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1950 Lincoln Cosmopolitan
I joined this discussion because there was no category for my classic dream car. I own an unrestored bone stock black 1950 Lincoln Cosmopolitan 4 Door and I love it like no other car I have ever owned! My dad had a black 1949 Lincoln Cosmopolitan coupe when I was eight years old and I have always longed to own a similar Lincoln and it became a reality recently. Now I am taken up with nurturing it and joinging other classic car buffs in my central NY region where there are lots of classic cars. I will be a regular vistor here for sure, now that there is a category for this fabulous automobile. I am going on a maiden voyage of 90 miles one way to a classic car picknick tomorrow on Sunday the 29th of July and I will report back on the trip in this discussion group.
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This was a FoMoCo event and the sponsor was a generous couple of Ford devotees. They made everyone feel at home. They had barns full of cars that would make your mouth water! I never in my life saw three 1953 Mercury's in a row. It was awesome. What they could not fit in the barns were tucked under the tree rows that lined the farm they owned. All sorts of diamonds in the rough. I imagine he was keeping them hid so he would not have to register as a junk yard. I will tell you, I am an early Ford man all the way and no Ford is "junk" in my blue book! Everyone that came to the event had really nice Ford rides, most of the years were covered from a 1939 Lincoln V 12 coupe, that was spotless to my 1950 Lincoln, all flatheads for the most part. There were a few 1st and 2nd generation Mustangs there too. It was so much fun driving and keeping up with the BMW's etcetera on 81 South in NY. Keep on rollin.
I want to find a matched pair of nice mellow glass packs and some big diameter pipe to stick out from under that awesome rear bumper and then my hot rod Lincoln will be a road warrior!
Like a string of firecrackers, things will go wrong.
You might want to check out the rest of that wiring harness, if it's original and it probably is, things can get pretty brittle.
Part of the fun!
Click on my screen name for my address.
As far as an update on my cruiser; the thick walled exhaust pipe will be in at the muffler shop in my home town tomorrow, 9-5-07 and the header job will finally get done. I sent my busted AM radio off to Idaho for a refubishing. A guy there will strip out the innards and install a modern AM/FM receiver and leave it bone stock and you will not notice any visual change from the stock radio installed in the dash. It will be a 12 volt connection supplied by a booster that boosts my stock 6Volt connection up to 12V. I will run just one speaker as that is all it came with in 1950, way before the boomers and boxes of killer speakers, sub woofers and amps. You can bet I will buy a top of the line 6x9 to go in the dash where the old one used to hang out and do nothing. So far it is running pretty good but still do not have a working speedometer. I have a guy that will repair it but no one in my town will attempt the removal. If you know how, please let me know and I will try. No one would remove the radio either but someone showed me how and I did it. You have to be able to do some things yourself with these old cars. Mechanics fear these cars. More later. Cosmo1950 aka cosmopolitan1
1. They don't know how since they were born in 1982.
2. They are afraid they will break something irreplaceable.
3. They don't want to tie up a stall for weeks or months.
This could open a whole new topic. How many places would tackle an overhaul on that flathead? Nobody in my neck of the woods that I know of!
Be damm careful how you cut that FRAME!
If you want to discyuss your car with people who understand it (and YOU) you need to be on Jalopy Journal
That site is for and about MEN who are into old cars like yours. Maybe you wouldn't fit in there. But that's where I discuss and gather info on my 3 1950's vehicles.
Sandles, huh? They sound real cute.
I've enjoyed reading your posts, so you just keep at it. You might think about starting your own page on your car, and then you can add blog entries and tell us how you are coming along. Go to www.carspace.com to get started on that.
Once your page is up, you can invite friends from these forums and also outside these forums to see what you've done so far.
RE: Cutting the frame -- this was a common practice. I've seen it done a LOT on the late 40s, early 50s Oldsmobiles, to accomodate dual exhausts. The plasma cutter is nice because you can get a very very neat hole. I've seen some that just didn't look very good.
Ignore the troublemakers, they always go away when ignored!
Yup notice we haven't seen that particular new trouble maker on the sales side of the boards lately?
You could have suggested that site in a friendly manner.
Please continue your discussion!
MrShiftright
Host
Smithy's mufflers and flatheads are discussed there everyday--about 15 of the first 20 posts here were from him and responding to himself so I figured he might a place where he can get some interaction on his topic.
If good advice upsets people, I think that is more their problem than mine. I do appreciate your advice and value it as much as I paid for it.
I think if he builds a Carspace page he'll have an easier time sharing photos and data with us and with other forums. As he progresses on the car, we can follow along.
I'm always interesting in the choices people make during restoration.
We just got this lincoln in our shop to restore. Don't know much about it and need much help. Right now I need rocker panels and don't know where to find them. Can anyone help? Thanks :confuse:
If you hunt and are persistent, you can find almost any part.
A second one was owned by my grandfather, a '50 Cosmo 4-door black sedan. I told both he and my uncle that I wanted it if he sold it, but it ended up with the heating oil deliveryman before I found out he was selling it.
Right now we don't have any spare cash for a project car, but given my druthers it will be the car I have someday. Being in the Willamette Valley in Oregon where it rains quite a bit, I'd opt for the 4-door sedan as I love the suicide back doors - and my daughter could have her own door.
Anybody else care to share?
]
"Lincoln Tries to Find Its Way: 1949-1960
The party was over. The pent-up demand for cars after W.W.II had been fairly well supplied by 1948. Up until then, any warmed-over pre-war model was quite acceptable. But the normal laws of economics dictated that once this demand had been met, the various players would actually have to compete against one another. This meant new products. Lincoln answered the challenge with an entirely new car for the 1949 model year, first offering it for sale in April, 1948.
1950 Lincoln:
Two models were produced. The Lincoln, with a wheelbase of 121 inches, and weighing about 4000 lbs, cost $2575 for the door. The upscale Cosmopolitan rode a wheelbase of 125 inches, weighed about 4200 lbs, and was priced at $3238 in the door style. Both cars were powered with Lincoln's all-new flathead V8 of 337ci. At 152 horsepower it was about equal to Cadillac's 160. But it was not an overhead valve engine and would only last 3 years. Initially only a 3 speed manual transmission with optional overdrive was available. Later in the year the GM Hydramatic would be an option."
From another site I found that the '49-'51 Ford V8 was 239 c.i. and put out 100 hp, while the Mercury engine from that same period displaced 255 c.i. and generated 110 hp for '49 and '50, and 112 for '51.
They can certainly sound more powerful with glasspacks.
From "Lincoln The Gold Portfolio: 1949-1960" here are the specs they give:
1949 Cosmo 4-door sedan weighed 4,527 pounds and sold for $3,238 while the most expensive and heavy was the convertible at 4,717 and $3,948. The 337 cu. in. V-8, the first V-8 in a Lincoln since 1932, was rated at 160HP, and was both the biggest engine Ford had ever built and the biggest production engine on the market. The regular Lincoln and the Mercury shared the 7-A body while the Cosmo was a different body style. The 337 cu. in. V-8 was an adapted truck motor.
If you can find this book, it goes into quite a bit of detail on the design and numerous changes for the 49-51 Lincolns, especially the Cosmo. The ISBN number is 1-85520-0163 and was printed in Hong Kong, but was distributed by Motorbooks International in Osceola, Wisconsin 54020. Inside the back cover it gives the phone number for Motorbooks International as (715)294-3345. If this doesn't work, the British side is listed for direct orders as:
Brookland Book Distribution
Holmerise,
Seven HIlls Road, Cobham, Surrey
KT11 1ES,
England
It's sad tha the Cosmo was dropped after only three years and is pretty much relegated to the shadows of automotive history. It is a beautiful car and in many ways a trailblazer in design.
In which ways was the Cosmopolitan a trailblazer in design? I ask because it seems to me that the Cosmo was more or less on a par with the other '49-'51 Ford Motor Company models, and maybe less trail blazing than, say, the Cadillacs of those years. That doesn't diminish my liking of the '49-'51 Fords, Mercs and Lincolns. They were neat cars.
What makes some of those Lincolns and Mercurys so popular is how well they take to being lowered, chopped, shaved, frenched, etc.
Generally speaking a trailblazing design is not apt to be heavily modified in the body shape (as a rule), since you can't do a lot to improve it. Engines, paintwork, etc are a different thing.
Still, by 1949 a lot of cars had that look. The "pregnant" Packards, Kaiser/Frazer, and Nash were doing it. Studebaker didn't quite have them integrated yet, but still had a smooth, modern looking package. And the Hudsons looked downright futuristic by 1949 standards.
The 1949-51 Mercury always stands out in my mind as being modern looking for the time too, but I think my mind is clouded by the multitudes of customized Mercs I've seen through the years. Seems like they outnumber the stock survivors enough that I sort of forget what they look like. The customized models often look futuristic and sleek, sometimes a little garish, depending on how well of a job was done. But in stock form, I don't think they really have anything on a Buick or Olds from that era. Now a 1949 DeSoto, its closest Mopar competitor, is downright old-fashioned looking in comparison.
The 1949 Ford was probably the most modern looking of the Dearborn bunch though. I think the combination of smooth, integrated rear quarters, as well as tall, almost hood-height front fenders made it look more futuristic than a 1949 Chevy or Plymouth.
But I like the Lincoln design as well. I'd call it "period attractive" for sure.
Granted without hesitation that the GM cars were using overhead valve V-8's instead of the flathead design, and this is the only true drawback I can see to the Ford/Mercury/Lincoln offerings for '49-'51.
'49 was a year of big changes for Ford in their body designs. And an interesting side note is that the '49 models for Ford were the last ones personally approved by Henry Ford himself.
'55 was a good year for Ford-GM head to head competition IMO. After that, GM slapped Ford silly until the Mustang. Maybe not in sales, but in design, quality, etc, no doubt in my mind at least.
Lincoln used GM's 4-speed Hydra-Matic, an excellent transmission, in its '50-'54 models. Buick introduced Dynaflow in 1948 (ultra smooth but very inefficient in terms of gobbling power and poor gas economy), and Chevy made its Powerglide available in its '51 model.
Ford Motor Co. introduced Fordomatic and Mercomatic (the same torque converter 3-speed design), but I think Lincoln first adopted this (Lincomatic?) transmission for its '55 model. The Ford automatics were okay - more efficient than Dynaflow and Powerglide, although less rugged, and definitely neither as rugged nor efficient as Hydramatic, but smoother. You definitely felt the shifts with the old Hydramatics, kind of like the old Benz automatics.
Really? Ford used a GM product? I never knew that. Any info on that somewhere?
"updated November 30, 2002
Hydramatic Transmission Manual for the 1949-1950 Lincoln
Hydramatic transmissions (built by General Motors) were used for years in Lincoln cars. This rare factory service manual covers the Hydramatics used in the classic '49 and '50 Lincoln cars.
Contributed by Mike Schmitt.
INDEX:
Operating Instructions
Fluid Service, Manual Linkage
Throttle Linkage
Band Adjustments (External)
Valve Control Assembly - Disassembly
Front and Rear Servos
Reverse Anchor, Bracket Assembly & Shims Remove, Install
Transmission-Remove
Trouble Diagnosis"
"Starting in 1948 Hydramatic became optional for Pontiacs, although Buick and Chevrolet chose to develop their own automatic transmissions. One million Hydramatics had been sold by 1949. In the early 1950s various manufacturers that did not have the resources to develop an automatic transmission bought Hydra-Matics from GM. Users included:
1950-1956 Hudson
1950-1956 Nash
1951 Frazer
1951-1955 Kaiser
1954-1955 Willys
1949-1954 Lincoln
In 1952 Rolls-Royce acquired a license to produce the Hydra-Matic under license for Rolls-Royce and Bentley automobiles. It continued production through 1967..."
The Rolls cast their own case for the Hydramatic. Probably was the best part of the car, next to the upholstery.