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Hello all. Seeking advice for BIG restoration

CCongdon

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Hello all.

I've recently acquired quite the large project vehicle to restore.

It was found in the garage of an old mansion. The mansion was originally built in 1903. The most recent owner lived in it for a while and after some major storms damaged his slate roof back in '06, he took the insurance money and bought a smaller house and pretty much locked the door on the big house and ignored it. Based on the license plates on this car, the car had been sitting in the garage a few years before he had boarded up the house.

A couple of months ago, an enterprising genetelman decided to take on the restoration of this magnificent home. As the archtiect he had chosen to use was the same one our company uses for restoration work, we were invited to tour the property. When we got to the garages we saw this poor car just sitting there. My dad, who knows a lot more about cars than I do, realized it looked like a 60's Bonneville...but he said something looked not quite right about it. When we opened the rear door, we found to our surprise, that this car could seat nine people!

When we researched it we found that it is a 1966 Pontiac Embassy limo. Made by Superior Coach out of a Bonneville chassis.

The interior of this car is in pretty decent shape...it's the outside and engine that appear to be pretty bad.

We got it for $400 and I'm picking it up tommorrow with a flatbed. Once we get it back to our storage area and start checking it out, I'll get the good news/bad news out of it. I'm assuming it's mostly bad news though.

Don't know if it was worth even the $400 we paid, but it seemed a shame to let it rot any more or even head to a scrap yard.

I'm also assuming that most of the major problems I'll run into is not being able to use body panels normally designed for a Bonneville...and this thing needs some body work all right.

Chris
 
Welcome to the forum! Please post some pics of this when you can as I don't think I've ever seen a Bonnie limo before. Good luck with you project.
 
This site has a lot of great photos. Down towards the bottom is the 1966 limo.

Learning some interesting things....like most sites that help decode the model number out of the VIN have no idea what a body style 50 is. My data plate says 26250. I figured out that 2 is Pontiac, 62 is Bonneville, but nobody lists what the 50 is. I presume that 50 is a chassis version which would also explain why my trim package is listed as 000 on the data plate.
 
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