Royce Massey Cover

Sometime in November and December 2011 my wife and I were eating in a Subway restaurant in Russellville, Alabama after church one Sunday with some friends. My friend Dale said to me Royce your are a Ford man I know here there is a Crown Vic that I think you could buy. Dale had purchased a 1957 Chevrolet from this man. I owned a 1956 Ford Club Sedan at the time a driver but a pretty nice driver. I asked if the Crown Vic had been restored and he said it was in the process. I told Dale if the man ever mentioned selling the Crown Vic let me know and I would go look at the car.

About the middle of February 2012 Dale told me the man was ready to sell. Dale set up the meeting and he and I went to look at the car. The car was located in a shop near Haleyville, Alabama. What I found was a 1955 Crown Vic that had a frame off rebuild started a very nice solid body with the mo-tor, transmission and rear end rebuilt and installed. The frame had been cleaned and painted and the body set back down on the frame. The mane that owned the car had been collecting parts since 1988. He told me he had the parts to build this car to fac-tory specs for any option available on these cars. I listened to the engine run and looked at all his parts which included bout three sets of stainless for this car all polished and wrapped in about three layers of newspaper. I asked the man what his best price was on the car and he told me and then said before he would take less he would dig a hole and bury the car and parts in his back yard. After thinking about it overnite and talking with a couple of people about the car I agreed to purchase the car and parts.

At the time one of my sons had an empty warehouse in Tuscumbia, Alabama and he agreed to let me finish restoring the car in his ware-house. Dale took his trailer and hauled the bod for me and I took my 16 foot flatbed trailer and hauled all the parts. There were tons of extra parts, motors, transmissions, etc this was late February 2012. All the sheet metal had been primed so I started cleaning those up painting the inter fender wells and getting the car to a rolling body.

Around the first of June 2012 I talked a man into painting the car. The man I purchased from was go-ing to paint the car red and white his favorite colors. The vin plate showed the car had been Sea Sprite Green and White originally. I decided to paint it back to the original color. the car went into the paint shop around the middle of June 2012 and I picked it up in November 2012. Base-Clear paint was used and the body was taken down to bare metal and built up from there.

Around the first of December 2012 my brother Jerry Massey and I started putting the car back together. We worked about two days a week around four hours each day. All we had to go on of how to put the car to-gether was a 1955 Shop Manual which helped a lot. My brother was an electrician and he restored all the electrical circuits and everything works like it should. We had very few major obstacles in restoring the car and the man I purchased from was accurate I had to purchase very few parts for the car in most cases I had extra parts. I did order a interior kit from LaBaron Bonney that fit and looks like the original interior. We finished restoring the car in about June 2014. Since that time I have enjoyed driving, showing and admiring the car.

Royce Massey
Spruce Pine, AL