Lincoln Air Suspension and More

The Strutmasters Story, in Chip's own words....

I was a mortgage broker in the small town of Roxboro, North Carolina. My wife and I home-schooled our two children on a 55 acre farm as we had been part of the corporate structure earlier in our lives and wanted to get out of the concrete jungle.

Our family was involved in a goat dairy making gourmet cheese. At one time we had over 125 milkers and the largest goat dairy operation in North Carolina. Since for several years my income went towards family needs and supported the very expensive start up of a dairy-cheese operation, we choose to drive our 1980 red and silver GMC van which could make farm deliveries and take us to church also.

In our past we were accustomed to driving nice automobiles but we could not finance the farm and drive expensive cars at this time. In 1999, when old red and silver was looking a little tired and I was greatly needing an upgrade to my image as a mortgage broker, a very good friend made me a great deal on an 89 Lincoln Continental for only 4500 dollars.

It was a beautiful car with leather interior and more electronic options than you could ever imagine. I was simply overwhelmed to be the proud owner of this magnificent car. I even saw the original invoice in the glove box which said it costs around forty thousand dollars. Heaven couldn't be any better than this. I had gone from old red and silver to Mr. Continental. Even the body style was still popular and no one would know that I was driving a ten year old car. "I'm the man."

I even wanted to leave the farm and drive to town more. It just felt great. But all my feelings of jubilation would soon change as steam started coming out of the tail pipe and then the engine started to skip. I knew from doing some repairs around the farm that this meant that the head gasket was bad so I opened the hood to see what had to be done to remove the head gasket. Whoooo.... What an assortment of electronic dodads. Not my cup to tea, so off we go to the dealer. No problem, says the dealer, only 1280 dollars. I only had the car for two weeks, but, hey, this is a beautiful car, let's do it. When I picked it up, I asked the dealer, "What is the warranty on this job?" They answered, "That's a Ford gasket and it has a ninety day warranty, no warranty on the labor."

I still remember it like it was yesterday. So, I'm thinking, what else could go wrong. However, within weeks, the alternator went, and then the starter. For some reason the dealer had a round figure for both of those items at about 480 dollars each. Well, at least now I have all the little things that can go wrong behind me and I can just drive my Lincoln with my head high. With everything done and still feeling like I got a great deal, it's time to plan a family vacation especially since we hadn't had one in years because of the farm animals.

But God had blessed us with a friend that would feed all the animals and with automatic waterers off we go to Dollywood or so we thought. About 45 minutes into the drive we pulled into a service station to tank up, but as we were pulling in for some reason the rear of the car began to lower. Maybe I had hit a button. Maybe it was just making an adjustment. Sure, that's what it was. But it didn't come back up. So maybe I blew a fuse and the compressor isn't coming on to raise the car. No problem, vacation dad will get that leather lined, gold embossed, owners manual out of the dash and do a little reading and push some buttons and we'll be off to Dollywood shortly. I did locate the fuse assembly under the hood but to my surprise when I put the spare fuse where the compressor fuse was, nothing happened. I know what it is. There's some sensor thing in the back that got stuck in the low position and I'll push up and down on the rear quarter panels and unstick this device and it will level itself and we'll be off to Dollywood.

"What's going on Dad?" said the kids in the back seat, "You're making us car sick". "Don't worry guys, I've got everything under control." After a few minutes of looking like a fool in the parking lot, I lost my cool and slammed the drivers door. When I did, the compressor came on and a miracle happened. Yep, it went up. "I'm the man" so off we go to Dolly World. Then from the back seat one of them says, "Dad, I think the car is going down again." I explained that it was probably adjusting itself again. But two minutes later I was a low rider in the rear and that cushy ride had turned into a freight train and so we pulled off the road to make more adjustments. Again, I checked under the hood; maybe the wires to the fuse box had a break in one and by bending them I could make contact and get us going again. Maybe the switch in the trunk could be turned on and off and that would be easy to do. Let's bounce the car up and down some more and hope no one we know drives by. But none of this worked, so again I got mad and slammed the door and again I heard the compressor come on and once more the car lifted and we were off to Dolly World. Then it dawned on me that getting mad and slamming the door had saved the day or should I say the next ten minutes because this exercise was repeated every ten miles for the next 200 miles. We finally arrived hours behind schedule, but hey, we made it and no one knows that we have this problem.

Wrong. I heard comments like, "do you have two dead men in your trunk?" or "are you hauling moonshine?" Well, needless to say, our vacation has long been remembered and no one has ever asked to go back to Dollywood, so some benefit there. After a long journey home, you know, slamming the door every ten miles to get the car back up, we finally arrived back at the farm. I'm telling you, old red and silver never looked better, but not wanting to drive it to church, I took the Lincoln to the dealer so they could make what little adjustment was necessary to keep my car from going down. I'm certain there is a setting on some device that will correct all of this and I can get my life back once again.

What??? Thirty five hundred dollars to fix this. No, I don't want a new car sir, just make the air suspension function again. "Your air struts are leaking and to replace them and the compressor which has died will be thirty five hundred dollars" He might as well have said thirty five million because at that moment it wouldn't have had a greater impact. "Oh, that'll be 75 dollars for the diagnostic work, cash or credit card?" So back to the farm I go to park this slot machine that only takes and never pays. Before I even consider making this kind of investment, I should find out what this car is worth. A simple click of the mouse on Ebay says when this car is up, it's worth 1900 dollars. So if I add the 4500 that I paid for the car, the 1280 for the head gasket, almost 500 each for the starter and alternator, and now the 3500 for the air suspension, I'm going to have a 9000 dollar, 1900 dollar car. My dream car is now my worst nightmare. I now hate leather and push buttons and all those luxury things. I've left Heaven and gone to Hell.

What was I thinking when I got this car? So now I'm going to fall into the category of a poor man in North Carolina which says a poor man has a car on blocks, a rich man has two. Then it hit me. Others must have experienced this. I'll get on the internet, do some research, and find a solution. Someone has figured out a fix for this deal and I'll learn what it is and I'll be back in my beautiful Lincoln in no time. I now had a new religion. SURFING THE NET.... I surfed here. I surfed there, but no fix in sight. Now two months have gone by and I'm back to old red and silver for everything. Who says you can't put 200.000 miles on an 80 GMC van. At least it doesn't have air suspension. Then I had an idea. I'm a little slow sometimes.

What about calling salvage yards and getting some used air struts? That's it. I can make this happen. So I called the local yards first and learned that no one had any. So, I expanded my search through out the state only to hear, "No, I'm sorry, we don't have any." I once again broadened my search to include Virginia but with the same results until finally one day a guy says "No we don't have any, but we have a wrecked continental with a regular set of struts on it". I had almost set the phone on the receiver when I heard him say no like every other place. I pulled the phone back to my ear and said "Excuse me, did you say what I think you said." "Yes sir, we have a car with regular suspension on it."

As an old friend used to say, "That's it, that's it..." I begged him not to let those things get out of his sight until I could get there the next day. I arrived jubilent only to find out that three of them were good and one had been damaged in the wreck, but I wasn't letting this deal get away. Now how do I make one more. Back to surfing the net. With a little luck, I matched some part numbers and rebuilt the broken strut assembly. My next door neighbor had a little mechanic shop and would be able to install these standard struts on my car. After figuring out where to drill holes in the body and how to make adjustments to the height of the rear so it wouldn't bottom out when the kids got in, I was up and running. After months of frustration and a determination not to own a 9000, 1900 dollar car, I can finally say at the top of my lungs, "I AM THE MAN...."

You see, I really did love all that leather and luxury, I just hated the suspension. Doing this once in your life is enough, so when I was approached by someone else in town to ask if I could fix their suspension, I quickly responded that I was a mortgage broker, not a mechanic. But his story was so similar to mine and I couldn't see anyone else going through what I went through and coming out sane, I caved in and did one more set. This was to be the end of all this. I have fixed my car and paid my debt to society by fixing another man's car. Life is good, I've done my deed, let's close a few more mortgage deals and milk some goats. I'm done with this car thing. Well, this guy went and told someone else and they told someone else and now you can see what kind of mess I'm getting into. So many Lincolns, so many sane people facing insanity. Where did I go wrong?

I'm a mortgage broker with goats. Well, you get the picture, I've now got a second job or is it third? Now I'm getting extra parts to take care of these folks and so it only made good sense to list some on Ebay. What the heck, maybe I can make enough money to make my house payment. Yeh, that's my new goal; sell enough to make a house payment. Little did I know that in 6 months, I would sell over 53,000 dollars worth on Ebay. I met a guy who knew how to do web sites and I made a deal with him to put up a small site to sell the kit for the one car, the 88-94 Continental. After several months, I emailed him and explained that I had never sold anything off of this web site and could something be wrong. He replied that it takes a lot of time to build up a site and that I should be patient. But then he emailed and said something had to be corrected and then we would be more visible. We started at number 4400. If we could improve 100 positions per month, I would be 195 by the time we made it to the first page. But I'm a patient man; what's the big deal. I'm just looking for a house payment anyway.

My mortgage broker business still my main income, I don't have time to answer phone calls about Continentals, so my web site only had my email address listed for contact and in the evenings, I returned emails and sometimes called folks to see that I was for real. Some people in town heard that I was selling stuff on Ebay and asked me to list there antique cars and hot rods for sale for a fee. I liked the fee part, so off we went. It seems as though people who want to bid on these cars want to see more pictures than just a few shown on ebay, so I contacted my web site guy and he says he can put extra pictures on our web site and when they click here for more pictures they will actually be looking at pictures on the web site. Ok by me, let's do it. In just a few months time, from the vehicles I listed on Ebay for other people, we had gotten over 90,000 hits on our web site from people wanting to see the pictures. So our site, without knowing it, went from 4400 to number one and then I had a brain storm.

I told my wife, "I think I know how to do 2500 a day in sales with the kits and if I can do that I can get out of the mortgage broker business and let all that go to DiTec.Com." My wife replied, "If you do that, you'll have overhead."

I told her that I was going to take that chance; you see until then, I was working from my goat barn and had no bills except for parts and shipping costs. Now I would take on MaBell and risk it all. It seems to have been a good idea because the first month the phone number went up, I did 53,000 dollars in sales. This was more than I could handle so I hired two part time workers, moved the goats to pasture, took down the milk stations, bulk tank cooler, and pasturizer, and transformed myself from goatman to strutman. I must admit I was getting tired of being known as "those people with the goats". Now people are calling and asking "what can you do for my Towncar?" I don't know anything about Towncars so I say I'm sorry that I can't help them.

So after getting about 500 calls for Towncars, I thought it might be a good idea to find one around town and see if something could be done to make a conversion for that model. So next came the Towncar conversion, and so each model came as hundreds of people began to beg for a way to fix their car. By the end of the first year we had done over a million dollars from our 1500 square foot goat barn. The neighbors started making a little noise about the tractor trailers coming in and out all day so we found a 15,000 square foot building in town thinking that this would take us into the next millenium.

Our business doubled as we now added other models to our line. The 15,000 square foot building was looking smaller and smaller. It's funny how the local realtor who would only show me 75,000 dollar homes when I asked to see 140,000 dollars (because he remembered me in old red and silver) now wants to show me a 220,000 square foot building. Has he lost his mind? Well, I fell in love with the building and through the grace of God was able to purchase it. I got my payment within 500 dollars of what the rent was at the 15,000 square foot building and it has proven to be worth every bit of the extra 500.

We don't have goats any more and we are blessed to live in town in a real house with heat and such. And as Paul Harvey says, "Now you know the rest of the story."