Shot by CC Cohort improbocat in Boston. Another view:
More?
Does this help?
Nothing “wrong” with this one, but its a face worth looking at once again.
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
– Posted on March 24, 2012
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Curbside Classics Archives
Whoa. 57 Ford Skyliner turned into an Edsel. I love it!
Is that a hard top convertible?
The nose looks good; it’s a ’58. The tail looks rather ’57 Ford, but with taillights from what I believe is an Edsel wagon. The interior has a column mounted gear selector, although many of the ’58’s had the steering wheel hub mounted gear selector. Perhaps the interior is ’59 Edsel, although I doubt it. Oh, and the trunklid in the second picture appears to fold backwards, indicating this is likely a retractable hardtop.
I’ve seen a ’59 Ed-chero, so why not graft parts from a ’58 Edsel on a ’57 retractable? Whoever did it does very good work.
I saw this car, or one just like it, at the car show in Forest Grove, Oregon a few years ago.
*update* WOW! In the time it took me to type the above, comments went from 0 to 4. I wanted to see what other commenters had to say. There was a guy at the show who should have known better who thought this was original.
The Massachusetts plates made me wonder if it was the same car, as I recall some talk about there being another one (don’t know). There were so many people crowded around it that it was hard to get a look and to hear the owner/builder talk about it. I did get that he had to use station wagon rear lights and fenders. And yes, it is a superb job that looks as though it could have come from the factory.
There’s at least one more of these, in the Iowa City/Coralville area. I’ve seen it at the monthly cruise in at Sycamore Mall. It’s candy apple green and white, and has the horizontal Edsel taillights. I’ll have to go through my photos; I’m pretty sure I have a picture of it.
Skyliner Edsel? What’s next an Edsel Ranchero? Maybe with the crazy two tone paint and wood of the Edsel wagon.
How about an Edsel Squarebird?
Just out of curiosity, while we are talking about this sort of thing, would the front fenders, bonnet, grill etc (i.e. front clip) of a 67 Country Squire “bolt on” to the body of a 68 Colony Park/Commuter, or would it be an exercise in heavy customization like this Edsel/Ford ?
The first thing I noticed was it’s sporting regular plates, so maybe this is a daily driver. Cool.
When I saw the first photo, I knew something was off. Once I saw the back, I knew what it was. The tail lights are off of the Edsel Bermuda wagon. The interior is definitely Ford, not Edsel. To really make the coversion work, they really should have done the whole Edsel “tele-touch” steering wheel with the transmission push buttons.
OTOH, I wonder how this came to be? Aren’t 1957 Skyliners fairly rare and valuable? If it wasn’t worth putting back to a regular Skyliner, how was it going to be worth more as a faux Edsel?
Rhetorical questions, to be sure.
I get the joke and really do think it’s clever.
Did someone cobble together a frame-too-rusted-to-fix ’58 Edsel’s front clip and a 57 Skyliner with a good frame and a wrecked front and transfer all the Edsel trim??
This is a ’57-’59 Ford Ranchero with Edsel sheet metal and other design elements used to transmogrify the pedestrian visage of it’s Ford counterpart.
My father test dove an Edsel in late ’57 and brought me home an AMT 1/25th-scale model, pink and white.
The first thing I tried to do with the model was to “pin stripe” it. I wanted a front-end flame job. Dipping a pin into a vial of Testor’s paint and attempting to transfer on to the model’s body didn’t do dick. So I simply used a paint brush to do the job.
My father wasn’t happy. He was concerned with the fact that I had affected the residual value of the vehicle. I said screw it, it’s an Edsel! you douche! My father and I never really got along.
I’ve been studying the brochure and this seems to be more complicated than it appears. It looks like the rear fenders are a combination of ’58 station wagon and ’58 two-door hardtop or sedan. On all station wagons, 2 or 4-door, the color spear extends onto the front door, but on all 2 or 4-door sedans and hardtops the spear ends behind the front door, as on the car here. But the rear of the fender had to be from a station wagon with station wagon taillights because the high flat lights of the non-station wagons wouldn’t work with the Skyliner’s rear-opening trunk. Another compromise could possibly been made, which would have been to extend the spear into the door by welding in all station wagon sheet metal, but that would not be an option because there were no hardtop wagons. Pardon me, but my head is spinning. At this point I think I’m making things more complicated than they are.
I remember hearing bits and pieces of all this from the owner at the show in Forest Grove. Also, I think this is the same car. The color scheme is the same. Forest Grove is a pretty big deal nationally, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the car had been brought in from Massachusetts.
Looks good someone with some dead Fords and a welder did a real nice job stitching this together.
This wonderful car is what the ’58 Edsel should have been.
* Retractable hardtop, in the trick new Edsel, not the Ford!
* Column shift automatic instead of the Tele-Touch fail.
* Real speedometer instead of the weirdo drum.
* Nice upholstery. The two-tone red/white is a real winner.
If only they’d ditched the horse-collar grille. I’ve always thought it should have been classic with thin vertical bars.
PS: I think it has Mass plates just because they match the paint job.
“Whats wrong with this picture?”
There is nothing wrong with that picture, nothing at all.
Not bad, thanks for the explanations
I’m embarrassed how fast everyone spotted this when I, the guy who took the pics, missed it entirely.
When I was shooting the car I thought the taillights looked wrong, but didn’t thinking much of it (partially because I was out with friends(who are decidedly not car people) and was in a rush to snap the pics and catch up with the group.
I’m starting to think that if all of the sedans and coupes had this rear treatment, things may have gone a bit better for the poor old Edsel.
I particularly like the dash, which is much nicer than that strange rotating barrel speedometer arrangement they originally had which kinda reminds me of a set of bathroom scales.
The pushbutton gear selection that was in the center of the steering wheel was a great gimmick, but not too practical from either an operational or servicing viewpoint.
I finally found a copy of the “Edsel Affair” by Gayle Warnock (which I first heard about when I was about 13) on Internet, but I have not finished yet, because half way through I found this Website called Curbside Classics and it has been distracting me ever since 🙂
From what I have read of the book so far, the whole project seems to be have been doomed from the start because Edsel did not have their own factory, they were basically customers of Ford and Mercury, I guess most of you knew that, but I never did.
You can just imagine how “stoked” Ford & Mercury would have been about building another companies cars that were also probably going to reduce their market share …..
The car is slick – no two ways around it. Kudos to the builder that pulled it off!
Very nice styling exercise. With choices of 57 or 58 Skyliners and 3 different 58 Edsels,(wagon, Ranger/Pacer, Corsair/Citation) the options are almost limitless.
Saw this car at a show recently, but didn’t notice until later that something was amiss.
Hi Adam — this was my car from the summer of 2010 until I sold it in the fall of 2015 to a buyer from Texas, who wanted it for his museum in Fort Worth. I used to drive it to work at weekends and that’s where this photo was taken on Tremont Street in Boston. Sold it to get a Packard, which I still have, but some warm days I do miss driving it. Put a whole lot of money into it during those five years although I did make a nice tidy profit.