No Plywood Allowed - 1956 Lincoln

Let's say you died. When the funeral director came to take you away, it was at least even money that he'd have a Cadillac with custom hearse bodywork. To a guy who loved Lincolns, or Fords, the thought of riding away in one of GM's luxury haulers was foul, even if just to the cemetery. Yet there wasn't much choice in the matter.

Dual picnic tables are covered in delicious fabric when closed.

Not only did Cadillac enjoy a numerical advantage as the basis for professional cars such as limousines and hearses, but also for the scatterings of custom-designed station wagons for residents of the top tax brackets, laden with luxury, making one think that its list of mandatory options included Texas plates and an oil stake. In fact, we showed one such cattle-rancher Cadillac in these pages not long ago (HCC #80, May 2011). Neither the somber black cars nor the whoop-it-up wagons tend to be based on Lincolns.

Dual air conditioners cool the interior, which matches Full Classic limousines for capaciousness.

You know what they say, though, about how one man with a vision can make a huge difference. This 1956 Lincoln station wagon is a bitsa, meaning it has been made up of many parts that are not original to the car. It was built in a hot-rod shop, but it's not a hot rod, even though the late-model Lincoln 460-cu.in. V-8 has enough torque to topple Interstate 65 where it swoops nearly over the owner's Indianapolis shop. The car is like George S. Patton: loud, flamboyant, completely over the top, but believably the way Lincoln would have done a family station wagon in the mid-Fifties.

Phil Schaefer, who commissioned this massive automobile, calls it the Pioneere. The last "e" is silent, and the name is wordplay on the Lincoln Premiere, this wagon's literal basis, and the Pioneer name that Dodge once attached to its own station wagons, as expressed in custom scripts. Phil is, dare we use the pun, a premier collector of old Lincolns. His lavender 1956 Premiere convertible was on the cover of HCC #88. Most of his other Lincolns have either low build numbers or are highly customized, such as his 1959 Hess & Eisenhardt Formal Sedan, 1973 Andy Hotton convertible, and more. The idea for this 1956 Lincoln wagon, though, began with a trashed Cadillac hearse.

Indianapolis is a wonderland of old brick structures dating well back into the 19th century, many of them elegant houses. Phil has made a career of restoring them. Thus, in the 1990s, he bought a 1975 Cadillac hearse that had enough interior length to hold 10-foot beams. Plus, the doors locked, a big consideration in some neighborhoods. Finally, the Cadillac, well, died. Phil then happened upon a hearse that was based on a 1978 Town Car but, if you will, passed. In his words, "I decided that I wanted a vehicle more live-passenger friendly."

That was when the basic idea began to form, even though Phil lacked a specific platform: a genuine, modern, custom-body station wagon. One with a modern driveline transplant performed by a hot rod shop, which also did most of the highly complex bodywork, even though it's not the common expression of a hot rod. Neither, obviously, is it a traditional coachbuilt Lincoln, though it can hold its own alongside any of them. Rather, the Pioneere is the product of complicated fabrication defined by Phil's vision of the intended result, something he has conceded he had trouble getting across periodically, even to himself.

When this all started, Phil was sitting on a pair of 1959 Lincoln parts cars, and piecing them into a station wagon intrigued him. A designer at Ford whom he knows roughed up a couple of sketches. Nice, except for the horizontal taillamp treatment which didn't lend itself to tailgate integration. Next up was the consideration of some Elwood Engel-designed 1961-'65 Continentals for modification. Phil even considered taking a 1969 Continental Mark III and remaking it as a two-door wagon in Chevrolet Nomad fashion. But Phil likes tall vertical taillamps, something none of these Lincolns had. Plus, the personal-luxury Mark III was too much the compact. Phil intended to go big. He started making Xerox copies of Premiere side-view artwork from a 1956 Lincoln sales brochure.

"I was doing the restoration of my 1956 Premiere coupe, so I had a small collection of 1956 parts cars," Phil said. "I searched and found a good running parts car with a good title out of Kentucky. Around this time, I had been down at AutoFair in Charlotte, and saw a display by the Carolina Rod Shop out of Greenville, South Carolina. I visited their shop, where they were converting a 1938 Buick four-door sedan into a two-door convertible. I figured that if they could do that, they could do the wagon."

What followed took two years of work and communication. The Pioneere rides on a 140-inch wheelbase, which is a lot longer than the original's 126 inches. "Because of where I wanted the B-pillar to be, we could not do a single cut and stretch to the frame. So we literally cut it in two different places on each side: one cut in the middle of the front doors and one in the middle of the rear doors, for a total of 14 inches--but not all added in one place."

If you look at the Pioneere, you'll see the waterfall line that runs horizontally the length of the wagon. It's not a straight line, so to achieve the right visual effect, Carolina Rod Shop took eight doors, two each from each corner of a 1956 Premiere sedan, cut and welded them. Phil told us, "Each door was cut 3 1/2 inches off center, vertically, and then the long halves were welded together to create a door that was seven inches longer than normal."

Discreetly positioned rocker switch controls powered rear liftgate.

The most critical design change, obviously, was the roof. Phil decided, broadly, that he wanted to preserve the original Premiere appearance by pulling the C-pillars from a sedan all the way to the rear and repositioning them as new D-pillars incorporating a liftgate, effectively making the wagon into a semi-fastback. A set of Premiere A-pillar vent windows were adapted to create the new C-pillars. Some technical details were more easily resolved than others. The rod shop relocated the fuel filler off to the side and custom-built a one-piece liftgate, powered by an electric motor, that incorporated a rear window sourced from a castoff 1980s Ford Tempo sedan, of all things. Despite the Dearborn lineage, Phil didn't like it.

"The Tempo window was the proper curvature, but was too small and made the rear look like a hearse, not a wagon," Phil recalled. "But in the shop, there was a 1963 Jaguar Mk 2 sedan that was having a Corvette engine installed. I noticed the similarity in the curvature of the Jaguar's windshield to the Tempo's. We did a quick search of the junkyards and found another Mk 2 windshield that became the Pioneere's rear window. The roof is three Premiere sedan roofs pieced together."

Aside from being huge, the Pioneere uses a fully custom roofline that takes sedan C-pillars and radically changes them into wagon D-pillars. workmanship is stunning.

Phil lists one of his challenges as reminding the shop more than once that the end product wasn't supposed to be a dictionary-entry rod or custom in the chopped-frenched-rocker dragging-kandy paint sense. Rather, the Pioneere is essentially a Lincoln that never was, a car with a made-up history--a phantom. You could say it was a long-lost dream car or something commissioned especially for somebody in the Ford family, or another rich family with a taste for eye-popping cars. That's why Phil, in one case, nixed a proposal to slide an independent Corvette suspension under the wagon: Stock wheels wouldn't match up. It wasn't a Lincoln. Rejected.

Here was plan B: The Lincoln frame had its nose cut away, and the front end from a 1974 Ford Ranchero car-based pickup was splice-welded into place at the firewall, just ahead of the X-brace. Modifying the frame in this fashion for long-distance freeway driving made a lot more sense than trying to adapt generations-removed suspension pieces to the Lincoln front frame. Once modified, the Ranchero-based front end got Ford LTD-sourced power steering, plus ventilated front disc brakes. A 1978 LTD contributed the 9-inch Ford rear, with drum brakes and a 2.73:1 Traction-Lok differential.

Let's talk power. Actually, first, let's talk weight. In 1956, the Ford Motor Company made the call that boring and stroking the Y-block Lincoln V-8 to 368 cubic inches, thus producing 285hp, was sufficient to prod along a new Premiere weighing 4,300 pounds. When we contacted Phil, he didn't know how much the Pioneere weighed, and agreed to weigh it at our request. The readout showed 6,380 pounds. That alone vindicates his choice to repower the wagon.

It's not easy to tell just by looking, but the engine is a 385-series Ford V-8 displacing 460 cubic inches, which disappeared from Ford's passenger-car lineup after 1978 but continued in light trucks. Phil insisted on a cosmetically revamped 460: His was sourced from a 1996 F-350 pickup, and by then, the oval-port 460 made a consistent 245hp. More importantly, its horses would dig in to the tune of 395-lbs.ft. of torque at 2,400 RPM. For repair consideration while on the road, off came the Ford multi-port EFI system, replaced by a Motorcraft 4300 series four-barrel carburetor.

Here's what's really trick: Phil had a 368 air cleaner modified to fit over the big Motorcraft carb--plus the tops of original 368 valve covers were cut out, welded atop the 460 valve covers, then stenciled with the correct emblems. The engine block is painted in the correct Lincoln light turquoise. We can attest that the effect is convincing. The rod shop released the Pioneere with the 460-cu.in. V-8 hooked to a General Motors 700R-4 overdrive automatic but, as Phil told it, "the engine's computers and the transmission's computers didn't like to talk to each other." So a Jasper Ford-based C-6 automatic has replaced it.

Inside, this is dream car heaven, all the way. Up front is a 1960 Imperial bench with the swing-out feature. Both the second and third seats were sourced from a 1960 Buick Invicta station wagon. All are covered in a gold cloth with black Lincoln emblem-shaped stars that Phil located while browsing a furniture store. Upholstery craftsmen Harlot Pittman and Dan Wickett of Indianapolis completed the lavish cabin, which also includes dual air conditioners, to Lincoln standards.

This is not your typical Lincoln collector car. Phil calls it a "radical custom" and has presented it at hot rod shows, but it's also made the field at several concours that allow modified cars. "I don't like showing it at hot rod shows, even though that's what it is, because a lot of people just don't understand what it is. I was at one show, listed all the modifications, and people are still coming up and asking me, 'Factory stock or prototype?' The problem is, the final result is so nice that I'll never use it to handle a load of materials. People or pets only."