Dirt, salt, moisture and simply time will lead to rust—there doesn’t seem to be any way to get around it. That’s certainly true of a nearly 70-year-old Cadillac from the “rust belt.”
The 1955 Cadillac Coupe deVille e-mailed “enewsletter.” A pre-sale inspection of the Wisconsin-based car by 1955 Cadillac authority Rick Payton revealed the Cadillac was complete—including complete with rust—but remained surprisingly solid and buildable considering its age and geographic location. Essentially, it was in what we on the staff call “Wisconsin solid” condition (rusty, but not too far gone to restore). After we won the bid for the Cadillac, Payton retrieved it and parked it in his shop, The Classic Garage, in Chippewa Falls, Wis., where body guru Jan Behlke went to work cutting out the rusty metal and welding in new panels that he fabricated. When Behlke is done, the Cadillac will be about as rust-free as when it rolled off the assembly line at the Clark Street Cadillac plant in Detroit.
