The seller of this 1949 Plymouth Special Deluxe repeats a well-known phrase in the auto world, “When the top goes down, the price goes up.” That’s true in many cases, even if the convertible in question needs a full restoration. This one can be found in Long Island, New York and they have it listed here on eBay. They have a $6,800 buy-it-now price listed or you can make an offer. Do you have what it takes to restore this car?
The Special Deluxe, or DeLuxe or even De Luxe, as some say, was the top-level Plymouth Deluxe and they were made in two rounds, in 1941 and 1942 and again after WWII from 1946 to 1950. In 1951, Plymouth gave their cars names such as Cranbrook and Cambridge, pretty fancy and creative compared to Deluxe or Special Deluxe. For the record, Hagerty is at $11,800 for a #4 fair condition car and $17,800 for a #3 good condition car, so there’s room on this one for sure.
The seller says that this is a “barn fresh” car and it sure looks like it was just pulled out of somewhere. They go on to say that it hasn’t run since 1986, and, sadly, out of 18 photos, 2 of which are duplicates, they don’t show us any photos of the engine. It should be Plymouth’s 217.8 cubic-inch flathead-six with 97 hp and 175 ft-lb of torque. They say that it’ll need a lot of help to get it going again.
The interior, or at least the distinctive dash, looks good. That is one fancy radio and speaker layout and overall it looks pretty good inside. I’m guessing that given the look of the exterior and the seller’s mention of rust – and the rust shown in the trunk – the seats and most of the interior will need to be stripped out and some welding may be needed, but that’s just a guess.
The 1949 grille was fairly fussy compared to the restyled 1950 cars, or slightly-restyled and cleaner 1950 grilles. They were still classic boxy Chrysler products in an era when cars were designed for both men and women to be able to wear hats inside without worrying about the headroom. It would be a few years before Chrysler would slim down the high-box look, but I love the look of these late-40s and early-50s Chrysler products. Are there any fans of 1949 Plymouths out there?
Mighty nice for what you’ll get. The 217
under the hood can be revived fairly quick
and without a lot of muss or fuss. The only real problem I see is that of redoing
the brakes. Like so many of these cars from the ’40s and early ’50s, the master
cylinder was frame mounted to the frame and was located under the driver’s side floorboard.
That made them a pain in the ass to
remove and service. From the pics the
seller gives us, it looks like a nice solid old ragtop. No, they’re no speed merchant, but you’ll cruise around in style.
Wow, it’s got those iconic ’49 Plymouth bumpers!!
Notice the aftermarket turn signals, with the large column mounted switch. The more expense way to add them was to replace the parking light sockets with dual filaments, Here, they added additional lights front and rear.
Buy it now is now $8000.
That’s the “featured on barnfinds.com” effect lol
I’m an absolute sucker for barnfind convertibles…it looks very tempting. Fortunately/unfortunately, these just don’t bring a lot of money even as drop tops.
I wonder what someone is willing to pay for this car.
First car was the sedan version Special Deluxe. $200 in 1976- was a good, tough, car that took at lot of abuse and kept on going
My first car was a 51 Plymouth convertible and we had 50 Plymouth Suburban too. My brother and I spent our teens abusing both of them but never tore either one up. Not fast cars but they would take a lot of abuse. We proved that.
My parents had a 49 Deluxe 2 door sedan that I would learn to drive on. BTW, several car brands had a model tier that included both Deluxe, Special Deluxe, with a few adding Custom. I believe Plymouth went to hotel(?) names about 1951 when they came out with their Belvedere, Cranbrook, and Savoy names.
As often happens, the dash and door caps on this car were painted over, they should be painted wood grain.
These also had a tendency to rust at corners of the front floor, the good news though is that the repairs are easy and straight forward.
And yeah, these cars are slow, today’s diesel powered cars will run away from this.
The convertibles didn’t have the wood grained dash. Their dashes were the color of the body.
I had those “ripple” bumpers on my ’41 Ford 2-door. Really the $h1te at the time. 1957 +/-.