Junkyard Find: 1963 Imperial Custom
With scrap steel worth so much these days, does a fairly rough ’63 Imperial have any chance of evading The Crusher? Probably not.
This one has been picked over pretty well, but still has plenty of goodies left for someone with a project Imperial.
Plenty of overlooked bits and pieces in the trunk
Speaking of the trunk, check out this huge air-conditioning unit in the back.
Chrysler Airtemp!
The ’63 Imperial came with a 340-horsepower 413 under the hood. Hmmm… this engine might be just the thing for my Dodge A100 van.
Someone who felt like restoring a 1963 Detroit luxury car would probably go for the more popular Continental or Cadillac; the big-fin Imperials of the late 1950s and the boxy monster Imperials of the later 1960s get a lot more attention than those of this era.
These cars were huge and heavy, but not quite as heavy as you might think. The ’63 Imperial Custom four-door hardtop scaled in at 4,690 pounds. How heavy is that? Just 521 pounds more than the ’11 Dodge Challenger SRT8!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Some people rescue cats, some rescue dogs, if I had the money and the storage space I'd rescue cars and this would be one of the first I'd go after even though I've never had the least bit of interest in a '63 Imperial. There is enough here that it would be an absolute shame if this car and all of those hard to obtain parts disappeared for a few hundred bucks worth of scrap metal.
Wow! I've owned one of these for the past 11 years & use it at least once a week. It's like driving a luxurious JFK-era living room on wheels. The handling & braking aren't at all modern, but not as bad as you'd expect. On the highway, it gets around 13 MPG; on surface streets, not so good. A few years ago, I had to re-solder a wire inside one of the electric window motors. I swear that motor was the size of an early Honda Accord starter.