In the not too recent past, Facebook Marketplace was a haven for old and often times unique automobiles. Granted, a lot of it was pure trash, but I could count on a gaggle of at least somewhat interesting and affordable old stuff to whittle away time with. All that changed sometime during The Pandemic as "Marketplace" became just another site for people looking for anonymous, slate-grey Nissan Rogues or similarly generic vehicles. Dealership sites found it too and now clutter it with ads like they do on Craigslist. Sigh. That's why when this 1961 Cadillac Fleetwood 60 Special with a transplanted, twin-turbo, Ford V-10 truck engine popped up the other day on Marketplace, I most certainly wasn't looking for it, it felt like a throwback to those pre-Pandemic days when I could count on finding "special" cars on it.
This Frankenstein-ian monster is the work of Bob Richards of Fremont, Ohio, his eight-year-old-son and Bob's father and is the most fascinating project car I've come across since I found a 1981 Chevrolet Citation X-11 on Craigslist stuffed with a 4.9-liter, Cadillac V-8 engine. Bob, who's a lifelong "Ford guy", has been working on cars his entire life so he knows a thing or two about engine swaps and fabrication.
It had been sitting in a garage in Columbus since 1974 and was bought as a project by a gentleman who lost interest in it. Enter Bob who bought it from him and while he got it running, thought better of rebuilding its 390-cubic inch V-8 or even doing a proverbial "LS swap". As Bob put it, "that wasn't crazy enough". Bill Mitchell, the GM design honcho who penned this car, is spinning in his grave. Oh, the humanity.
Cadillac's were all new for 1961 with much smaller tailfins than 1960 models and the Fleetwood Sixty Special was top-of-the-line. Well, technically, the Fleetwood Seventy-Five was, but that was a limousine; not that many a Sixty Special wasn't chauffer driven. The big difference between a Sixty Special and a Sedan deVille was the "Special" had a formal, limousine-like roof line and different rear-back light (or windshield). It also came standard with every gadget and gizmo Cadillac could come up with. They had to somehow substantiate the thousand-dollar tariff they charged for it over a Sedan deVille or a Series 62; thousand bucks was big money back then in the gilded Camelot age.
Ford's "modular", single-overhead-cam V-10 was the result of Ford moving away from pushrod, overhead valve V-8's in the '90's to overhead-cam engines. Ford's "modular", SOHC V-8 topped out at 5.4-liters and the horsepower and torque it made was not adequate for some Ford customers who had come to rely on the raw power of their 7.5-liter, or 460-cubic inch, V-8. In particular buyers who used their vehicles commercially. With the 5.4 pushing the limits on how much it could displace, the cylinders were all but siamese, rather than develop a proprietary, large displacement truck V-8, Ford grafted two additional cylinders onto the 5.4 V-8. Voila, a legend was born.
Leave it to Bob to marry the two.
Bob had challenges at first getting the Garret turbos to play nice with the Ford V-10's PCM as there's not much tuning information out there for the engine; Ford never offered a turbocharged version. If he wasn't selling this, he'd swap the factory-Ford PCM for a (pricey) Holley Dominator and replace the rear-end with a nine-inch Ford unit. No doubt the Dominator box would help with tuning and diagnostics and the stout Ford rear end would be better able to handle what Bob claims is some five-hundred-pound feet of torque.
The transmission was the (relative) easy part. That's a Tremec T45 out of a 2003 Ford Mustang and with an eight-bolt Cobra flywheel and an eleven inch clutch it bolted right up. Makes sense given the Ford V-10, again, is derived from the Ford V-8. Fun fact, before the Chevrolet Cavalier-based Cadillac Cimmaron of 1982 infamy, Cadillac hadn't offered a manual since 1953 and that was on their limousines and ambulances. Cadillac made an automatic standard in 1949 although a manual was still available through 1952.
Bob also converted the front drums to discs and added an air suspension. More fun facts, and amazingly so, GM didn't start using front disc brakes until 1965 and that was on the Chevrolet Corvette, Cadillac didn't have them available even until 1967; they became standard in 1969. Wow. Nothing like that bowel cleansing feeling of, "is this thing going to stop??" when driving an old GM drum brake car. I need to find out more about this magnificent shifter lever on the T45.
This goth, grand-old dame is most certainly not everyone's cup-of-antifreeze but as they say in the business, there's an arse for every seat. The ask is $9,000 and that seems fair given what's in it and the amount of time Bob, his son and his father spent building it. Bob's very proud that three generations of his family had a hand in putting this together, as he should be. If you're interested comment below and I'll hook you up. Perhaps I'll meet you out in Fremont and we'll go for a spin. A very, very fast spin.
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