There are no reliable production numbers for the various Lincoln body styles built in 1949, Hoines is pretty sure his ‘49 is quite rare.
“I’ve never seen another ‘49 Lincoln and I’ve never seen another Lincoln coupe,” he says.
He has heard that about 10 percent of Lincolns built in ‘49 were two-doors, which would make his car one of fewer than 4,000.
It took Hoines a long time to get possession of his dad’s car. On the passing of the elder Hoines, the car was left to one of Murray’s elder sisters, who looked after it well and kept the bodywork and paint in good condition. “I always wanted it,” Murray confesses and says it finally became his in 2006.
Ford products of this vintage have always been something Hoines was interested in. “I had a ‘50 Merc for 23 years,” he points out. Although the Lincoln is a fairly rare specimen, Hoines set out to put his own personal stamp on it and succeeded in creating something of a period piece in the process.
Viewed from the front, ‘49 Lincolns always had something of a sad look to them, thanks to the drooping headlight openings and the downward curve of the grille.
Hoines replaced the grille on his ‘49 with the toothy grille from a ‘53 DeSoto, lowered the stance of the the coupe a couple of inches and changed the wheels – all normal mild-custom changes popular in the late ’50s.
“I grew up in that era,” Hoines says, calling his modifications “pretty typical of my teenage years. Nobody had really built mag wheels yet, so we used to knock the centres out (of standard wheels) and turn them around. That gave a deep look to the wheels.
The car’s power plant was changed too. “It’s a very nice-running engine actually, but it was a little slow and quite a gas-guzzler,” Hoines says of the original 152-horsepower V-8.
Although he says he thought about hopping up the Lincoln mill, he finally decided it would be better to pull it out and plug in something more modern.
As a member of the Rollers car club, Hoines gets good use from the Lincoln in the summer, although its registration and insurance as a collector can restrict the amount of mileage he can drive.
His vision for the car, Hoines says, hasn’t gone unchallenged, although he insists that the car can be put back into near-perfect stock condition with very little trouble.
“I didn’t cut one piece and I still have the original parts.”
“I got quite a bit of grief from a few people when I started to make the changes. They thought it was sacrilege. They said, ‘You can’t do that!’ I said, ‘Care to watch me?’ he says, smiling.
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