Got everything buttoned up today. Yesterday I reinstalled the upper and lower control arms, washed out and re-greased the wheel bearings, and after remembering to borrow the coil spring compressor from my buddy, I was able to install the coil springs. They just needed that inch or so of arc, to get them back into position to be able to swing the lower control arm up with the floor jack. Today I finished up the brakes and sway bar end links and lubed the ball joints and tie rods. Took her for a ride and she really does ride nicely now. Especially with two functioning shock absorbers in place.

The old boat actually did a one legged burnout while attempting to get up to speed with traffic on a local road. Those 2.8 rear gears are rather hard to get moving but once they do, it actually pushes you back into your sofa when the four barrels kick in.

I am thinking about swapping out the steel rims and hubcaps for some later model Lincoln turbine wheel. It would save some weight, look classy and get rid of the really out of round steel wheels. The first 20 years of my grandfather commuting over all those New York City city potholes did a number on those rims

Here's those later aluminum turbine rims on a 1971 Lincoln Mark III. 15x6.5 inch, 4.5 by 5 in bolt pattern. They came on a lot of Ford and Mercury products in the 4.5" bolt pattern during the 1980's. The Lincolns actually used a 5 inch pattern later in the 1970s but switched back to a 4.5 in the 1980's. So I need a Ford set with some Lincoln center caps.

I installed the Redi-Rad I got for the car in December. Pretty interesting contraption. It allows you to play your music on the AM radio via your cellphone. It adds an input lead that goes in the headphone jack of your phone, Ipod, DVD player, Beta-Max, or whatever.

Pretty simple installation if you can reach the antennae lead on the back of your radio along with a ground lead and a power lead to the fuse box. The antenna lead just plugs in series with the factory antenna and you set the radio to 1000 on the AM dial.

In other words it took several days of dash disassembly on this car to get to the back of the radio which is in the top section of the dash, above all the automatic A/C climate control duct work. I waited a few days for my cuts and scrapes on my hands to heal before reinstalling all the parts.

Here's the website: https://redirad.com/

Now I can play some appropriate theme music while cruisin' the scene with my Detroit lean.

I recall the dash pad on my fathers Lincoln was easily removed so he had access to the radio from the top. Maybe different in different years though.

All access is from the underside on this car. And of course Ford decided to have the lead also plug in from the top of the radio, not the bottom. Jeez!

How would you rate the Redirad sound quality? I've been contemplating buying one too.

It actually is better sound quality than any AM radio channel. It is essentially playing the car speakers as a set of earphones off your cell phone. You could even set up one of the satellite radio portable units and play it the same way, out of it's earphone jack and into the redirad cable. I have one of those SiriusXM units that I move from car to car. I'd just need to figure out a spot for it's little magnetic antenna since this car has a thickly padded vinyl top that won't allow it to go there..

Now I have to check and see why my rear door speakers aren't functioning. The Continental has four speakers, one in each door (none in the dash or rear deck). The two fronts sound fine. I was going to pull the door panels and regrease all the window tracks anyway, so I guess this pushes up the schedule of the next fun project.

Thanks for the feedback and good luck with your speaker project....

It's been a while but I recently started playing with the Lincoln because I'm bored. :-)

Last week I pulled the doors panels off and cleaned out the petrified grease from all four window track systems and regreased them all with a tub of chassis grease and PB Blaster. It's amazing how they all now actually will go all the way up and all the way down without having to rev the engine to 3000 RPM to give it extra juice.

I also sprayed the door lock mechanisms and they work nicely now too. The Lincoln uses an vacuum/electric door lock mechanism. There are solenoids in the dash which send power to relays when then allow the vacuum to push or pull the door lock button up and down. So instead of simply having a single solenoid like a modern car, they have 100 feet of vacuum line, 12 gauge wires with heavy amps and several relays involved. All so it can have some satisfying "ka-chunk-a-swish" sound when the switch is depressed.

When I was in the front doors, it appears that the dealer had been in there once before - all the weatherproof paper was shredded and missing in sections and there were several drilled holes at the bottom where they removed the power window motors to replace the plastic gears inside that crumble with age. This is actually the factory recommended repair procedure instead of removing the entire window and regulator assembly to get to the power window motors. Of course they didn't bother greasing all the moving parts of the window tracks properly at the same time. They just greased the main slider which just allowed the regulator to bind on itself when half of it was old grease and half was new. Sigh!

I found the speaker problem - the right rear door speaker was blown...and the left rear was never installed. I was lucky enough to find two NOS Ford speakers on ebay. One for $63 and the other for $85. After reading all the factory manuals my grandfather bought back in 1971 it seems that the AM radio only used three speakers though the car is wired for all four. So all I had to do was screw the left rear speaker in place and all four worked nicely (or as nice as 50 year old NOS Ford speakers can sound).

The best part was while searching for the speakers I found a 1971 AM/FM stereo radio from a 1971 Lincoln Continental on ebay as well. It's a unique one year only radio. And it was only $84 and already checked out and fully working.

Today was the fun part of removing the AM and installing the AM/FM. and getting the wiring to match up. You have to remove half the dash just to get to the three screws that hold the radio in. Two hours of labor to get to the radio and 2 minutes to install it.

Now everything actually works - the AM/FM radio, four speakers, four power windows and four power door locks! YAY

Nice job Steve. That is one beautiful Lincoln.