{"id":269,"date":"2020-03-26T12:09:45","date_gmt":"2020-03-26T18:09:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tluke.com\/?page_id=269"},"modified":"2026-10-18T10:14:45","modified_gmt":"2026-10-18T16:14:45","slug":"home","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/tluke.com\/","title":{"rendered":"Home"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Restoring my 50’s Classic Cars<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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1955 Cadillac Series 75 – Limousine <\/h3>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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1957 Continental Mark II<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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My Cadillac was purchased from an owner in Georgia in March 2020 and hadn’t run in 6 years. The car had been painted and both the engine and transmission rebuilt shortly before being parked. The complete interior was removed and sitting outside of the car. Check out the My Limo as Purchased<\/span><\/strong><\/a> page to see more pictures of the car and what 65 year old seats look like.

It’s labeled above as Series 75 – Limousine, but it’s technically a “business sedan” since it doesn’t have a divider glass between the front and the back. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Me and my Cadillac<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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My Continental Mark II was purchased from an owner in Indiana in February 2020 and also hadn’t run since 2014. After installing a new distributor cap and rotor the car started right up and was driven through the neighborhood. Wow!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It turned out that a valve was stuck due to the car sitting so long and bent a push rod. It took weeks of soaking the valve to get it to free up. A new push rod and it was running much better.

Check out my <\/span><\/a><\/mark>M<\/span><\/strong><\/a>ark II Original<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/mark> page to see more pictures of the car’s condition when originally purchased.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The famous Continental “trunk bump”<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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A Little History Behind ‘Why’ These Two Cars<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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The start of my love affair with Cadillac Limousines <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

My First Cadillac: 1956 Series 75 (Limousine)<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

My current Cadillac represents my fourth limousine. I purchased my first Cadillac at the age of 18 for $600. It ran and everything and it was even a limousine! I drove it for a year then had to sell it to go on a mission to Germany for my church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wasn’t into taking pictures back then so the picture on the right is my only one of my 1956 Cadillac and me just days after I purchased it. Although the car was only 13 years old at the time, it had a lot of rust. It was a California car but from the coast. The salty ocean spray had rusted a small hole clean through the outer panel of the passenger front door about the size of a shirt button. Other than that it was in fairly good shape. The paint looked pretty shiny after a good polishing and the bumper rust was minimal after chrome polish and a lot of good old elbow grease. The interior was great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The air conditioning didn’t work so I went to the junk yard and pulled a compressor out of a wrecked Cadillac and installed it. My local shop charged it up and it worked. Cold air blowing out of 6 vents in the headliner was a wonder to me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The salt air had also done a number on many of the electrical connections and I spent many hours tracking down corroded connections to get the interior lights, windows and other gadgets to work. I’ve spent a lot of time on my current Cadillac doing exactly the same thing, only it was a lot worse. After all, it’s now 69 years old. <\/p>\n<\/div>

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1955 Cadillac 75 Series<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Three years after selling the ’56 I purchased a 1955 that didn’t run. I rebuilt the engine, painted it a root beer color, reupholstered the interior myself while going to college. I found a limo in the junkyard that had the dividing glass partition. It had been totaled in an accident so the divider window was shattered, but intact. I took it home and had a plexiglass window created from the cracked glass as a template. It took some trimming to fit the different curved headliner from the car it came from but the width and the whole regulator assembly that lifted it up and down fit perfectly down to the screw holes. I also found the rear compartment radio controls (volume & channel changer). So with the divider window and rear controls made into a full-fledged limousine. I lost all of the pictures of the car after painting it a root beer color but it was stunning for a young man in his early 20’s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After painting the car, it was time to redo the interior, which I did myself using my mom’s sewing machine. She helped on a few of the difficult areas where I was having trouble keeping the straight seem. The blue shoe box on the package tray was the stereo speaker (one on each side) which was temporary except it was still there when I sold the car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides driving it to college and to work, I drove it to Vegas, to baseball tournaments in Idaho, Yellowstone Park in Montana, Mountain Man Rendezvous in Wyoming, Harrah’s Car Museum in Nevada, on scout camping trips and ski resorts in the Utah mountains, on dirt roads rabbit hunting and just about everywhere. I put 100K miles on a car that already had over 100K on it when I bought it. I drove it all week and spent weekends fixing all the things that went wrong with it during the week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just a few months after I had it up and running the throttle pressure linkage to the Hydramatic transmission stripped out. The shop pulled the transmission pan and big chunks of metal were sitting in it. I was told it needed to be rebuilt and would likely not last the month. I was a college student and didn’t have any money so I paid $45 to fix the linkage and had them put the pan back on. I then proceeded to drive it that 100K miles without another transmission problem.<\/p>\n<\/div>

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My First Black Limousine<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

My third Cadillac was also a 1955 Series 75 limo and was practically given to me by a young man who couldn’t get it running and was leaving with his cousin back to New Mexico. He sold it to me for a song and even steered it as we towed it to my house behind my own limousine. That was a scene, a root beer limousine towing a black limousine through town. A few days later I got it running and drove it now and then until I sold it, not having the time or money to support two Cadillacs. As you can see in the image on the right, I ran out of garage space as well.<\/p>\n<\/div>

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My First & Only Continental Mark II<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

My current Continental is my first Mark II, but I have wanted one all my life. As a teenager I worked as a bagger at the local Alberstson’s grocery store. My job was to wheel the cart full of groceries to the customers’ cars and load them into it. One weekly customer was a little old lady who drove a Mark II. I had never seen one before and immediately fell in love with its styling and luxuriousness. I constantly teased her, asking her to leave it to me in her will. Well, unless more than 50 years later that little old lady is still alive, she didn’t leave it to me!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I never saw another Mark II in real life until I purchased the one displayed on this web page and it was delivered from Indiana to my home in Utah. <\/p>\n<\/div>

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Here’s my Cadillac posing in front of a “White House” in a very exclusive neighborhood in the Toronto area. I claim it was teleported from its home in Utah to that site, but others just think it’s superimposed over the picture of that magnificent home. As of today (8\/29\/25) it certainly doesn’t run reliably enough to drive from Utah to Canada, so you decide how it got there.

There’s something else amiss about this picture. Unless you’re a ’50s Cadillac aficionado specializing in the Series 75 you won’t have a clue. Many of us who own a ’50s limo think the proportions are a little off. In particular, the rear deck, i.e. trunk lid is way too short for such a car, especially when compared to the coupes and high end sedans of the same year. Much of the trunk space was eaten up to provide a more spacious rear seat compartment including jump seats. Basically, it’s the rear end of the cheaper Cadillac models (e.g. Series 62 sedan). So I stretched out the rear deck in this image to give it a more balanced look. The car is already 19.5 feet long so if the trunk were extended like this, it would be over 20 ft.!<\/p>\n<\/div>

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Best viewed in landscape mode on phone<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stretch My Limo<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Just slide the white line with the arrows to the left side to see the limo stretch, then back to see it again as it really is<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n