gwells

Be sure to introduce yourself to me.

There's currently no car show in Georgia like the Celebration of the Authentic Car event, which showcases unmodified, uncustomized, and unhotrodded vehicles, restored or not, essentially as they were built. The CotAC criteria has been extended to recognize two classes of authentic cars: ‘The Greats’ through 1948 and ‘Mid-Century Moderns’ 1949 through 1959. If you own such a vehicle, please bring it out. If you have a later or a custom car, please do not feel unwelcome!! Regular museum admission will apply and your car will be parked right next to the main field, just so Mustangs aren't placed next to Marmons nor Teslas next to Thomas Flyers. We are pre-registering the CotAC cars this year, $20 in advance and $25 day of the show, which covers your car, your passengers, and admission to the museum. Gates open at 9 AM, the show is from 10 AM to 5 PM. Pre-register at https://tinyurl.com/CotAC-online-registration . Cassie’s Kitchen will be onsite serving food and there’s plenty of room for your trailer. No formal judging will be held but a few prizes will be awarded. Rain date is Sunday, May 19. This is the third annual CotAC show to benefit the Southeastern Railway Museum and it could the last one without your support. If you cherish authentic, historic, and rare cars, please attend this unique event. And please share this post widely! The first two CotAC events had the misfortune to be on the same weekends as an AACA National and a Grand National, and many members were already committed to attending those shows. There is no conflict this year and we hope to see a lot of our AACA friends and their cars on May 18. The 501(c)3 Southeastern Railway Museum is located at 3595 Buford Highway, Duluth, Georgia, across the street from Howard Brothers Hardware. Here's a terrific short video of the first Celebration of the Authentic Car event in 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yioeF6jY5I

That's a great photo, Varun!

Actually, Bill, I believe that's not 100% accurate. Here's the best table I could find that I didn't have to remake. Doesn't show production numbers, but I think it gets the point across. Ford clearly dominated sales through the first half of the '20s. But most people don't realize that Chevy actually outsold Ford for two out of four of the Model A years. And that Chevy outsold Ford in 1927, 1932, and 1933, too. Ford fought back during the middle '30s, but after that Chevy took over until WWII. From 1926 to 1941, inclusive, Chevy was tops in sales nine times and Ford just seven. One personal experience many years ago suggests those who target the wood-framed bodies that Ford largely abandoned by the mid-to-late '20s as the reason old Fords of this era have survived at a much higher rate than Chevys are on the right track. In my later HS years, I bought a 1926 (IIRC) Chevrolet sedan that was essentially complete, out of a guy's garage near Nashville, for $80. This would had been in the very early '70s, perhaps very late '60s. Every single piece of body structural wood on the car was extremely rotten and all the nailed-on external sheet metal body panels were literally falling off. It's been almost 55 years, thus my memory is a little fuzzy, but I think I quickly sold the car to someone else for $200, without having to actually move the car first. I think I hleped guy who bought it from me take it to his place. To this day, it remains the most profit, percentage-wise, I ever made on a car I bought and then later resold. LOL.

Or retrofitted, to help deaden the headlamp vibrations. There are actually two '26-'27 headlamp bar designs used by Ford, a solid bar (forged?) and one that was stamped with a U-shaped crossection. I assume the latter was the second design used, as it was probably cheaper to make.

According to Shorpy: "Stone Mountain, Georgia, May 25, 1926. Ford Motor Company publicity still." This image is shown in numerous Model T books. To see the image in higher-res, click HERE.

The Mercury car was introduced as a 1939 model, so this isn't a Mercury grille. Plymouth, I think, perhaps a 1933 grille.?

I'm sure I first met Harold at some small Middle Tennessee Region meet in the late sixties, but my fondest memory of him was attending an AACA judging school at his farm in Chattanooga in 1970, when I was 16 years old. We test-judged several cars and had our scores corrected by the senior judges present. One of the items I said was OK on a particular car was marked wrong, when I knew it wasn't based on recent judging rules published by the marque club for that vehicle. I'd seen the recent issue with the judging rules in the pile of magazines in the den of Harold's garage and quickly placed it in front of him and the senior judges, pointing out the section that supported my judging sheet. Harold took the podium to address the attendees and basically said that it is a mistake to dismiss the opinions of youth out of hand, and that old folks might learn as much from them as they were attempting to teach. I have loved the guy ever since. "... antique automobile royalty." Absolutely! "Just plain good people." Way, way higher than that on my scale.

Walt, got a pic or two you could post? Would like to see this.

Peter, thank you. I don't think you will regret it.

I met Austie during the 1978 Pocono Glidden Tour (as well as Bev Kimes). He had a portable bar with him and poured me a very strong drink at one of the tour rest stops. Was very glad I was riding with Don Peterson in his 734, instead of driving, after that stop. Austie was excitedly showing off a large very early automobilist's scrapbook he'd recently discovered somewhere, when he wasn't mixing drinks...

I've owned this car since 1977 and it's been stripped to the bare shell basically since that year (please don't ask why...). I wrote feature stories about Tigers for Car Collector in 1978 and Special Interest Autos in 1981. And interviewed and stayed with the late Ian Garrad, essentially the 'father' of the Tiger, in preparation for those pieces. I think I probably have done the homework to a decently high level... That's not what I am hearing from numerous sources. Seemingly it does remove surface rust, which is primarily the concern here. Still debating how effectively to kill the rust in the rocker boxes that form the main structural members of this unibody.

I have a LBC (Sunbeam Tiger), which as you may know is a unibody car, i.e. not a body on frame. These cars are notorious for rust, as bad as early Porsches and Jaguar E-Types. My car, actually dismantled and stripped in 1977 when it was just 11 years old, had roughly 30 pounds of Bondo layered with aluminum foil in each rocker panel, with surprisingly little rust elsewhere on the body. The rocker boxes comprise a majority of the structural integrity of the body and they're not rusted out (except for the outer rocker panels), but contain a fair amount of internal surface rust. I want to kill that rust, so that it will take a very long time for it to reappear. The question is how to do that. Afte considering sandblasting, chemical stripping, and other options, I am focusing on soda blasting. I would appreciate hearing from anyone here who has direct, personal experience with the soda blasting process.

Ooh, I love it when people talk dirty to me, Ben! Yep, that is a more modern car...

Hard to to take Greely's advice, when I turn 69 tomorrow, i.e. not a young man any more. And my first Model A 'adventure' in 2014 was actually in the other direction: west to east. There's a link to that trip blog in the first paragraph of the first post in this thread.