Found the perfect parts car so the project will begin again.

Mob Steel has the shell of a '68 with a perfect roof and real good doors, exactly what I need. I plan on removing all the parts I'll need and cutting the rest off for others. I feel great that I'm not cutting up a perfectly good car to save another.

I'll have a trunk lid, hood, passenger side front and rear quarters and driver's side rear quarter. It does have a differential and rear suspension that looks intact, too.

Make me an offer.

Had my crew drag it home today. I'm amazed at how clean it is. It has every panel I'll need to complete the limo.





Only surface rust on the inside of the fenders and doors.







Adam, from Mob Steel, gave me every trim and spare part they could find for the car.





Seems almost a shame to cut this baby apart. Let the fun begin.

i think '60s Lincolns and Thunderbirds are my favorite cars of all time. being such a car fanatic, it's hard for me to really pick one or two, but there is a tug in my heart every time i see a 60s Lincoln or Tbird. they are so evocative of the time period, so well built, and just beautiful to look at. good luck with it all!

Nice new project.

Can't wait to see this with the same quality work you got in the Lincoln and the Porsche.

Those project were done when I got them. I'm doing this one myself. It should turn out about the same quality as the trailer.

How come I can't get pictures or links to post here?

Barry

we made the move to rich text editor that is more advanced than the BBL code type. It takes a little to get used to but everything can be done easier in this editor and we have more control over expanding it. The easiest way to copy an image is to just high light where ever it is on the web press the hot key of ctrl+c to copy and ctrl+v to past just like you would be doing text. I think it's because this editor is very HTML friendly. Like if someone wanted to post images from autoblog or something, they could just simply select the whole website and past it into the post and the website would be there.

Like this google image i just copy and pasted right there. Also the editor allows you to resize everything right there on the fly, I guess the best parallel you could draw is like it's being able to post using a word document program. And if you have a hard time using the small space which is a bit of a pain, we've been trying to make it bigger, next to the spell check button is a blue rectangle, that allows you to full screen the text editor for greater ease while posting.

In any case if the project is going to turn out as nice as your trailer than that's going to be one nice clean project

So what is the story on this car, i am guessing that some parts of your limo were beyond repair so you found a donor car? Is that about right

Yes, the roof had rotted through under the vinyl roof. I needed doors because the maker had hacked the originals so badly. I want to turn it back into a 4 door limo so I'll be combining a front and rear door to make a filler panel.

The car I bought appears to be a restoration project that ran out of money or some major parts went missing. It was too far gone to restore but great for my purposes. I'll be able to sell the trunk lid and the hood for as much as I paid for the shell.

Scored some new goodies.



Bought a soda blaster from Eastwood. Does a fine job of ripping paint off of sheetmetal but doesn't touch rust. Blaster also takes abrasives to finish the task.











A friend in the HVAC business closed his shop due to the poor economy and put his equipment in storage. I offered to let him "store" it in my shop. Instant sheet metal shop. He can still do little jobs and I have all the tools the fab shop I use has. Works for me.















Not exactly sure what this one does. I think it makes locking corners and the locking seams for round duct.

How does a soda blaster work? I've never heard of that before.

Barry you should hang the no dumping sign on the wall in your employees restroom, it would be good for a laugh for a while

With these guys it wouldn't help. Can you say toxic?


Soda blasting works the same as sand blasting except it's biodegradable.

DECONSTRUCTING A SLAB-SIDE LINCOLN In order to salvage the roof and sail panels as a unit I needed to detach it from the space-frame of the unit body. Grinding out hundreds of spot welds to detach the panels would have left me with holes in the flanges sometimes less than 1" apart, so I removed the roof from the inside. By using this method I will be able to remove up to 4 layers of sheet metal, leaving the flange edges intact. A BOF car often has only one layer of sheet metal for the roof panel to attach to but the unit body Lincolns have two, boxed for strength. I started by removing the inner box. This allowed me access to the outer shell of the boxed support where I cut another line, freeing the roof and sail panels from the sub structure. Lincoln advertised that these cars were dipped and electro-statically charged the cars for better primer adhesion. Maybe the dip tank wasn't working the day this car went down the line but I think the claim is BS. After taking two of these apart I see no sign of dipping. Here's the inside of a boxed area. Even with an air bubble at the top of this assembly there would have been some primer inside this area. I cut away one of the "A" pillars to put some stress on the rest of the roof. The grinding wheel kept getting pinched under the stress of the car's structure changing. The pillar is made of three pieces of 1/16" steel reinforced with 1/8" metal at the intersection of the pillars and room. After burning through about a dozen 4" x 1/16" cutting blades I had the roof assembly free. It appears to me that the roof, sail panels and rear window opening were a sub-assembly that included the front trunk gasket groove. It appears to be a sub assembly because there are machine-made bronze welds and bronze filled locating holes. It was apparently made on a buck. I spent a lot of time making repairs around the rear window of the limo. The results weren't bad but swapping out for perfect sheet metal is the way to go. It will be a slow process preparing the pieces for a swap, but the end results will be superior. The next step is to remove the flanges of the sub-assembly leaving a perfect edge on the roof panel. Because the roof panel was spot welded to boxed members that were welded together there will be lots of hidden spot welds. It'll be very tedious but I'll end up with a perfect replacement panel. Cutting it into front and rear portions is is the only thing that concerns me now.

DECONSTRUCTING A SLAB-SIDE LINCOLN



In order to salvage the roof and sail panels as a unit I needed to detach it from the space-frame of the unit body. Grinding out hundreds of spot welds to detach the panels would have left me with holes in the flanges sometimes less than 1" apart, so I removed the roof from the inside. By using this method I will be able to remove up to 4 layers of sheet metal, leaving the flange edges intact.



A BOF car often has only one layer of sheet metal for the roof panel to attach to but the unit body Lincolns have two, boxed for strength. I started by removing the inner box. This allowed me access to the outer shell of the boxed support where I cut another line, freeing the roof and sail panels from the sub structure.



Lincoln advertised that these cars were dipped and electro-statically charged the cars for better primer adhesion. Maybe the dip tank wasn't working the day this car went down the line but I think the claim is BS. After taking two of these apart I see no sign of dipping. Here's the inside of a boxed area. Even with an air bubble at the top of this assembly there would have been some primer inside this area.







I cut away one of the "A" pillars to put some stress on the rest of the roof. The grinding wheel kept getting pinched under the stress of the car's structure changing. The pillar is made of three pieces of 1/16" steel reinforced with 1/8" metal at the intersection of the pillars and room.







After burning through about a dozen 4" x 1/16" cutting blades I had the roof assembly free. It appears to me that the roof, sail panels and rear window opening were a sub-assembly that included the front trunk gasket groove. It appears to be a sub assembly because there are machine-made bronze welds and bronze filled locating holes. It was apparently made on a buck.



I spent a lot of time making repairs around the rear window of the limo. The results weren't bad but swapping out for perfect sheet metal is the way to go. It will be a slow process preparing the pieces for a swap, but the end results will be superior.



The next step is to remove the flanges of the sub-assembly leaving a perfect edge on the roof panel. Because the roof panel was spot welded to boxed members that were welded together there will be lots of hidden spot welds. It'll be very tedious but I'll end up with a perfect replacement panel. Cutting it into front and rear portions is is the only thing that concerns me now.

What's that box there behind the right rear wheel? Ballast?

Just a parts box. Just used it to support the sheet metal.