give you a real good idea of what we did. The first incarnation of the Chevelle 12 bolt swap involved using Chevelle lower trailing arms where we cut, notched,bent and rewelded
the arms to get the angles of the bushings right. We had to make spring perches to attach the rear 62 Chevy springs to the Chevelle trailing arms, and it all worked out pretty easily. I had made upper trailing arms from Chevelle units by determining the center to center distance that the front bushings had to be in order to attach to the 62 frame, then we cut, notched,and rewelded the Chevelle upper trailing arms to arrive at the correct bushing locations to make it a bolt in. Early Chevelle 12 bolts were about an inch or so narrower than the OEM Chevy unit, I think the 68-72 rear ends were very close to matching the OEM overall width. It took a bit of early amateur engineering, but the overall result was worth the effort. That faded red Impala SS in the story doing the burnout on the back street had several hundred runs on it at the original Irwindale and Orange County drag strips with no breakage. Car ran high 12's with a 4 speed. Those were some fun times doing this stuff and writing about it for Doug's magazines. He sure helped launch our old 409 Chevy Club of America. He loves 409's about as much as we do!