The Search

By April of 2011 I was getting emails every morning from ebay telling me about new listings for '68 Eldorados.  There were a few rust buckets, but most seemed to be in reasonable condition.  There is a Cadillac shop here in Torrance called Tips Cadillac.  Mark Tippett has been working on Cadillacs for 35 years.  I talked to him about my search.  His best advice was to avoid any vehicle with rust.  Anything else could be fixed.  He also casually mentioned that the '68 was the most difficult to find parts for.  I would find out later he wasn't kidding.

Eventually I found a '68 in Sherman Oaks, about 20 miles north in the San Fernando Valley.  I made arrangements to see it on a Sunday morning.  The car drove nicely.  It looked great.  It was not in perfect condition, but I felt that it was car whose restoration I could handle.  The ebay auction was scheduled to end in less than 24 hours.

The auction ended with four bidders interested but the reserve not met so there was no sale.  The next day the seller contacted me and said he was taking bids from the four of us.  He said since I was the only one to take the time to come see the car he would give me first refusal.  At noon on Tuesday I matched the high bid and won his offline auction.

That evening I picked up the car.

How It All Started

I think what started this project was a movie I rented from Redbox early in 2011.  It was called Kalifornia starring Brad Pitt and David Duchovny originally released in 1993.   It is a story of a journalist duo on a tour of serial killer murder sites with two companions, unaware that one of them is a serial killer himself.  But the real star of the show (for me anyway) was the 1963 Lincoln Continental Convertible.  This is the type of car seen on the HBO series Entourage.

I started to look at the usual websites for Lincolns for sale.  I even looked at one in person near my office.  I went so far as to narrow my search to '65 or '66 for a variety of reasons not very important for this story.  In the end, the complexity of the convertible top, overall size of the beast and the cost to purchase and restore soured me on the Lincoln.

I turned my attention to the General Motors personal luxury cars:  the Oldsmobile Toronado, the Buick Riviera and the Cadillac Eldorado.  The Riviera was quickly eliminated since I just wasn't crazy enough of the styling.  The Toronado was introduced in '66 with a completely new front wheel drive platform.  

In '68 the styling changed for the worse, in my opinion.  I started searching for '66 and '67 Toronados.  There were plenty of cars available but most seemed to need a TON of work.  There just didn't seem to be a lot of people interested in maintaining their Toronado. 

I eventually gravitated to the Eldorado.  The Eldorado style that interested me most was introduced in '67 and built thru '70.  This model used a front wheel drive platform similar to the Toronado.  The '68 sold for $6605 and introduced the first round of federal safety standards, the first year of concealed windshield wipers with a 4 1/2 inch LONGER hood, front turn signals moved from the bumper into the leading edge of the front fenders and the first year of the 472 cubic inch V-8 with 375 hp and 525 ft-lb of torque.  After '68 the headlamps were no longer concealed.  Since all these features were either important or attractive to me I narrowed my search to the '68 Eldorado.