A friend of mine, Ross Miller from Maryland creates these pickups from cars that no one is bound to restore--dogmeat four-door sedans that are no jewel when he begins. He just did a '56 Clipper pickup, and he did the red '51-'54 that "the well known collector form New Jersey" had in the Hyman area of The hershey car corral this past meet.

SWAG--shorter chassis,same torsion bars,less "stuff" in the rest of the body=less weight=higher riding height?

Atta boy, Randy. Anorher one got fixed right and escaped blue crimp connector purgatory, aided and abetted by someone who knows Chevy/Ford/Mopar only and would take one look at the T/L system, not know AT ALL what they were looking at, and would happily go about the work of lowering to their level.

Glad you liked that story. Oldt CJohn (the "J" sound being pronounced like the "CH" sound) didn't live in Hamtramck anymore, he had, and at the time I worked on his Clipper lived in a northern suburb that had seen a huge Polish influx after 1980, when General Motors brokered a gigantic deal to buy the Dodge main plant from Chrysler and a quarter of the rest of Hamtramck (homes, churches,stores)to build their "Poletown" plant--the new Cadillac front-wheel drive factory. One other famous quote from that repair job was when we settled up at the end of the job he cut me a check, and as he handed it to me said "Younk CJohn, you make oldt CJohn very happy"

Packards1--should I unleash some stories about Nestor L. at MCP activities meetings?

P1--yes, it was.

For those that don't know the story, Packards1 contacted me about 20 years ago and had a customer with a '56 Clipper who needed to get their T/L system up and going. The owner was an old guy with a heavy Polish accent, the type of second-generation Polish-American who grew up in the enclave of Hamtramck, a small city surrounded by the city of Detroit, where from 1913-until-the early 90s you could still find Polish being spoken in shops and restaurants. Dodge main was in Hamtramck, and for decades it was almost impossible to get a job there unless you spoke Polish.
My client had this '56 Clipper that he bought because "his brudder-in-law built it at Packards" (One other note of explanation: Detroiters have a peculiar habit of referring to their place of employment or businesses in possessives e.g. "I work at Ford's", "He works at Chrysler's","lets go to K-mart's")
The owner of the Clipper was, like me named John, he referred to himself as "Oldt Cjohn" and me (then) as "Younk Cjohn" Spelled as such to try to give you an impression of this unique dialect) I went to his house, diagnosed the problem (the motor was fried, a first for me) I removed it from the car and took it to my favorite auto electric bench-rebuilder. One week later Younk Cjohn is back at Oldt Cjohn's house, I bolt the motor back in the car, hook it up, connect the battery, turn the switch on, stand on the back bumper and after the usual wait--CLICK, then the nice whir of the leveling motor.
Oldt Cjohn looked at me from his lawn chair and said

"OH, Younk Cjohn, that's music to mine ears"

To this very day whenever I see Marvin King he greets me by calling me "Younk Cjohn"

Wow--how very corrosive! sounds like you got to the problem and fixed it. Has anyone on the list had experience with the solid-state conversion boxes being offered? I think they are just using a 555 timer circuit to handle the time delay function, the mechanical relays would still work fine, as long as the contact points weren't totally burned to a crisp.

FYI--the Bosch (style)"ice cube" relays will fit inside the T/L compensator box case with some minor modification to the mounting ear and solder connections in place of the usual socket. I had to do this last year for a '55 that the owner had converted to neg. ground and didn't want to convert back.

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&Partnumber=330-070

Ahhh--tres cool

Mark II--welcome to the party! always glad to have another contributor.

do you have a Lincoln Mark II?

I think it was $125, which seems pretty reasonable considering you can then use $7 NAPA points common to a big three distributor, all day long. I have only seen this offered in a CCCA publication. I'm not a member, I always see their publications where I work. It's a great idea, and I don't know why it wasn't advertised in either the PAC,PI publications or Hemmings.