Abandoned 77 Lincoln Continental Rescued After 35 YRS - Barn Find With 9000 Original Miles- RESTORED

And stormy nights, much like this night, my plans slowly began to unravel into the reality. I have finally found the missing links to my diabolical plan. What is my plan, you may ask? Why, it's rather simple. To capture and conquer the remains of the Hudson Farm. And they'll be mine, all mine. At last, all my hard work has finally paid, so long for this day. And nothing, nothing can ever stop me. That's not the end of the story. Now wait one minute there, Edgar. You're gonna scare the kiddos. Oh, you never let me have any fun. If you folks want to know the truth, the story started something like this. 1977, Lincoln Continental. My, my, my, what a car. Legend has it, the longest Lincoln they ever made. But don't think for a second it doesn't have the motor to push it down the road. Powered by that big block 460 engine? Well, most families would drive the wheels plumb off this thing. Now, we've all heard about them cars that never die. Well, this one here, she's never had the chance to live. 9,000 original miles. Well, that's just unheard of. Did grandma only drive it to church on Sundays? Why was she part of it? Well, that's the part of the story I'm just not sure of. So, maybe I should get out of the way and let these boys pick up from where I left off. So guys, as the story's been told, this old car is only showing 9,000 miles on the odometer. Now, is that gonna be the accurate miles to this car? Well, we really don't know. It could be that it's rolled over, it's 109,000 miles, or maybe even the odometer stopped working at some point back. I do have to say that it appears to be a pretty clean car up underneath this dust here. So, me and dad are basically just gonna dig into this thing. Hopefully, we can get it up and running and find out that we've stumbled across an extremely low mileage barn find. Well, that's a change for once, ain't it? Yeah. Too bad up underneath here. Very little, so. A few rat turds up top there, breather. Right. There's a little bit of grime on these valve covers here. Everything else, I mean, is pretty good shape, I mean. Right. For what we're used to working with. Gonna be a few more electronics on this one. I figure we'll probably go ahead and pull this breather off. We can see stuff a little better. And keep an eye out. I do know that there was a snake skin on this first time we laid eyes on it. Okay. Yeah, not bad. No? What do you think? Go ahead and pull the plugs. I don't know if it tries to. It's got a little clutch thing. Yeah, I think we need to. Being that it's so low mileage, I hate to just try to turn it over without having any kind of, you know. Right. It's been sitting since 83. It's been sitting longer than I've been alive. You know, that cylinder's probably dry. Yeah, it won't hurt it. I mean, if that hurts it, then we're in trouble anyways. Let's go ahead and pull them out and get a little Marble Mystery Oil squirted down in there, I think. I'll borrow an extension from you. You got one? Yeah, I got a long one. It may work. Whew. Pretty rusty on that one right there. Yeah. That's not good. I sure hope this thing is not locked up. Although over, well, more than half of them have been locked up that we've got from out there. Yeah. I don't think there's been one that wasn't at least started out. No, there hasn't been. Yeah, nothing's, very little chewed on. Right. Yeah, that's a good thing. I got one wire over here. It had just a little nick in it. I don't know what that wire there is. Is it holding something up? Yeah, I don't know. It's wrapped around that wire. I mean, it holds, but... I broke a spark plug. Put it at the back. Yeah. I guess that's one way to make you replace them, huh? Yeah. I'm going to get a little bit of that Marble Mystery Oil and try to squirt down in them best I can. Alrighty. Yeah. I guess we haven't even checked the hole yet. No. Kind of jumped the gun, didn't we? At least it has some in it. It's got it in it. It ain't milky. It's not milky, and it's not, like, new, but it's not... You'd think if this is an accurate 9,000 miles, that could be the original oil. Could be. Hard to say. Especially being dark like that, I would bet that it is. I don't know if there's... I highly doubt it, but... Oh, yeah. It's to the topless. Coolant. Slightly over full, but it doesn't smell gassy, so... Yeah. It smells oily. Missing our belt off of the AC, I guess. Yeah. Missing off the smog there. Yeah. Those days are over and done with, though. We don't have smog anymore. Yeah. Can I grab a battery? I think so. See what it does? See what it does. I don't know if this one's going to be set up right or not. Looks like the cables are long enough either way. Either way, as long as they're to the back. Battery tray's not rotted out. We want to try it with the key, or do we want to go ahead and use just the starter thing? Yeah, let's... I don't know. Let's just use the starter, so I can watch it out here. I hear crackling when I put the negative on, so something's... Let me see if the key's on. Key's off. Still something. Well, we got some lights coming on inside here. The fasten seat belt light's coming on. Okay. Do it again. Just a buzzer and stuff. I think we're okay. Okay. I'm just going to do it with the key. Right, yeah. That's it. Seems like everything's working in there. Oh, there's a buzzer. There's a buzzer inside the car, yeah. I thought I could hear something. I guess stand clear in case it does turn over and squirts everywhere. You ready? I'm ready. Nope. Nothing, huh? Try this. One of them should run down to the... Starter? Yeah, to the solenoid on it. Please don't be locked up. Ready? Yeah. There it goes. Ready? Yeah. Square down on yours. Yeah, it scared me more than it did anything else. I thought it was going to spray me. Here we go again. It's kind of... It smells... Old. Old, yeah. I can just let her keep turning over a little bit more. I'd rather know we've got oil kind of pumping up. Well, where's our fuel line running at? I also don't want to pump any old fuel into it in case there is any. Vacuum... Fuel line up there? Goes in right there, don't it? Yep. Need some pliers or something? Yeah, a needle nose if you got any. I got it. Ain't nothing there. It's dry. But I just wanted to be sure before we're pumping. We're not pumping full of junk. Let me see if it shows anything. I don't know what's up with the ignition switch, though. Ah, the fuel light's on. Oh, I see what it is. There's a little rod that runs down off the ignition switch there. It looks like it's come unhooked to the actual relay thing that starts it over. Kind of like a safety something or other or something like that. So we got this thing turning over. It didn't take very long at all. Just pulled the plugs out of it. We squirted a little Marvel Mystery Oil in there. When these cars sit so long, just in them cylinders, the pistons just get in there dry. So we wanted a little bit of lubrication. The first few times we start turning it over. So now hopefully a lot of the oil has been moved around in this engine. So we need to move on to the next step. I've got to hook up a rod that runs off the ignition switch. So we can actually crank it by the key in there. Got to buy a new spark plug. So we're just going to put new plugs in it since I broke that other one off. Kind of want to see if we can crank this up with as much of the original stuff as possible. But we'll go ahead and get that ignition switch hooked up in there. And just move on to the next step of trying to see if we're getting any fire. You ready? Yeah. We're getting fire. Pretty good? Yeah. Real good fire. Yeah. That's easy enough. Yeah. Just try to dump a little gas down through it and see what it does. I have to watch and make sure if it does happen to start pumping. We don't want to hurt it and kill it. A little gas everywhere. Try it. I'll give her a try. See what she does. Here we go. All righty. Well, those buzzers are annoying. Try again? Yeah. So we're sure we're getting fire, huh? Yeah, we were getting good fire. Could be just a little bit of that Marvel Mystery Oil kind of just fouling those plugs right now. Burning it off. A bit of a lifter noise or something? Or what was that? Couldn't tell? I couldn't tell. Try it again. I was just watching everything else. Well, a puff of smoke over there. Oh, yeah. I think it's just going to take a little bit of that oil getting everywhere. Been sitting, what, I mean, close to 40 years. Yeah. Still smoking? No. Not that I can tell. A little bit. We'll check our gauges, see if anything's working in here. Shows that we're charging. Fuel light's on. We knew that earlier. There's no fuel in the tank, so that's honestly probably a good thing. We'll try to see if we're even able to save that, but temperature gauge obviously hasn't moved yet. Radio did come on. I need to see if we've even got any brakes. There's a bit of a vibration when I press it in. It does have a pedal, though. It tries to feel going gear. It feels like, I mean, there's a brake pedal, but it kind of feels vibrating when I push it in, so I don't know. Something's probably crusty in there on that master cylinder. I'll just see if it'll go and drive. Okay. I'll be ready to kill it, I guess. Nothing. That's why they parked it. Fan's hitting that shroud every once in a while. Huh? I think that fan's hitting that shroud. I think so. I hear something tap every once in a while, yep. Try? Yeah. Well, I guess let's get some fluid in it and see if it'll move. I'd like to get it inside and then we can kind of tell why maybe it's lost the fluid. It's running pretty good, though. So we ended up having to run to town to pick up some transmission fluid for this car. We're going to just go ahead and start pouring it in just a quarter of the time, just trying it out, see if it'll make it move. Obviously, we've got some kind of a leak, but a car that's been sitting over 30 years, it could be a slow leak that's just leaked out for a long time now. So we really don't know. Hopefully, though, the goal is to get the car moving. If we can get it moving under its own power, we're going to try to get it inside, get it on the lift, where we can check out up underneath the car just to learn a little bit more. The easiest way to move this car around our shop is under its own power because this thing is huge and heavy. So fingers crossed, get some transmission fluid in there, and maybe she'll try to move for us. All right, starting up underneath this thing. Had a surprise right off the bat. That right there, my friends, is a snake skin. We'd seen one up on top of the motor when we first looked at the car, so I don't know if that's another one or just part of it. But up underneath here, not near as pretty and clean as I'd hoped for until this oil pan took a little bit of a hit at some point in time. I wanted to check out our brake hoses here. One thing I noticed is this wheel is stiff now. So a lot of the times these old brake hoses, they'll start collapsing where they won't allow the fluid to come back through. So when I press the brakes, it pushes that caliper for the brakes to stop, but it's not allowing the fluid to go back through it. So probably going to have to get those replaced. On the exhaust system here, we've got our little catalytic converter still. You can tell it had an undercoating on the car. At some point in time, a lot of it's flaking off. None of this is rusted through, just starting to get some surface rust. So we may end up having to take a pressure washer, pressure wash it off up underneath here and just go ahead and spray some more undercoating up underneath here. Trying to think, so on our transmission leak here, as you guys can tell, it's been sitting on this lift for a couple days now and it's dry as can be. So it's not dripping off too bad, but our pan is wet all the way around there. So not exactly sure where it's coming out there, but we might try to clean that up and just wait and see before we pull this pan off to try to replace that gasket. Could be coming off from somewhere else. Back here on the car, we've got our original exhaust. It's pretty rusty. Back here, I guess what you would call the resonator at the end of the exhaust system, it's just completely rusted out. So we're going to have to have some exhaust work done on this car. Basically cut it from where the muffler is, put a new muffler on it, new tailpipe, all that stuff. So on the gas tank back here, it's actually in pretty decent shape as far on the outside. Now, we haven't pumped any fuel through it. I don't think that there's anything in it at all. It actually sounds pretty hollow, so that's good. We'll have to put some fuel in it, try to pump it through, see if the factory mechanical fuel pump is working, and just see what kind of shape the fuel's in. Pretty cool little hitch back here. I guess you saw that a lot in the 70s and 80s. They'd put on some kind of a tow hitch where they could haul stuff around on. Not exactly put on there the greatest, but it probably works. So what we're going to go ahead and do now is we've ran some engine flush through this motor. We're just going to go ahead and try to drain the oil out of it so we know we need to put some new oil in it, clean up that transmission pan just a little bit, and probably go ahead and try to check on these brake hoses to see if we can't replace those where we can have our brakes working a little better. Way to try to pull this thing out. It looked like it was a decent size. Yeah, at least a few feet long. Yep. I'm going to hold this up there and catch what comes out first and lower it down. It's pretty black, huh? Pull this little cap on this so it can breathe. I have an old oil filter and it looked terrible. Go ahead and replace that. So the oil's pretty black. We did run some engine flush, as I said, through it. Just going to go ahead and let it drain out real good. Got a new oil filter we're going to put on this as well. You always want to kind of do this on any kind of vehicle that's been sitting for a while now. If this thing actually has 9,000 miles and that oil that dark, I bet it's the original oil. But even so, it probably hasn't been changed once or twice in its life. So we're just going to go ahead and get some new oil put in it. Then we'll also get back on the top end once we've got all that and start changing out spark plug wires, all that stuff. That's just going to give it a good tune up as well. Now another thing that's going to keep us from driving this car very far is these old tires. As you can tell, this one's got a big old gash and a sidewall on it there. But something really cool as far as verifying on the mileage of these things is they're actually stamped from the Department of Transportation with a date code on them. So you can kind of figure out when this tire was made and possibly when it was put on the car. So the last three digits around this time period would have been the week of the year. And then that last digit is the final number of the year. So we have 187, which would be the 18th week of the year. And 7 would be 77. Now it could be possibly that it would be 87, but that doesn't make a lot of sense since how it was parked in 83. So these right here, I'm going to say, are the original tires that come on this car. So we definitely don't want to try to drive on them. So we'll go ahead and get these pulled off, try to find some tires to put on it, and that'll get us a little closer to actually getting it down the road. That's terrible. Yeah. If we did try to drive on that thing, it would for sure blew out and ruin the whole quarter panel. Yep. So while we're going to go to town and get some new tires on these wheels, we notice these front rotors are extremely rusty. So we're going to go ahead and pull those off, have a parts place, just go ahead and turn the rotors. Go ahead and put some new brake pads on here as well, so that'll have us replacing the front brake hoses, the pads, the rotors will be turned. So that should help us stop a whole lot better. So once we get all that on there, we'll move on to the fuel, see how the tank works out on it. But getting pretty close to getting this thing going down the road on its own power. Now that we got the car off the lift, we've put some fresh oil into it, did the typical tune-up stuff, new spark plug wires, new rotor button, new distributor cap. So now we need to move on to check to see how the fuel tank is in this car. So we're just going to go ahead and just put some gas into the tank. We're still running it off this tank up here with an electric fuel pump, so hopefully our mechanical fuel pump on the car will pump. And we'll just catch it up here in the jug and see what kind of shape it's in. Worst case scenario, we'll have to drop the tank, clean the tank up, but we won't really know until it starts just pumping that fuel up here to see how it looks. Smells like old gas, but I think it's empty. It's not showing anything. Well, we know it wasn't pumping out anyways. Could be the pump's no good. Wasn't a really big looking tank from up underneath it like you'd think it would be. No, it wasn't, no. No, you would think something this size vehicle would have a 20 gallon tank on it or something. That didn't look near that big. I'm going to check to see if the gauge is moving in it. Probably enough to at least check it. And, yep. So the gauge does work. Want to go ahead and try it out and see what it does? Yep. Let's see here. You want to just hold that in there and I'll crank it up. It may take it a little while to pump up. Let's see what she looks like. Clear? Clear. Yep, we're pumping. I thought at first we wasn't, but... Boys, I don't know if that's the alternator or that fan shroud is failing up. Yeah, I think it's that fan shroud. Don't look bad on the gas. No. I'm going to check that alternator though. The gauge is actually just sitting in the middle. I don't think it's charging. I'm going to pull this positive and see if it dies. Ready? Yep. Need an alternator. Well, I think we got the gas problem fixed. Yep, just a matter of hooking it up now. So we've got some clean gas pumping up here to the motor now. But I noticed on the alt gauge it was actually just sitting right in the middle. So I went ahead and checked it here. It was just showing basically the voltage of the batteries. If you didn't know, a lot of times on this old school stuff you can actually pull the positive post on the battery. If the car dies, more than likely you need an alternator. And, well, I pulled it and the car died. So we're going to have to grab an alternator, get that slapped on here, get our breather and stuff put back on the car. But I think we're getting really close. Crank this thing up. Try to make it to the car wash and just wash off some of this 30-year-old dirt. Running quite a bit better. Let's see what she does, I guess. Going to go ahead and try to make it over to the car wash. We did run into a few more things we're going to have to address. But I need to use the lift with another truck. One of the things we ran into is apparently our master cylinder isn't allowing the fluid to flow backwards right. So the brakes are kind of staying stiff after you've pumped them up a few times and getting to where they won't turn over. So we're going to have to get a new master cylinder for it. So not a big deal. We went ahead and did also replace the calipers as well. And I'm also still hearing that fan shroud. I keep forgetting we need to adjust on that. But it's running as smooth as can be right now. Actually really impressed. I'm going to keep an eye on this odometer. I mean this is the first time I've been able to move the car further than just a few feet. So we're going to see if the odometer is working or maybe if it stopped. What the deal was on that. If I can see. Drives like a Lincoln. Actually get to stop with a working blinker. Get some of this old dust washed off here so we can see the cosmetic stuff of the car a little better. But that's not the end of the story. Well, you're right Edgar. This isn't the end of the story. 7.5 meters of pure American power. Backed up with that C6 automatic transmission. I'd say this car is moving along mighty fine. But with a car that sounds and drives as good as this one. Well, she's got to have a look to match. Hey Amos. Want to hear a joke? I'll keep it clean. Get it? All right Edgar. Make it fast. Tell your joke. Why did the evil villain take a shower? Tell us. Why did he take a shower Edgar? Edgar? Come on. I got a story to tell. I got this. Hold on. Wait. I got it. You wanted a clean getaway. You get it? The joke? From earlier? Well, son. I believe you need to work on your delivery. So now that we've got a lot of this old dust washed off the car. You can definitely tell what we're working with a lot better. It does have some dents and dings and chips in the paint. But being a 40 plus year old car, that's kind of to be expected. I still think the car is going to clean up great. Our next step here is just to try to detail it out the best we can. Restore the paint. Try to clean out the inside. Maybe shampoo the carpet and the seats as well. I can confirm that the odometer is indeed working. So we can go ahead and scratch that off as a possibility of why the mileage was so low. I believe indeed that this is just a 9,000 mile car. And I guess we can just blame the dents and dings to the little old lady that drove it to church on Sunday. So now that we've got the car inside here. You can kind of see it does have some little dings and scratches, chips in the paint across this driver's side here. This car looks like it has been repainted before. Especially the hood and there's some other panels we've noticed. So what we're going to try to do is just try to buff out this old paint. Actually on the other side, it's a lot cleaner of a sheen of the paint job here. So we'll run the buffer around the whole car here. But this side here was obviously the side of the car we saw in the barn and it's pretty much flawless. So kind of hate seeing the little chips and stuff it's got over here on the driver's side. And may eventually come back and try to repaint some on this car. But for right now, we're just going to take a buffer, probably start on this rear quarter panel right here. And just do a comparison from the rear door to the quarter panel and see how this old paint will shine up. So I don't know how much you can tell, but it's already making a difference here just on the first pass. What I can tell is that this is just an old single stage paint job because we've got a little bit of the color coming off on the pad there. So we're just going to keep going on it. A couple more passes, work our way down the panel and then come back with the next step. So you can tell quite a bit of difference now. I did the driver's side half of the hood there. You're going to have to give me a new pad. That old oxidation of this paint, just the old paint, break it down and start clogging up your pad. Now I've got that spur I'll clean it up with, but it's just really tearing down this pad for me. So I'll grab a new pad, keep going around this car. Once again, on the passenger side of the car, it doesn't look near as bad as the driver's side did. So I'll probably get away with just one pass on that. Take it outside, rinse some of this extra compound out of the jams and the little crevices and stuff like that. Hit it with the foam pad and then move in and start working on the inside of the car. So now we got the exterior cleaned up a little bit better. We're going to head on into the interior and see if we can clean it up a little bit better too. With it only being 9,000 miles on it, I'm not expecting it to be crazy bad, but we'll just see how it looks. So right off the bat, the chairs are not that bad at all. I mean, they're not stained or anything really that bad at all. So that's great. I guess the next thing to look at would be the carpet and it's a little stained. It's definitely going to have to be shampooed and vacuumed out, but I mean, nothing that's terribly hard. One cool way of finding out if this thing is actually 9,000 miles is you can look at the brake pedal. So if it's got a lot of wear on it, you know, it's definitely got a lot more miles on it. But as you can tell, this really doesn't have that much wear on it. So it most likely is 9,000 miles, which is really cool. So I think the front seat will not be that bad to clean up at all. Now, as for the back seat, so as you can see, the seats are a little bit more stained up than the front seats were. But I think if you got a shampoo and vacuum, it's not going to be, you know, crazy bad to do either. So honestly, I think it's going to be a pretty simple cleanup right here. So I guess first things first is we're going to try to vacuum it up some, see if we can get some of that loose dirt up. But I think it's going to be pretty easy. To me, what's a lot of fun when you go to cleaning out these old vehicles is just seeing what you can find inside of them. Now, this one is completely out of our normal of what we're used to dealing with. Most of the time, it's just a bunch of old rat turds and a bunch of junk no one wants that needs to be thrown away. In the glove box of this car, we found some really cool stuff, including this original owner's manual to the car. Pretty good shape. We've got a performance specification that tells you everything about the engine you're going to need to know. And get this, we found the warranty on the original tires that was still on this car. So at 40,000 miles, with 9,000 miles only on the car, maybe we could have cashed that in. I don't know. We've got our original owner's card, the metal plate here that came with the car when it was bought brand new. And even the envelope where it says, your sales rep, and then his name there. So a lot of cool information. Here's the warranty on the car from when it was bought. There's the 12-month, 12,000-mile warranty over different things on the car. But I have to say, one of the coolest and weirdest things we've come across in this was this little memo book. And I'm pretty certain this belonged to the owner, Mr. Hudson. And what's cool about it is this was where he took notes of his everyday calculations he may have been working on, or whatever he was trying to come up with. But in the front of this book, he's got a list of what appears to be a Christmas list for his children, grandchildren. So I'm seeing some names here I recognize, like Cecil, which is the son that we bought it off of. His brother George. I see a grandson in here being Benjamin. But on the second page, I see a Lance. And the first thing on the list is Car. Now I'm not really sure who Lance was to the family, or what kind of car he was expected to receive back then. But I have to say, it's definitely an eerie feeling to see my name with Car on the first thing on the list there. It definitely makes me feel that this purchase was meant to be. So, we finally got her all cleaned up. We got the windows all cleaned up. And the seats have all been deep shampooed, as well as the carpet. Some of these stains are a little bit more stubborn than others, but I think overall it's a lot cleaner. We got the door panels. It's definitely a big difference on that. And on to the back seat. Looks pretty great as well. We deep cleaned the seats back here too. And honestly, the carpet back here cleaned up better than it did up front. I don't know if maybe it didn't have as many people riding in the back as in the front, but happy that it cleaned up anyways. Overall, looks better, smells a lot better, and I'm pretty proud of it. So, I guess the next step is to see if we can get her on the road and see what she can do. Amazing how easy this thing cranks up. Typically not the story around here. So, we've got the outside cleaned up just about as much time as we wanted to invest into it. The old paint job just isn't the greatest on this car, so we got it buffed and waxed out the best we can. Now the inside, it doesn't look a whole lot different, but it sure smells a lot better. This will be the first time we actually get it out on the road and try to see how she does more than just a couple blocks. Ended up having to do a little radiator work on it. Some more brake work with the master cylinder. It's kind of crazy just because a car as low mileage that's been sitting, it'll need just about the same amount of work as a car that would have had 100,000 miles, just because these things sitting, it just really isn't good for them. So, I think we've about got all the kinks worked out of this one though, for the most part. What's so crazy to me though, as I've always heard, rides like a Lincoln, rides like a Cadillac, but the seat in here is like you're sitting on a couch. This has to be one of the smoothest riding cars I've ever ridden in, in my life. I'm not 100% sure, parts-wise, where exactly we're at on the investment of what we've had to buy for it, but we're in it a little bit more than what I'd hoped for in the beginning, but I think we've got a pretty solid car now. I'm going to try to get it out here on the highway and blow a few cobwebs out of her. You've got your standards. Everything you do has to meet them. You won't compromise. Lincoln Continental hasn't compromised. Full size, full luxury, it sets a high standard for luxury cars. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, Miss Percy. Well, Edgar, I'm impressed. Did you come up with that name on your own? Ha! Just because I'm a villain doesn't mean I don't have a heart. All right, all right. I'm sorry, Edgar. But, to tell you the truth, I, well, actually just found it on Google. Well, I guess you heard it, folks. Here she is in all her glory, Mrs. Percy. I have to say she's cleaned up mighty fine. Found in a bar, sitting for over 35 years, and somehow only 9,000 original miles. Well, a story like that is just hard to believe. But, with a full tank of gas and a fresh new start, she's got a lot of catching up to do. And once I mount my intergalactic space missiles, dude, my evil plan will be complete. Now, Edgar, I think it's time you say goodbye to these fine folks. Well, can I at least invite them back to the next one? Go ahead, Edgar. Go ahead. Don't forget to like and subscribe. We'll see you when my next plan unfolds.