'58 Cadillac Meteor Hearse combination

[electra225]

The same guy with the Fleetwood 60 Special has this ambulance. He put a lot of work into it. I would have replaced the silly original blue paint and did something more with the hood. At least take the dents out for pity's sake. This guy wasted a lot of time and effort just to make a hooptie out of a rare car. He turned the field find of a rare car into a parts car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fStFUheJtrk

[TC Chris]

Again,I did not see anything irreversible or destructive. It was in bad shape to start with and now it's better. Engine runs; he can drive it. And he does. If a one owner some day wants to make a museum piece, the basis for that is still there. But meanwhile, he has a fun vehicle that's unusual and usable. He has not desecrated something rare (most old vehicles are rare now).

Me, I'll reserve my ire for the guys who take good old cars and drop massive non-original engines in.

Chris Campbell

[electra225]

Your point on the engine is well-taken. I am not much of a rat rod fan, particularly if they use a real car to make one. Clear-coating a hood with hail dents and no paint is not my idea of a good thing. If he took a bunch of miscellaneous parts that weren't good for anything else, put them together to make a running vehicle, that's another matter. He says there are only 17 such vehicles known to still exist. He did good work on the engine and the instrument panel, then to just bodge up the hood seems a tad incongruous.

[TC Chris]

Yeah, but the finish was already destroyed, so to make it perfect it will have to be stripped anyway. That could happen still if the guy wins the lottery and has the $$$$ to make it perfect. Meanwhile, he's having fun without damaging the vehicle. He has not made anything worse.

Let's also remember that most of us operate on limited budgets. I did for most of my life until I got old, and habits are hard to shake. So my projects have always been incremental. Do this now, leave that for later. Look at my Chevy. I would imagine that buying anything for old Cadillacs tends to thin the wallet quickly. And that guy seems to have a fleet of them.

Chris Campbell

[electra225]

I should take a calmer line on this. This car is a hearse. It has limited appeal and a limited market. It may be a '58 Cadillac and may be rare, but that doesn't make it valuable. Better that he puts the "happy hands at home" touch on this thing than on that 60 Special he has.

[TC Chris]

Let's put it in console terms. What he has done is like finding a good console stereo with a bad cartridge and water-damaged finish, and replacing the cart with one that fits but isn't original, and splashing a bit of Howard's on the finish to make it look better. It will survive as a useful music-maker. Maybe in the future somebody else will completely refinish the water-damaged sections to match the originals, and perhaps find an OEM cartridge that works, and make it like-new. Meanwhile, it's saved from the garbage truck.

Now, if he ripped the innards out to make a wine cabinet, a bar, or a TV stand, or if he painted it some garish color with "Mediterranean" grille cloth to match, yeah, I'd be jumping up and down.

The hearse isn't painted bright green and purple. He did not cut a hole in the hood so he could install a 454 with a blower. He did not cut up the rear section to add "tubs" for huge tires. He did not install velour upholstery and chenille headliner. He did not cut up the door panels to install a 10-speaker sound system with a subwoofer in the rear. Those would be desecrations.

It does not appear that he destroyed any original stuff like door panels that were salvageable. It was in bad shape to start with. He has improved it overall and left it so a committed perfectionist could take over, reverse his actions, and have a good vehicle.

Chris Campbell

[walyfd]

It's an ambulance. It was never used as a hearse or combination if it belonged to the hospital. A hearse has rollers in the floor. It may have been ordered with the combination code as it's not a high top but that never carried anybody to the cemetery.

Funeral homes also had the ambulance services in some towns. The firm I served my internship had a 58 combination (don't know the maker) into the early 70s and ran on ambulance calls. We still had the cot from that car and the oxygen tank setup. Car rotted out so bad the rear bumper fell off I was told. The floor flipped from roller side to flat side.

Strangely, I see a factory radio in the dash. And there was no "gold package" for trim like the CADILLAC letters on the fins. Gold anodized is standard...

Kudos on saving the engine and trans... that trans has commercial only specs and parts.

Paint... sorry but coating "patina" I think is irreversible... treat it and wax it but don't varnish it. It should be nitrocellulose lacquer paint unless MM used something different. And that paint reacts with other finishes in strange ways.

[electra225]

Patina to me means you need to restore the item. The guy has put so much glop on the metal it would need to be chemically dipped to get it all off. Not fixing the dents is the worst thing as far as I'm concerned. That is just "poor".