I don't see the reason for the excitement
Posted on 06/11/2007 5:05:42 AM PDT by battlegearboat
This is a link to several stories the Tulsa World is running about the 1957 Plymouth that has been buried for fifty years in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/webextra/content/2007/buriedcarunearthed/default.aspx
The first principle of Ford’s Rust Acceleration Technology.
Didn't get a Hemi of my own until '69, was 426" by then. Still have it.
My father had a 53 Plymouth, stick shift, six cylinder. Great commuter and kind of cute.
When he transferred, selling the house and Plymouth fell to me...up there on the hill.
Naturally, three guys showed up at the same time to see it and I could see a bidding frenzy coming on!
So, we all loaded into the car, ran around in the flats for awhile, and started bidding on the way back.
Things went fine until the little flat head refused to pull four people back up the hill.
It came down to "make an offer or get out and walk". One of them did have enough sense of humor to buy it but he got quite a discount.
Dad learned a lesson from that, years later when his Rambler barfed it's transmission on the freeway he coasted down a ramp, parked it on a surface street, and left the pink slip under a windshield wiper.
If the vessel was evacuated, even to just a small vacuum, and sealed, then it would last. Pack it full of cosmoline, otherwise......
....56 was the last year for the 354, I stand corrected.
I don't see the reason for the excitement
Well maintained, the Mopar L head (flathead) 6 was a mountain goat. I had one in a 1952 Plymouth and it didn’t have the horsepower but the Torque was phenominal. I am sorry I wrecked that car.
that rustbucket has GM written all over it...though I could be wrong.
Amen to that! Although my dad had a ‘57 Ford Fairlane 500, the four-door hardtop without the post, and it would give the Chevy a run for its money in the looks department. Some of the most memorable events of my life took place in that Ford on the back roads of rural Alabama in 1958. Sure would love to have that car now! It was yellow and white. I recall dad and I spending a very cold Saturday in 1958 putting dual glass packs on that car.
That’s a great story...brightened my day. Thank you.
Ramblers — hadn’t thought about those in a long time. A neighbor had one, but as I recall, it wasn’t the kind of car to take out on a highway. Your father was a brave soul for driving his on a freeway. :)
My old man was "A Packard Man", would buy new one every two years, from '47 on.
Last one was '55 400 model........SUPER CAR!!
He quit Packard when they merged with Studebaker, (I think he suffered a stroke over THAT).
I believe he paid $5,500 for the 400, my mother was, to say the least, miffed about the price. We had just paid $5,000 for a 4 bedroom house on 10 acres.
bump for later reading.
I traded it after a couple of years, but from time to time I dreamed that I found my old Fury in a barn someplace. In 1963 I bought a nice used "58 Fury with about 50,000 miles. The '58 was identical to the '57 except that it had dual headlights and slightly different trunk trim. After a week or two, the oatmeal all got dissolved in the tranny and I had to have the seals replaced. The car had a really baffling problem - - when the engine was hot, it would not start until after it cooled a while. Finally I found that there was a wire coil resistor in the ignition circuit, and the coil was broken so that when it got hot, the spark would jump the break as long as the engine ran, but current could not pass once it stopped, until cooling brought the gap together. No, there were no transistor ignitions back then.
I finally bought a single carb intake manifold out of a junkyard and set one of my 4-barrels on the shelf, but gas mileage didn't really improve much. The 2 x 4 Furies would pass anything but a gas station, but a friend said if you got it up over 100 you would never stop because the brakes would burn out first.
Finally, at Christmas of 1969 the tranny blew, and I traded out the good tires and sold the car to a junker for $10.
Glass Packs bring back memories of my first car, a 55 chevy. What a honey that car was, and a jack rabbit as well.
Ah, Schlitz, the world’s only true onomatopoetic beer.
The Packard of that era was a land Yacht. Thinking of it also reminded me of the Hudson Hornet, whose maker also went belly up.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.