Danbury Mint 1941 Cadillac Fleetwood Series 61 Special

[THarrison351]

I've been watching these for the past couple of years on eBay and there seemed to be many with broken front suspensions. None the less, I was going to get one as long as the price was right and it had all the parts. Well, I finally got my chance a couple of weeks ago and like most of them, the front suspension was broken. At least it included all of the critical parts and no one had attempted to repair it. The only part missing was one of the fake coil springs under the control arm. I knew I could make a replacement and that's what I've done. I'm really intrigued as to why the suspension breaks so often on these. It is a very heavy diecast and the front lower control arms are not very robust plastic. They always seem to be broken at the three attachment points where the screws come through. Mine had a lot of stress cracks around all three points like the screws were over-tightened.

The damaged area and parts I have. Obviously, I'd already fixed the control arms when I took this photo.

The lower control arm and the outboard points for the steering knuckle pins broken off and the center was cracked.

The lower control arm assembly repaired.

In the process of test fitting everything, I managed to drop one of the real suspension springs under my shelves or somewhere, so I'm using a ball point pen spring cut to fit.

As I said before, this is missing one fake spring, so I took some .020 stainless safety wire and wrapped around a number one Philips screwdriver shank and Voilà, replacement spring

Putting the parts in place and pulling the wheels up so the control arms can be glued in place.

I used 5 minute epoxy and glued all three points where it was originally mounted, then I placed this cap over the control arms and taped it down so the glue could set up.

All fixed!

Here's what it looks like after some cleaning and polishing

It has a couple more working features, but I didn't photograph them. The left tail light raises up to access the fuel cap and the rear seat armrest can be moved up and down

[Sam I Am]

Those are beautiful cars. Nice job on the resurrection. 

[randyc]

Cool - I didn't know about the gas cap and armrest.  Have to check those out on mine.  Good job getting it display ready.

[Geno]

Beautifully done Tim, what a great piece.

[kilrathy10]

Very nicely done... Great save... 

[Dan Hay]

Very nice. I also have one of these I picked up cheap that wasn't broken. My grandfather had several 41 Cadillacs, at least one 60 special and the last one he had was a series 62 coupe.  He always carried a couple 50 pound bags of sand in the trunks to lower the rears of them... in combo with their already wore out original springs, they sat pretty low. 

I tell that story because I was thinking of lowering mine a bit, to resemble the 41 Cads he had.

[misterNNL]

Thanks for inspiring me to add yet another un-necessary project to already too long list of things that I would like to build. Noe I think that id I were able to find one of these at the right price (insert the word Cheap here) I would latch onto it a make into a ground scraping low rider with fender skirts and a sun visor. Here we go again.

[slusher]

Great work and save!