For what it's worth, this stuff has ALL been covered in detail in another long-winded thread from a couple years ago, and probably several others... this is the one that stuck out in my mind.
old rebody thread
I said it then, and I still feel the same way...
I don't see why its so hard to determine what is a rebody and what isn't. Yes, if you FIX the car you have, its not a rebody... if you turn a totally different car into one you have tags or documentation for, its a rebody... all the NOS sheetmetal in the world can't turn a car into a rebody...but taking one car and turning it into something else can. Some of you seem to be trying to say that replacing various sheetmetal pieces with new ones can eventually turn the car into a rebody... no way. I dont care if you piece by piece fix or replace every panel on your car, as long as you never bring in a different car and start taking smaller pieces (IE: the tags and firewall) of the original car and attaching them to the other one...bottom line is you gotta FIX the real car...not simply wheel in a different car and weld the real firewall to it. Seems like a simple enough explanation to me. You need to use the structure of the real car...that doesn't mean you can't do some major sheetmetal replacing, but i dont care how "bad" the car is, it can be fixed without replacing every square inch of car from the firewall back... If you don't have anything else but the firewall and tags of a real car, its a rebody.
As a side note to this... if you think its OK to replace the entire car with another car, leaving only the firewall and tags of the real one, then that would mean any clone yenko could become a real car if you found a rusty real yenko and welded the firewall to your clone... I don't think anyone anywhere would consider this clone to all the sudden become "real".... but yet thats essentially what you're saying is OK to do if youre starting with the rusty/damaged real car instead of the other way around.