Car of the Week: 1939 Lincoln Zephyr

Wally Messner knew he didn’t have much to lose when he decided to buy his 1939 Lincoln Zephyr sight-unseen, halfway across the country, off some sketchy internet website.

Even if the car needed quite a bit of work to be drivable and look good, he was sure there wasn’t much risk in buying it. And it’s hard to argue with his logic.

“Like [my wife Lynn] always tells me, if you keep looking, you’re going to find something. I’m always looking,” jokes Messner, a resident of Fond du Lac, Wis. “At the time I had the ’34 [Lincoln] and I’m a big Lincoln fan. That was probably 20 years ago now … It was just on some obscure website. Normally you think of eBay and standard places where you look for old cars, but this was some website I’d never heard of in Nevada. A guy had this car for sale that he bought out of an estate, partially restored.”

“I probably shouldn’t even say this, but I only paid $ 6,500 for it. Obviously, the guy was only trying to make a little more for it than he paid for it at the estate sale. I bought it sight-unseen. I just figured for that price, if everything he says about the car is even halfway true, the car was such a deal!”

The good news was that the body was rust-free and had been repainted. The seats had been reupholstered and the 12-cylinder engine had been rebuilt. And the car started and ran.

The bad news was that it needed a new interior, it didn’t run right, it was missing a bunch of parts and needed a lot of cleaning and TLC. Finishing the restoration that a previous owner of the car had started was a daunting enough job that it took Messner about 10 years to finally dive into.

“I finally said this is the year that the car is not going to sit anymore!” Messner joked. “It took me about 2 ½ years from start to finish to get it done. I still have to finish the interior of the trunk. I’m not done with that yet, but that’s about all I have left.”

Even if it’s really only about 98 percent done, Messner’s four-door sedan is a stunning machine that he is more than happy to show off at local car shows. The Zephyr coupes might be a little more coveted among collectors than their four-door siblings, but Messner’s four-door is a show-stopper and a rare machine that most old car lovers rarely see.

“When I was looking for a Zephyr I had looked at a ’37 a few years before that that actually needed more work than this one,” he says. “But if had a choice, ’39 would have been my choice. They are the epitome of the style, I think.”

1936: A Star is Born

The Lincoln Zephyr debuted for the 1936 model year and was one of the most revolutionary cars of its time. The Zephyr found a home occupying the vast space between Ford’s V-8 DeLuxe and Lincoln’s glorious Model K luxury lineups. Its sleek styling, teardrop headlights, sloping rear deck, curved side window corners and handsome grille all contributed to an undeniably beautiful overall package that helped propel automotive design into the future.

Inside was fancy pleated upholstery in taupe broadcloth or tan Bedford cord, with leather on the options list. The Zephyr also used integrated body-frame construction and featured an all-steel roof, which was a first for Ford Motor Co.

The solid front and rear axles used transverse springs to soften the ride.

Power was supplied by a V-12 Ford developed in-house that was basically a 75-degree version of the Ford V-8, plus four more cylinders. Steel alloy pistons churned inside aluminum cylinder heads and twin water pumps were used for cooling. A single downdraft carburetor fed the 267.3-cid/110-hp power plant.

The Zephyr was originally offered as a four-door or two-door sedan, with a coupe and limousine arriving a year later in 1937. A major restyling was unveiled in 1938, with all new sheet metal and fenders and a longer 125-inch wheelbase. The grille was divided and utilized thin horizontal chrome bars. The back end also became more streamlined with longer, flowing fenders. Two open models, a convertible coupe and convertible sedan, were added to the lineup for the 1938, bringing the number of body styles up to six.

For 1939, the addition of hydraulic brakes was perhaps the biggest news for the Zephyr lineup. A voltage regulator also became standard equipment. The options list including upgrades like wind wings, radio, heater, leather upholstery, whitewall tires and custom luggage.

The four-door sedans continued to be by far the most popular version with the buying public in 1939, as 16,663 examples were built compared to 2,500 for the six-passenger coupe, which was a distant second in popularity. Less than 1,000 open cars were constructed.

The base price for a six-person sedan like Messner’s was about $ 1,360, which was a far cry from the grand Model K series that still occupied Lincoln’s top tier and carried prices between $ 4,800 and $ 7,100 — a king’s ransom at a time when the U.S. was finally starting to emerge from a suffocating Depression.

The Zephyr nameplate soldiered on until 1942, when Ford turned its attention to war-time production. By then, the 172,000 examples that had left Ford’s assembly lines had more than secured the Zephyr a lofty place in U.S. automaking history.

SMOOTH SAILING

Messner insists that one of the best things about his 1939 Lincoln when he purchased it was that the engine had already been rebuilt. He could focus on finding missing pieces and figuring out how to replace the interior. Except that there was one little problem with the carburetor, which didn’t take him long to discover.

“Somebody had the wrong carburetor on it. If you work on Lincolns, you know that the throttle linkage on Lincolns is backward from the throttle linkage on Fords. So when I started the engine up it immediately went up to full throttle. The engine just started racing!” he recalled with a laugh. “That’s then I realized that it was the wrong carburetor.”

“The seats were reupholstered, but the whole rest of the inside was missing or tattered. The interior went to United Auto in Fond du Lac. They do really nice upholstery work. He did the door panels. I bought a new wiring harness and strung the harness myself. All the mechanicals, short of the engine, which was done, I did myself. I took the radiator out, had the whole dash out …”

All things considered, Messner says that getting his Zephyr back in one piece and driving as good as it looks was surprisingly not that difficult. He had a solid car to start with, managed to find all the parts he needed, and found plenty of folks willing to offer advice in the Lincoln Zephyr Owners Club (LZOC).

“About the only thing that ever held me up was my own time to get at things,” he says. “Out of all the cars I’ve done, this one was pretty easy and I met a lot of really good people that had parts and could help me out … Not all clubs are as friendly as the Zephyr Club. The Zephyr Club is just really full of nice people.”

“I redid the brake cylinders … the interior …got the paint buffed out… It’s not 100 percent, but it’s pretty good. The grille was missing, the headlights were missing. When you are in the club you wind up finding different sources for parts, so it was not that difficult to find the window cranks and the door handles, and things like that. The grille was a little harder to get, and any grille you get is going to need to be re-chromed. Really, it was mostly a matter of putting it up on the lift out in the shop and cleaning it up.”

Messner has never been able to find out much history about the car, other than it was last titled in California and somehow made its way to Nevada, where he purchased it. It has now become of the jewels of the Messners’ collection that also includes a 1934 Lincoln K and 1967 Lincoln four-door convertible; three Jaguars; a 1935 Ford pickup and 1935 Hupmobile — the latter two of which are both projects still in progress.

Other than finishing up some panels in the trunk and installing a new ashtray in the backseat, Wally says his only goal with the Zephyr is to take care of it and have some fun. Unlike some of the other cars in the fleet, even Lynn enjoys piloting the ’39 Zephyr.

“I don’t mind driving it! It’s actually fun to drive,” she says. “When you drive that ’34, that’s so big it’s like driving a monster, but this is one is nice to drive. But you aren’t just riding in the car, you are a participant. You really have to drive it.”

It doesn’t take much convincing to get Wally to fire up the Zephyr up and take it for spin through the Wisconsin countryside. The optional Columbia two-speed rear end makes the car more than capable of handling speeds north of 50 mph without much trouble.

“For being a car from the 1930s it’s really road-worthy,” he says. “You can travel pretty much at highway speed with that two-speed rear end. I don’t know what the car would be like if it didn’t have that. They were available both ways.”

“The more I drive it the less I worry about it. It’s proven itself to be pretty reliable … I do tend to have a little white knuckle syndrome with it. But I’d say I don’t fret much over it. I want to be able to use my cars. I don’t want to be worried about ever driving one somewhere. No offense to any people that do cars like that, but that’s not much approach to the hobby. I’d rather have a car I can jump in and go somewhere.”

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