What happened to them all???

[Bill Miller]

I don't have a car with a Continental motor but I was wondering about what became of them and why they are so scarce. There were many thousands made since the early 1900's installed in many car brands but you never see any come up for sale. Were they all melted down for the WW-II war effort?

[Rusty_OToole]

Not sure what you mean. There must be lots of cars left with Continental motors but they seldom are advertised as such. Graham, Kaiser and Frazer used Continental sixes but they tried to pretend they were of their own design and manufacture. In the case of Kaiser and Frazer this was not far wrong as they took over a war surplus Continental factory and made their own motors with Continental's permission. In the last couple of years I have seen fifties and sixties Jeeps in wrecking yards, that had Continental motors. I think Jeep was the last to use them, up to 1961.

Years ago I saw a Continental advertisement listing the makes of cars and trucks that used their motors. There must have been over 100 of them. I doubt this type of ad was repeated, as I said, most buyers of their motors wanted to keep it dark, at least in the case of cars.

[Bleach]

My dad has or had, not sure anymore, a large high capacity forklift with a Continental flat head 6 cylinder engine. My guess it was from the 50's. I had to work on it many years ago so I could move it out of the way of something else.

[Bud Tierney]

While I'm not a Cont'l buff as such, I would guess that if there're not many whole engines usually available (I haven't Googled or checked EBay etc for whole motors) it's because they were heavily concentrated in the "orphan" cars and trucks, most of which went into the shredders and melters over the years, and that the engines are now carefully watched for and snapped up by collectors/restorers...
As the orphan makes died off, most (all?) of the US m'f'r's left made their own engines; Cont'l remained in the industrial engine business (specialty vehicles, ag, comm'l and industrial eqpmt as the mentioned forklift etc, ag/ind'l power units, ad nauseum) as well as staying heavily in aircraft engines...
The 226 in the Kaisers etc were an engine Cont'l designated as F6226 in their "automotive" version (actually trucks and all kinds of eqpmt) F226 in their "industrial" version which included ag, many uses of which overlapped the uses of the "automotive" version, and PF226 (and possibly other P-other letter-226 IDs) for the free-standing power unit version ( pump drivers, whatever). I would guess literally thousands are still in operation today.

[Rusty_OToole]

I dare say there are THOUSANDS of Continental motors still around in cars, trucks, and especially buses. Not to mention industrial engines.

You wouldn't know it unless you happen to know which makes bought Continental engines. It is not something that was well known or advertised.