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Classic Cars Lincoln Continental Convertibles of the 1960's
52 messages, Last post on Jul 14, 2009 at 4:22 PM
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Replying to: douglasr (Jul 19, 2006 5:53 pm) I think most of these cars got ratty because they never had the value or prestige of their competitor Cadillacs--being so undervalued, few people were willing to undergo a complex and expensive restoration. They just drove 'em til they dropped. As for quality, for Ford it was very good at the time but I don't think it approaches its nemesis, the Cadillac. |
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| ...one of those. I'm not up to a project car, but I think a great mid-life crises car would be an early '60's Lincoln Continental. There's just something about the look. I guess I'll just satisfy myself with my 1/18 scale model! | |
who was into both Cadillacs and Lincolns and he said that back in the 60's the Lincolns made the Caddies look like crap, when it came to build quality and such. I wonder if it's because the Lincolns were unitized, and that might have helped give them more of a tank-like feeling? IMO, the Cadillacs definitely have more of a mass-produced quality about them, whereas a Lincoln just seems a bit more custom-built. Or, at least as custom-built as a mass-produced car could be.
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Replying to: andre1969 (Jul 20, 2006 10:43 am) You'd be hard pressed to find more bullet-proof drivelines, for instance than Cadillacs of the era, and their tops did fit pretty well and kept weather out. And the survival rate of old Caddies isn't bad, either. |
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In the 1960's Wixom built Lincolns at the rate of 14 cars per hour, 350 per cycle, each car taking two weeks to make from raw materials to driving vehicle. Convertibles got a separate shunt line; all cars getting a 15.3 mile Road Test Around Wixom, and a 189 point check-list. Subsequent inspections either at the zone lots or dealer comprised of a 27 point checklist. Lincoln relearned how to make a quality mass produced car in the 1960's. Lincoln's volume a fifth that of Cadillac, so they could afford to take their time. No one who bought a '58 would ever have been back to buy a '61 unless they liked the style. Of the Convertibles, only the 66-67 leaks, the earlier cars don't as long as the top is aligned and the rubber good. The 61-3 tops usually stay working, were-as the 64-67's don't because of the Upper Back Panel Limit switch being out of adjustment, or someone has destroyed it in less than two seconds trying to adjust it without knowing how.... Yes it takes skilled labour to bring one of these cars back. But the factory put them under a third QC review before they were shipped to dealers...when new they were quite nice. Rolls-Royce were far from being junque at anytime in their history---behind engineering wise, perhaps, but you can always disassemble one, fix and return it to proper glory. They suffer from ill-abuse like any other car, and those are the ones that often have given them---post-facto---a bad reputation. I drove a 1970 Silver Shadow, RHD against a 1969 Lincoln sedan, and outdrove the Lincoln...the RR handling better, and outpacing the Lincoln...Lincoln catching the Rolls in the straights. I was rather shocked, since both cars were mine! We forget that R-R at Crewe only ever had 5,500 people on staff to make an amazing car---today they draw from the whole of BMW AG to make 'the best car in the world'---and it is. What is true is that in the 1970's Lincoln learned to make their accessories as reliable as the engines, especially considering that suppliers build most of the car. The QC for basic items like trim, body, engines, driveline, etc. are excellent, getting the myraid of features to work is another issue and time consuming. At the end of the day, LC Convertibles weren't bad cars, an in many places better or equal to anything else then available. Complex, and painstaking to maintain: absolutely. No different than a Ferrari or a Rolls-Royce. DouglasR
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Replying to: douglasr (Jul 20, 2006 3:21 pm) A Lincoln from the 60s would be a breeze to maintain next to a Rolls IMO. I mean, you don't have to pay $8,000 for a brake job do you? On a '61 Rolls you do. You don't need special training to fix most things on a Lincoln, which makes them more appealing than a Ferrari or Rolls---where hobbyists dare not tread. |
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S. H. Harry Grylls, the engineer who designed the Rolls-Royce V8 in 1953-58, used both Lincoln 368 CID and Chrysler Hemi as inspiration for their aluminum block, chrome-iron lined V8. It had to fit under the hood of a Silver cloud, thus its compact and narrow configuration unique to R-R. Bored out to 411.2 CID with new heads (changing the plug location) for the 1968-9 Silver Shadow the engine became a mainstain of the industry---the essential block still being manufactured by Cosworth for Bentley today. The V8 was built because the straight six engine had reached the end of its design parameters and could not be enlarged, having had 39 different crankshafts within its lifespan from 1922 to 1959. The V8 was derived from concurrent 1950's technology, coupled with decades of emperical experience at Rolls-Royce. The Merlin engines providing much input in the ultimate arrangement of the Rolls-Royce V8. Rolls-Royce even developed a DOHC version of the V8 in the 1970's---rejecting it due to its excessive noisiness at idle---moving to turbo-charging instead using a 1969 Silver Shadow test mule for its first pre-Bentley Turbo. The strength of the design is shown in the fact that its horsepower has more than doubled in its nearly 50 year production run, now standing at 453Bhp. Dr. Paefgen at Bentley intends to introduce a 550-600Bhp version of this engine in the next Arnage for 2009. Having extraordinary familiarity with aluminum through its aviation engine history, the V8 used aluminum for both heads and block. Rolls-Royce maintained its characteristic cylinder bore arrangement even in the V8. The Aluminum content of the engine a unique patented/registered combination of aluminum, silicon, nickel, tin, and magnesium---giving great strength and heat dissipation. You can't melt the cylinder heads with a torch...they can get soft, but not break down the material! Failure of the owners to maintain proper coolants and regular flushing of the block caused problems not inherent in the design. Any engine will fail if it can't cool properly. Current use of GM's DEXCOOL prevents breakdown of the coolant passages and scaling of the aluminum. Lincoln's 430 engine, by contrast borrowed heavily from the same Merlin Engines. The design engineer had worked (If memory serves, a man named Phillip Martel) for Packard during the refit of East Grand Boulevard to produce Merlins in mass quantities. He used many features of the Merlin design for the Y-Block 430, itself derived from the Mark II 368 of 1956. The 462 being the same engine with different cylinder head porting, and enlarged capacity, the basic design lasted only 10 years, the R-R engine nearly fifty years!. The Rolls-Royce engine producing similar power and torque curves at 25% less the weight of the engine---giving the Shadow a nice weight balance for drivability. The Shadow style was inspired, in part, by the 1961 Lincoln Continental and the Graber Bentley's of the 1950's. John Blatchley, the stylist for the Shadow, admitted as much in a 1969 interview. Elwood Engel, who designed the '61 was also influenced by the same Graber style, and Facel Vega---a car that Blatchley had also looked at. So both cars share many common historical engineering and styling traits. As for the cost of a brake job on a Shadow: of course it is expensive---it uses air-craft type braking systems in conjunction with the Citroen licensed height control system pressured from two nitrogen accumulators. It is four times as complex as a standard system on a cheaper car---you always have power brakes even if the engine stops running---you get a couple of jabs of the pedal in case of an emergency. The Shadow brought Rolls-Royce to the forefront in the industry in terms of braking capacity, the old Birkigt designed Hispano-Suiza system adopted by Rolls-Royce in the 1920's having outlived its usefulness by the end of the Cloud era. Four wheel disc brakes with three hydraulic power systems and one mechanical system as back-up, all on independent suspension all round, meant the car really stops!. Lincoln could only boast of Kelsey-Hayes Disc Brakes in the front, and that with a single master cylinder prone to failure at 36 months. Lincoln convertibles and Rolls-Royce do share one thing in common: requiring proper maintenance and service to keep them it good fettle. Otherwise they become a very expensive habit to bring back to the fore. And they both look great in your garage. DouglasR (Sources: 'History of a Dimension', S. H. Grylls, Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1963) |
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why would Rolls Royce overdo it on the brakes, but then keep it nice and simple when it came to transmissions. For the longest time, they were just using GM hydramatics so the tranny in a Rolls Royce was really no different than what's in my '67 Catalina.
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Rolls-Royce did what every other manufacturer had to do in the 1950's if they wanted an automatic: they bought them from GM. Packard's Ultramatic did give the Shadow its influence for the "electric shift" mechanism used on the later generation transmissions. No other transmission but the Hydramatic had had such extreme testing and design evolution by the 1950's---having been used by Cadillac and Grant Tanks during WWII.* Rolls-Royce was never plagued by the 'not-invented-here' syndrome, and its engineers always looked at ALL possibilities before chosing, thus GM's hydramatic. There is the very famous story that RR engineers tore down the Hdyramatic, remachined it to Rolls-Royce standards, put it back together and found that it would not work! The 'rough' Cadillac standards were necessary for smooth operation. So Rolls-Royce built them under license to the same specification with an appropriate bell-housing to match their engines, and slightly different valve body to match the shift points and torque curve of the R-R V8. The other issue is that Packard spent $7Mn to develop their own Ultramatic, (also sued by GM for patent infringement, though they lost that battle), spreading their costs over 75,000 units per year (so they planned, meaning its cost $100 per car in the first year and $33 per car in the third year!). For Rolls-Royce to develop their own unit would have cost at least as much, but over volumes of 2,500 cars per year, meant that the transmission would have added at least $2,800 to price of every car in the first year, the costs not amortised over fifteen years to bring it into aligment with either Cadillac or Packard!! Even Lincoln used Hydramatics in the begining, not introducing their own transmission until 1956. Rolls-Royce did not overdo it on brakes; their testing on concurrent conventional 1950's power systems found fading and failure after repeated hard stopping---which the old system did not do. Thus they went with an adapted Citroen system---prototypes called "Burma" and "Tibet" were driven 1Mn miles before production began. Quite simply, they never wanted their customers to 'restyle' the front ends of their cars because of premature brake failure---major brake service required every 48,000 miles! Lincoln by contrast, had tried disc brakes in the 1950's on prototypes, but the control mechanism/fluid technology was not up to the pressure/temperature ranges required of disc brakes: the result was boiling brake fluid and loss of brake pressure. 'Treadl-vac' systems used in the 1950's were OK at best and disasterous at worst, they were not up to the task of repeatedly stopping a 5,000 plus pound vehicle. If you have ever driven a 50's Lincoln across the Blue Ridge Parkway you know what I mean. Lincoln did not arrive at a near perfect brake system until 1967-9 with the advent of the combination of Kelsey-Hayes calipers and rotors plus the dual master cylinder made by Bendix. The Hydro-boost system was an improvement over the vacuum booster, but it was coupled with the cheaper single piston Ford derived calipers, which are not as effective as the Kelsey-Hayes units, the rotors were also not as thick and warped sooner. Test a 1967-9 Lincoln against a Silver Shadow, and throw in a 300Sel for good measure and you can gauge were braking technology really was in the 1960's. It was extraordinarily good, and not outdone until the advent of electronic controls on brakes. DouglasR *Use of automatic transmissions in Grant and Sherman tanks used by Montgomery at El Alemain in 1942 allowed the British Army to defeat Rommel's Panzers because they could turn faster into the firing zone, and likewise escape out of firing range before Germans could strike---offsetting the difference in armor plating and gun capacity. Rolls-Royce could not ignore such 'testing'. |
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Replying to: andre1969 (Jul 21, 2006 7:10 am) I'm not impressed by the mythology of Rolls Royce. It's a great example of a product "resting on its laurels". After WWII, the car simply did not deliver what it promised in the 1930s. The British auto industry was going down the drain and Rolls went with it. The Rolls is a prime example of useless complication and a waste of talent and resources IMO. Everything was "good on paper" and sounded terribly impressive as churned out by Rolls PR department, but in the real world people are not Spitfire mechanics, they pay $100K for a car and they want to turn the key and drive it (or have their chauffeur drive it). For all that complication in the 70s and 80s, you got a fussy old-fashioned and rather clumsy car better suited to 1935 than 1985. Nice wood and leather though, and the Brits made the very best chrome for a long time. So my two cents about Rolls is: "All show and no go". The final word on old Rolls Royces from the 70s and 80s is, I think in the resale value. You can't give them away. Buyers run away in droves....they are virtually worthless. You could get more for a nice Camaro than a 70s Rolls. Cars are like everything else in that it is in the "execution" that it all works out or doesn't. Promises, statistics, specifications, testimony from engineers...all well and good...gee, the Corvair sounded so good, too, and so did the Vega. You'd buy one in a minute if you just read the brochures and never drove the car. HYDRAMATIC: The Rolls Hydramatic was is a Rolls case and it was valved differently and changed a bit internally, so no, it's not really like your Catalina in the sense that you couldn't switch them. I think Rolls was desperate for an automatic that worked well since they couldn't design one themselves apparently--and didnt' have the money anyway, even if they could. One has to remember that Rolls was a very undercapitalized company and bled money for decades. The car company was completely unprofitable, and no wonder. Without subsidization from its aircraft division, and its subsequent purchase by the Germans, it would have been long dead, an outdated, uncompetitive and eccentric piece of English history way too long in the tooth for the modern age. Finally the Rolls is a decent car again, thanks to German technology (and money). |
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