Ultra Magnus
This is Ultra Magnus after some serious resto work, mostly repairing damage done by previous owners.
"The wiring is substandard...and there is serious metal fatigue in all the load bearing members..."
-Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters, yet strangely applicable to my ambulance.
This is Ultra Magnus, my 1974 Cadillac M&M Lifeliner. Ultra was named after an Autobot from the television show 'The Transformers' a cartoon that I believe justifies the existence of every single person born in the 70's who was able to watch it as a kid. The Transformers was actually tied with Voltron in my love for cartoons.
This is her and her faded paint. A lot of these pictures are on the internet as a way of reminding me to get her fixed up right. The previous owner(s) were extremely negligent of the car, and apparently the only contribution (if you could call it that) to the car was to install wiring so bad that voodoo cannibals would have turned it away. I am not kidding you here people.
The floor. The awful, bone chilling, tear jerking floor. If the sight of this floor makes you want to go to the bathroom, it is not surprising, as it is actually the same linoleum used in numerous bathrooms nationwide. I sometimes wonder how a decade like the 1970's could have produced such awesome cars as the Lifeliner, and yet had such gut wrenching taste in colors that produced authentic bowel movements like this linoleum.
Me removing trim from around the floor. This is exactly as much fun as it looks in the pictures.
More of the same.
The front compartment was trashed. All the light and siren controls were stacked on the floor. They had apparently been removed (for some insane reason) then re-installed, but done completely wrong.
Sitting in the exact middle on the floor, you can see the bundle of wires that I have been tracing, and removing one by one. This is the compartment after quite a lot of cleanup.
The rear compartment during the new linoleum installation and after a thorough cleaning of all the fixtures.
The roofline in the front. Notice the Super Chief siren is not actually even sitting correctly on the roof, it is held level by some metal rings and washers. Somewhere along the line somebody kept the original Federal Q siren for their own and replaced it with the Super Chief siren.
The newly added cross on the roof is my first venture into auto painting. Pretty good for a first try. No smudges or over spray, so I figure I did alright, although as an unfortunate side effect I am now completely sterile and everything tastes like sauerkraut.
An excerpt from the sales brochure for my car.
