1966 Stainless Steel Lincoln

edited by David Barth, 22 February 2009.
Courtesy The Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.
Photos were taken in January 2009.

In 1966, Continentals grew four inches longer. The front bumper was stretched around the car to the front wheel wells, and the turn signals were returned to the bumper. Previous models had the turn signals next to the headlights. The instrument panel on the cars were also redone.

This particular 1966 Lincoln Continental had one of the most unusual options of all time: a stainless steel body. In the mid-1930s, the Ford Motor Company teamed with the Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corporation to produce car bodies out of stainless steel, which was still a relatively new product. The end result was six 1936 Ford Deluxe cars, one of which was in the Crawford Auto-Aviation Collection at the time of this writing. The cars were a sensation and were driven all over the country by Allegheny Ludlum salesmen and company officials. In the 1950s, Allegheny Ludlum renewed their interest in the cars, by tracking down the surviving cars, which had been sold to private owners. Four of the original six were located.

The resultant publicity from the earlier experiment in 1936 and the search for the originals convinced the company to try building cars with stainless steel bodies again. In 1960, they produced two stainless steel Ford Thunderbirds. This time the company kept the cars for promotional purposes. In 1966, to mark the production of that model year's 50,000th Lincoln Continental, Ford and Allegheny teamed up again, and produced three stainless steel Lincoln Continentals, one for Ford, and the other two for Allegheny. This particular car was donated to the Western Reserve Historical Society in 1977 by Allegheny Ludlum.

Allegheny retained the other two Continentals. In 2000, Allegheny Ludlum donated one of the stainless steel Thunderbirds to the Senator John Heinz Regional History Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Crawford Museum already had a 1936 Ford, and with the loan of a stainless steel Thunderbird by the Heinz Museum, the Crawford Museum had the only complete set of stainless steel Fords in the world, as of the time of this writing.

Model: 86
Body Style: Four-door convertible
Original Factory Price: Not sold commercially
Horsepower: 340
Displacement: 462 cubic inches
Bore: 4 3/8 inches
Stroke: 3 3/16 inches
Wheelbase: 126 inches
Manufacturer: Lincoln-Mercury Division, Ford Motor Company

Donated by the Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corporation, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.