{"id":2698,"date":"2006-07-26T02:50:00","date_gmt":"2006-07-26T06:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/2006\/07\/tip-of-cap\/"},"modified":"2010-12-30T12:02:03","modified_gmt":"2010-12-30T17:02:03","slug":"tip-of-cap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/2006\/07\/tip-of-cap\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tip of the Cap"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Secluded<\/a><\/p>\n

This car sat for years beside the road in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. Car spotters easily identified it as a 1957 Ford<\/a>. Closer inspection reveals an unusual fuel door location<\/a> and a distinctive roofline<\/a>, both hallmarks of the Skyliner retractable hardtop<\/a>, a “new kind of Ford<\/a>” that year. The Skyliner returned for the 1958<\/a> season, and one final time in 1959<\/a>, after which it departed the catalog. The unusual roof mechanism, in which the “trunklid” opened from the front to swallow the roof, carried on in 1958, ‘59<\/a> and ’60 “squarebird” Thunderbirds, but with a soft top, and had a final fling on the 1961-67 Lincoln Continental convertible, of which this 1962<\/a> is a good example.<\/p>\n

The collapsible hard top was not meant to be a Ford feature at all. Intended for the 1956 Continental Mk II<\/a>, an unbadged Lincoln, it was judged too costly for a limited production car. It was hoped that the greater production volume of the Ford would better amortize the development costs. Ford had a couple of Mk IIs softtop-converted<\/a> by Hess and Eisenhardt (now armored car constructor Centigon<\/a>) in 1957, but the model never entered production.<\/p>\n

It is well that the Skyliner was touted as a new kind of Ford<\/i>, as it wasn’t a new kind of car<\/i>. Peugeot had a retracting hardtop on the Éclipse model in the 1930s. Designed by French dentist Georges Paulin, the system was built into a few Peugeot 301 models in 1934 by Parisian coachbuilder Marcel Pourtout. Later Éclipse décapotables (crudely translated as “able to remove the cap”) were built on the larger 601<\/a> model and finally a series of nearly 500 on the 402<\/a>. The Éclipse is fondly remembered at Peugeot, so much so that the company has put modern versions, the 206CC<\/a> and 307CC<\/a> into production recently, although Mercedes-Benz would have you believe the SLK <\/a>is the only such collapsible in the world.<\/p>\n

But even Peugeot was not the first with a retracting hard top. In 1922, B.B. Ellerbeck of Salt Lake City, Utah, built one on a Hudson Super Six. Not as sophisticated as either the Eclipse or the Skyliner, its top had the same curvature<\/a> as the rear of the roadster body. It merely pivoted back and down<\/a>. A clever hatch in the top allowed the use of the rumble seat<\/a> when the roof was down. a feature missing on Peugeot and Ford.<\/p>\n

At $2,942, the 1957 Skyliner was nearly 20 percent more expensive than the canvas-roofed Sunliner. The price premium, the complexity of the top mechanism, and the nearly-unreachable luggage space<\/a> combined to limit sales to barely a quarter of Sunliner volume. At 20,766 units, though, the Skyliner is not the rarest ’57 Ford. The Fairlane Town Victoria<\/a> achieved but 12,695 and the Custom Business Sedan<\/a>, a “Tudor” without a rear seat, only 6,888.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This car sat for years beside the road in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. Car spotters easily identified it as a 1957 Ford. Closer inspection reveals an unusual fuel door location and a distinctive roofline, both hallmarks of the Skyliner retractable hardtop, a “new kind of Ford” that year. The Skyliner returned for the 1958….<\/span>
Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2698"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3376,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2698\/revisions\/3376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kitfoster.com\/carport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}