The High Point of American Luxury Cars: 1969 Lincoln Mark III

hello everyone my name is adam i'm a classic car enthusiast and owner and here to share with you today my 1969 lincoln continental mark iii so special treat today for those of you who like i'll call them mafia style cars this is the pinnacle i would say of that it would also be the pinnacle of what i would call a vacuum-centric engineering this car has a lot of vacuum powered accessories and also some very quirky engineering which i will talk about as we go into the car in more detail this car is finished in what lincoln called maroon which is a non-metallic you know burgundy color i believe it's the same color as the black cherry paint that mercury's used they just called it a different name and peeking in the garage you can see a black cherry colored 68 park lane that appears identical to this in terms of color so i believe it was the same color but this is a burgundy or sorry maroon paint with the red interior and then a black vinyl top a few production statistics on this car 1969 was the second best selling year for the mark iii they made the mark iii from 69 to 71 and you can see that they sold 23 000 of these so it wasn't a huge seller but that wasn't bad volume for such an expensive car you can see the price of this car the base price was 6 800 in 1969 which was a lot of money and it has a very powerful premium fuel 460 v8 putting out 365 horsepower which is admittedly not net horsepower which is the ratings that they went to in 1972 but this would be the horsepower without all the exhaust and accessories and everything so interestingly as you go down from 69 to 70 to 71 the horsepower rating of this 460 stays the same it was 365 in each year but truthfully the net horsepower just kind of decreased every year as more and more accessories and emissions controls were added to the vehicle so of all the years 69 i would say is really the most truly powerful uh of the the three years for the mark iii it's kind of middling in terms of the weight you can see the weight the curb weight was 47 62 pounds not a light car by any stretch of the imagination a bit heavier than the 70 but significantly lighter than the 71. and i believe they started putting more bass content in the standard between 70 and 71 driving the weight up so for comparison you can see the first year of the mark iv really increased the sales volume in almost 49 000 so it was a good seller but it wasn't an overly great seller and i'll put back here just to compare to the cadillac eldorado of the year so you can see what the production figures for that were i also do own a 69 el dorado which i will feature in a different video but similar production figures with 23 000 units sold per year in 1969 of the eldorados we're selling about the same number of units interestingly though by the time the mark iv came around and the new el dorado had come out the mark iv was outselling the el dorado by about 30 percent i don't have the marty report on this vehicle but i do have from uh marty autoworks the original invoice from the factory to the dealer for the car so you can see it's a maroon paint car it has a leather interior with the vinyl trim black vinyl roof the high torque axle which is the three to one open differential as opposed to the standard 275 to one i believe which is kind of humorous because i don't think that this 460 needs any more torque multiplication than what it has but that's what comes on this vehicle white sidewall tires which on this car were actually triple stripe bias ply tires i still have the originals i think the trunk still has the original spare so i'll show that to you because they're really unique like i said they're triple stripe for now i'm just riding on standard single stripe white walls i wanted i did not want to risk a blowout with really old tires power seats till steering wheel cruise control or window defogger automatic temperature control this one does have the am radio and 8-track tape player automatic headlamp dimmer which is that little device here which senses the oncoming headlights and then if you have it turned on it'll always have your brights on unless it senses light and then it'll automatically dim them and then go back to bright lights once the light is passed tinted glass headrests the appearance protection group which is the door guards and then power door locks so this car totaled out at 66.49 which is a lot of money and that is the dealer invoice price the retail price was 8 600 which was a small fortune in 1969 as you can imagine so a couple humorous things here on the invoice six gallons of gas which they were charging the dealer 6 30 cents a piece for per gallon so that's pretty humorous dealer advertising fund 35 so this is something that still exists today there's a number of things on here that for those who haven't worked in a dealership or in the automotive space you'll see hold back and option hold back holdback is basically an amount of money in this case about two and a half percent um of the invoice price that is not something that's part of the it's basically extra money that gets remitted to the dealer uh after the vehicle is sold but they don't have to pay commission on hold back money so it's a way of almost protecting the dealer and it sales people from itself and not selling below the true cost this is something that's generally not visible uh in terms of the dealer invoice but it's money that the dealer will get later that's why it's called hold back so for those who don't know often people get coached to say you should try to get a car close to dealer invoice well there's a lot of things outside the invoice price that the dealer can can get like different incentives that they might be able to claim back to the first vehicle they sold in the month or this hold back money that's not part of the invoice that they get later on this vehicle was sold originally to a dealer in norwich connecticut it still has a connecticut plate from 1976 on the front that i had when i bought the car and i thought it was cool so i kept it built in wixom just like all these vehicles all these lincolns were so i'll talk about some of the unique features of the vehicle because this is probably the most well-built mainstream american car that i've ever seen or owned it's extremely well put together it's i would call it high tech for the day um complicated but it is a beautiful car to ride and drive so talking about the exterior first maybe it does have vacuum operated headlight doors and there's a big system which i'll show you under hood that controls that you basically flip this dash switch in here and you pull it and the headlights will deploy there's also a little light that goes on you'll see it go off in a second when the headlight door is fully open if i still have enough vacuum in the tank and i may not um to suggest that the headlight doors are indeed fully open so they must not be totally open oh yeah they're not hence why that light is on so i'll start the car up here just so you can see the headlight doors and you can watch this light go off so there it goes it's telling me to buckle my seat belt and then the door jar lights on because i have the driver's door still open once i close the driver's door you'll see that that goes away so you can see the headlights then if i push the button to close them there they go so we'll shut this off as i talk for a moment about some other features as you saw on the windows sticker this car does have automatic climate control so you move the temperature you can choose between low and high fan speed settings which it's not just two speeds there's actually i believe four blower motor speeds this just increases or decreases the voltage that goes to the mo motor as it selects one of those speeds so it's a bit faster on the high setting and a bit slower on the low setting it does have a the blower style rear window defogger which i can turn on you can hear you can see the outlet in the middle there you can also see when i step on the brakes there are fiber optic lamps in the middle that you can see in your mirror to make sure that your brake lights are working this car does have a it says rear vent there um and on the back package shelf you can see that it has some ventilation louvers so if you want to keep your windows closed and you want some better fresh air ventilation you just turn this ring from open to aside from closed to open and it then opens you can see the louvers on the back that and it'll exhaust out on the rear package tray so really nice feature this is the selector for the automatic dimmer so you can have it off you can determine if you want it to kick on at when it senses light near or far away and again if you want it off you just leave it there these vents can be individually shut off with this little pullout which is a nice feature as well the wiper system on this vehicle is very unique it's continuously variable speed so the wipers will wipe slowly to fast depending upon how you rotate this outer uh i guess this is the inner knob so it's not an intermittent feature it just changes how fast the wiper wipes across the glass which is an interesting approach and as opposed to being powered by an electric motor the wipers on this car are powered off of the power steering pump so with the car off you have no wiper power just an interesting approach and something that's very different from from what you typically see you can also see the full array of gauges on here some extremely thick piled carpeting which is very luxurious this is the intake air aspirator for the automatic climate control which senses what the interior temperature is the eight track tape player is located here and this is a am radio combination you couldn't get am fma tracking you just get am 8 track this year so this buyer elected for that there's a interior dash courtesy light here there we go this other switch moves the power antenna up and down so you can hear it kind of i can't hear it extending but i just pushed it and it started to go up push it the other direction and it goes back down until you hear a ratcheting click so now it's stowed away this is the cruise control on off switch which is really interesting you push it on to um to activate the cruise at least turn it on then you push this lever at the end of the turn signal stock to set the speed and you pull it back to turn it off this jewel light does illuminate it's just a little faint to see in the bright light but when you turn it on this little light comes on and just to show you that the cruise control is activated as well it's kind of a nice feature another interesting thing about the 69 model year it is the only year for hidden wipers and it's the only year for this interior trim in 70 and 71 they went to different door panels different seat patterns what from what i understand it's the first application where the factory designers tried to have this ruching um purposefully included in the design to give it an overly rich look and from what i've read about a number of the factory um the seats that were sent to the factory were sent back because they thought that this was a defect and it actually was what the designers intended for it to have this rich gathered look i think it would be called so there probably was supposed to be more gathering on this rear seat and that look this one really doesn't have much at all my guess is that because of what i said the uh they were rejected and thought that thought that the seats were defective so perhaps that's why they changed the interior after just one year there are also many different variations of interiors on the 69 mark iii's just because it's a 69 does not mean that all interiors are alike so you'll see the earlier cars like this one have these white uh dial indicators uh the later ones that are built later in the model you have orange or a yellowy color this also has well so this has the early build dials this has a later build steering wheel i believe sometimes you'll see a different steering wheel on these and then later in the model year they added some embroidery right in this area on the back seat which this one does not have so depending on where you are in the model year you may have embroidery there you may have different covered color dial faces and i believe you might also have differences in steering wheels so i'm absolutely positive about the dial face and the embroidery in the back but very strange this is also the only year where this uh these wood panels are not real they're fake they are quite good and convincing they're grained they look nice but in 70 and 71 those become actual real wood so i don't think ford believed that they could get the durability out of real wood and somehow they determined that they would try later on on the door panel here i'll close the door listen to how this door closes i mean it's just a solid solid door there's an interesting bypass switch here you can see it says bypass if you want to close the windows with the key in the off position which is as it is now so if i tried to i guess it sorry it's in the accessory position i'll turn it off so you can see the window won't operate right now but if you hold this bypass switch you can now operate any of the windows so it's a nice feature when you don't have the key on to allow you to operate the windows you can also lock them out for the passengers the door lock system in this car is pneumatic it is not electric so when i push the button you'll hear from down in this area a little air noise you can hear it release [Music] so as opposed to the later cars the mark iv had electric motors this is vacuum operated so this car has a lot of vacuum operated accessories the door locks the cruise control the automatic climate control among other things so very complicated thankfully all the vacuum lines still work you can imagine you have to run vacuum lines into the doors for this and i'm just thankful that everything on this car still works including the automatic climate control and the air conditioning so one last look i showed you this header panel with these lights a lot of room in the front seat not a lot of room in the back seat but a really intimate and beautiful compartment back there there's a switch for the lights a switch for the power windows there's the reading light that's in the c-pillar a very rich headliner on these some sort of a woven fabric it looks very expensive and rich overall this car the attention to detail and the way it's put together is to me just blows my mind it's it's i have a 69 el dorado and while that's a nice car this car just surpasses it and smoothness and material quality i would say by a long shot the el dorado does have a great engine and transmission though some courtesy lights in the doors and a nice brushed aluminum panel on the door with the speaker grille for the am radio as well in there this is the i think it's called the cavalry twill vinyl roof this is a factory vinyl roof and they're only padded on uh the side of this of the roof i would say to the side of the scene so this area is padded this is not that's one way that you can tell aside from this interesting grain it kind of has a very linear shape to it if the vinyl roof is original one thing i'd advise if you have one of these cars is don't wash the top of your car just wipe it off with the damp rag water comes down and collects down here and you'll see a lot of these cars where they'll have bubbles and pock marks down here where rust is forming under the vinyl top this one somehow must have always been garaged and there is no bubbling at all and i try to preserve that as best as i can this is the rear window louver that exhausts out the cabin air when you have that vent switch turned on there's the area where it takes in the air from uh inside the car let me grab the keys here so i can show you the trunk another interesting thing about 69 only is the key position is way down here under the dash which i guess is a nice anti-theft feature if somebody's trying to take your car although you can hot wire these cars very easily hard to find where the key placement is nothing on the steering column in 70 they went to the column placement pretty good sized trunk in this car especially compared to the mark iv which is tiny the mark iv the fuel tank is underneath the trunk pan so it doesn't have this deep well like this vehicle has uh it's more of a shallow well because the mark iv although the platform will share with the thunderbird it's based on the torino it's actually a gussied up torino that they used for the thunderbird and the uh mark iv this mark iii platform is totally different and is shared with the thunderbird but i think that this is a more expensive platform and more well done and see if i can i can't easily get this cover off to show you the spare tire under there but you can look up pictures of the um the car with its factory tires and see the triple stripe white walls by the way there's no spare tire under this hot this is all just looks nicely integrated reverse lamps into the bumper you can see the hubcaps on this car these hubcaps i shouldn't call them hubcaps wheel covers are extremely heavy uh certainly not something they would do today from a weight perspective nor would they have dwarfs that are this thick i mean look at how thick that door is a lot of times these cars have some glass alignment issues where this glass will be too far forward or back or won't touch the windows rub strip i think what happens is when people close the door they don't push here they push on the glass and over time it just walks the glass forward and back there are bolts on the bottom of the door that you can use to readjust the glass i had to do that on this car so now all the windows seal correctly that was not easy um not much on this car to work on aside from basic tune-ups is easy speaking of which i had to replace the headlight motors which i showed you are vacuum actuated [Music] i replaced them with units that these have an internal spring that when the vacuum is lost the headlight doors open so you'll see a lot of these with the doors open i bought and uh these from a rebuilder who highly recommended taking that spring out it really doesn't do anything and now they stay closed forever and i can have the car shut off for a year and the headlight doors will never open and they operate just as well so highly recommend that if you have one of these cars get a set of rebuilt motors that don't have those springs in them otherwise you're going to still be chasing down other vacuum leaks i have not had any problem with these and they operate just great the dealer added this foot ornament and this is not correct it's actually the old lincoln logo the mark 3 was the first use of this newer style lincoln logo customer must have wanted it i think it looks good in the early prototypes they actually had that hood ornament on them and it got taken away for safety standards remember this was when around that time when ralph nader came out with the book unsafe at any speed so all the car companies got rid of their hood ornaments had a fear of liability that they were going to be potentially sued because they could impale people interestingly i think by 70 72 71 72 the hood ornaments started coming back um but you'll see it for a period of time there in the late 60s early 70s that all the hood ornaments left and then as an example like my 76 eldorado had a big old hood ornament just like that so i've kept it as opposed to returning it to stock because the early design photos i've seen of this car actually had that hood ornament and it got taken off for safety reasons so um seems to be in character with what the designers wanted as i mentioned this is the only year for the the non-hidden wipers the 70 and 71 have those wipers tucked under the hood so let's open the hood now and there's the premium fuel 460 v8 again an extremely powerful motor very very smooth i mean just a joy to drive a couple tips i would say for those of you who have who have these motors make sure that your radiator is not clogged i've had this one record when i'm running the air conditioning in the summertime never really got hot it just got hotter it's still the original radiator and after all these years this car only has about 35 000 miles on it but i put this record radiator in and uh the car doesn't get anywhere near hot at all you want these to run cool i have 160 degree thermostat in here and you want them to run cool because they're high compression and they tend to spark knock very easily even with premium fuel if you're running the stock timing so uh i would i i run this one with premium fuel plus a couple gallons of racing fuel plus lead additive and while that sounds excessive i want this motor to last a long time and that's what it takes for it not to spark knock with the stock timing so it is what it is it's a joy to drive and i don't mind it you can see the air conditioning i've unhooked it's still cool here in michigan and when you have the auto climate control on the air conditioning always operates and i just don't want it always operating when the weather's cold outside i'll plug it in as the summer comes comes back it's just one wire very simple to disconnect and reconnect these cars if you're looking for the voltage regulator it is not integral to the alternator uh this car when i got it had an overcharging problem i was searching for the voltage regulator and it's actually on the back of the alternator there's a little black plate and i was able to find one on ebay so just a tip for those you if you're searching for that voltage regulator it's it's on the back of the alternator and it's removable so make sure that you're not overcharging your batteries this is one of the reservoir tanks for the vacuum system there are others there's another here here this is interesting this is the power steering reservoir and that is just a reservoir there is no pump right there in 69 the power steering pump is actually on the front of the crankshaft and this was something that lincoln had back to i believe the 430 v8 when it was introduced in 1958 did that and they kept it through 69 it was the last year and then then there's an accessory driven pump it's in this area but there's no belt down there it is just a reservoir and the pump again is on the front of the crankshaft so some unique engineering there's the cruise control servo and the distributor cap a lot of times these distributors get stuck i highly recommend every couple years you just rotate them back and forth and then reset the timing otherwise they have a tendency to stick in place and they can be a bear to get unstuck this one thankfully when i bought the car wasn't stuck too much sometimes you can lightly tap with a hammer on this vacuum advance in both directions and it'll free it up if that doesn't do it sometimes there's a tool you can put on here like a clamp with a slide hammer and yank this up to get it loose uh but it is again it's just good preventive maintenance if you if you move that distributor around every couple years you're not going to have that problem so i always just every couple years loosen the hold down bolt move it back and forth maybe about 10 times then get it back roughly in the same position start the car set the timing tighten it back down another tip check your fan clutches uh to make sure that they are enabling the fan to rotate at appropriate speed when the motor is warm these fan clutches just don't seem to last like the gm vehicles so i finally go out around 40 50 000 miles and you'll see the fan just doesn't turn very fast even when the motor is hot and the air conditioning is running they're very easy to replace so be sure to check that and again you know check your radiator to make sure that it's it's allowing the car to cool appropriately don't think i have any other tips under the hood here there are a couple witness marks still from the factory showing it's a very very clean car i bought it from the son of the second owner in michigan so i don't know the owner had passed away the sun didn't know much about it so i don't have much of the history but it's very clearly a low mileage car and none of this stuff has been apart when i replaced the headlight motors which are down here none of that had been apart they were all original it still car still has the original headlights in it a lot of times these exhaust manifolds will crack particularly on the passenger side so if you hear an exhaust leak i've had to replace this one just something to be aware of other than that i'll just start it up one last time so you can hear the motor run it is cold so it'll be on fast idle this car did have dual exhaust from the factory with resonators which i have replaced and put the stock ones on you can hear it's really quiet even fast idle i should also note for those of you who have fords of this era you really shouldn't be doing what i'm doing right now do not operate these cars before 1972 in park unattended they did have uh issues with the cars jumping into reverse and uh you'll notice that the later fords like at 72 this gear shifting mechanism becomes very notchy for that reason but in this year you know i can just kind of glide through all the gears there's no notchiness at all but one thing you should check is make sure that when the car's in park if you just lightly tug on this park lever that it doesn't go into reverse what you'll find is on a lot of these cars if you do that it will go into reverse so this column is what holds the car in park and that park lock wears out over time uh and then it just enables it so you can go like this and then you'll tap it into reverse so i highly highly recommend two things one don't leave these cars unattended running in park and uh number two just check so that you're aware if your car is really prone to do that push on this a little bit with some light pressure don't yank on it you'll end up breaking the lock but make sure that it actually does hold and park i do have some one of my vehicles where that is not true so i just always make sure not to leave that one running and unattended for that reason so i just want everybody to be aware of that you'll see some of the later fords you'll buy from the 70s we even have a sticker that's put on the dash by the dealer somewhere that says not to do that and it's because of these cars it has a great feel to it and the later ones are super notchy and they feel clunky but this one is not as safe as the later ford so just want everybody to be aware of that so that's it for this vehicle hope you enjoyed this video and if you liked it subscribe to my youtube channel where i will show you more vehicles so far i've only displayed fords but i have gm vehicles too and i'll get those out soon thank you and subscribe

Channel: Rare Classic Cars & Automotive History

Views: 272,110

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Id: EGJE2pkT-I4

Length: 34min 30sec (2070 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021