J. Chapman

I recently met someone who had one of these wild creations, and it blew my mind. Personally,I now have a complicated history with Dodge myself right now as an EV Scat Pack owner, but this reminded me why I have enjoyed the ridiculousness of Stellantis’s Muscle cars.

This discovery sent me down Mopar Facebook rabbit holes and the Midwest automotive Instagram. I am surprised it’s not a more common mod.  But I suppose one would need to find a decent Magnum to make this dream a reality and that doesn’t seem as easy as I assumed.

It turns out there are entire groups dedicated to swapping LX-platform front ends, also with the modern versions of the Charger. It’s not a bolt-on job but specialty fabrication shops sell pre-fabricated parts specifically for the swap, and YouTubers log thousands of hours documenting the process step-by-step.

What’s a Dodge Magnum

Discontinued in 2008. The Magnum was so interesting: a rear-wheel-drive American wagon built on a platform borrowing Mercedes-Benz suspension bits, available with a 5.7-liter or 6.1-liter Hemi V8, and styled like an angry bulldog. It seems like it should be exactly what all of us say we want.  But I didn’t buy one and neither did anyone reading this.  Was it the cheap interior?  Probably a big part of it.

Think how much cooler you would feel arriving at the river with your kayaks on the roof of an American muscle wagon. Or Climbing to a rooftop tent on the easily accessible low roof? All those Outbacks and RAV-4 drivers will never know what could have been.

As the Magnum was killed, Dodge dropped the modern Challenger coupe, a car that immediately became the hit of modern muscle nostalgia that people were looking for.

Lucky for us, Mopar guys connected the dots. Both vehicles share the underlying LX/LC platform architecture under the skin. The hardpoints are practically lined up perfectly for this sort of retro make-over.

So Let’s do it

Because this community has spent years refining the build, they’ve turned it into a fairly repeatable process should you want to try this yourself:

The hardest part of the swap is the body line. The Challenger’s sharp shoulder line doesn’t align all that natively with the Magnum’s front door seam. From what I can tell, the process for this involves slicing a Magnum fender and a Challenger fender in half, then welding them together into a hybrid panel. Aftermarket shops do sell custom composite conversion fenders specifically designed to let Challenger front bumpers, grilles, and hoods bolt directly onto a Magnum body.

From there it seems rather plug and play if you are mechanically and inclined. Radiator supports, headlight wiring harnesses, and bumper brackets are adapted using crowdsourced forum knowledge, allowing the iconic halo headlights and twin-scoop hood to seat pretty cleanly on the wagon.

End Results

You can find way more than you would ever think examples online of these beauties.

When done poorly, these front-end swaps can look like a bad drift-car crash repair. Looking online, there are a number of 50 to 100ft cars. The pro’s make it look easy, but a look at the panel gaps and alignments on a lot of panels in these photos shows it’s not quite so straightforward.

But the best examples look like they rolled directly off the assembly line in Ontario. The menacing, wide snout of the Challenger fits the thick, classic wagon proportions of the Magnum far better than the original dated mid-2000s nose ever did.

New performance cars have turned into sanitized software platforms. There’s something undeniably refreshing about how hot-roddy old-school this feels.