Projects The Wagon Ford shoulda' built, so we did!

The Chevy Nomad has always been king of the 50's era wagons in my mind. "Sport Wagons" with there low roof lines, hardtop proportions & excessive amounts of the shiny stuff! We where lucky enough to have a customer take that concept & imply it to a Ford of the same era. The '56 Parklane was suppose to be Fords answer to the Nomad. No offense but it fell short in allot of ways. So it was decided, we'd build the car Ford shoulda' built! The end result being somewhat of a "Factory Concept Show Car".

The concept seemed simple but oh man where we in for a tedious, confusing & challenging 6 1/2 ish years. What follows is the journey that made it possible.......


+++++ Disclaimer: Yes, this car is now finished but I just want to document & share the build. We also didn't want to show our hand before its debut a GNRS. Please don't post any finished photos until the end. There's plenty of finished pictures on other threads. Thanks +++++++



We started with a basic '55 Ranch wagon I had bought for my wife & a pretty rough Crown Vic project car I found & couldn't pass up.

 

More...
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Can't wait to see this thread.

 

Such a tease...

 

One of the highlights of gnrs for me this year. Look fwd to seeing how it came together

 

Love the finished car!

 

Thfffffffffffttttt . Come on a little more than that .

 

I was wowed by it. I looked those pictures over and immediately started imagining the process. Not an easy process considering the differences in w/s height thus the tailgate, etc.

About 25 years ago a local builder did a custom '54 Merc 2drht with a Crown Victoria band. I didn't happen to participate but did get to follow the progress on a weekly basis. It turned out well but I don't know what eventually happened to the car.

A few years after that I donated a '55 Nomad roof and posts to a friend who wanted to make a Nomad-like wagon using a really solid "55 Plymouth two door post. I helped him with the chassis and drive-line and also did the Nomad roof modification after which he proceeded to almost finish the car.

It went through several owners who continued to bring the car along. It got a long-ram equipped 440 Mopar with a torque flight and a set of Halibrand Sprints. Someone figured out the taillight and tail gate, got it in primer and made it driveable. It got sold 3 or 4 years ago at Nats North in Kalamazoo...and has subsequently went underground.

Not to steal your thunder as you have done a masterful job on what looks like a pretty simple, let's just swap roofs, but in reality touches lots of other bits of the car. Well done!

 

I have had this exact thought for years. lets see some more!

 

Love to see the photos during the build of this car.
The finished car looked great in the GNRS threads.

 

I love this car, one of my favorites from GNRS

 

So the metal working faeries showed up and voila, all done!

 

For the sake of not making this thread to picture heavy I'll try to just touch on the good stuff & not bore with the rust repairs & junk like that. Tear down......


We removed the Crown Vic top & relevant parts at the factory seams/plug-welds. In the front It was a matter of just swapping the cowl top and windshield frame due to the fact that the Crown Vic has somewhere in the neighborhood of a 2"-3" shorter windshield.



The wagon body & parts we knew we where going to use was totally dissembled & dipped at Metal Works in Oregon.

 

Outstanding, one of my favorites of the show.
Can't wait to see the journey!

 

That was my favourite car at the GNRS and I was discussing it with my buddies for the last week! You did an outstanding job! I' ll be watching!

 

Yep, one of my favorites from GNRS too. I suspected tons of work went into it to end up with a car that looked like Ford could have built it.

 

Oh I love that you’re going to show us all this. Hands down favorite car I saw in coverage of the show

 

Next up was cutting the Ranch Wagon up!!!!! Well, before we replaced the front floor, rockers and filled some holes on the firewall & basically got the base of everything solid. Then mounted it on the chassis. You can also see we're running a Y block & had already started mocking that up.

We thought we might be able to re-use the Wag. roof skin & drip rails so we carefully removed them before cutting off the roof.

We discovered in order to use the Crown Vic B-pillars & hard top doors we needed to swap the tops of the door jams along with the structure.

 

At this point we started wondering if a fancy Ranchero might be a better idea.

 

and next up will be an Edsel Ranchero.......

 

OMG a ranchero version needs to be built

 

The had them in Australia already back in 56.........

 

Thought the same exact thing when I saw that!

 

It's been done. I stumbled on these doing research. Glass roof & Mopar taillights too!

 

I am looking forward to watching this play out!! Thanks for showing us.

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Beautiful work!

 

Beautiful work on your Custom Wagon. The yellow Custom 55 Ranchero belonged to a gentleman named Bob Haas. I met him in 2011 on one of my trips to Michigan with my Custom 56 ElCamino. We had spotted each other earlier in the day and were cruising up and down Woodward until we both finally got to see each other again and stop to introduce ourselves and our cars. I thought his roof was glass too, but it was painted to resemble one.

 

You're kidding, right? TOO many pictures? A thread like this can't be TOO picture-heavy.