nzcarnerd

Curti's car is a sedan. There were both a two and a four passenger coupe and a brougham listed for the Dodge Victory Six. This is the brougham - http://www.ebay.com/itm/1928-THE-VICTORY-SIX-BY-DODGE-BROTHERS-AUTO-ADVERTISEMENT-/172056368777?hash=item280f5bd689:g:NOAAAMXQrhdTS~7E - another one here - http://www.cars-on-line.com/69867.html - which would appear to have the separate trunk as on our mystery car. The four passenger coupe has a built in trunk like the one on this page - http://forums.aaca.org/topic/116790-1928-dodge-victory-six/ - and I guess the two passenger coupe has the same body with no back seat.

That Dodge is a fairly early one as it has a vertical windshield. Also the head lights are mounted well back so it is not later than about mid 1920. I think the wheels are from a later model - probably about 1922-24 as 1924 was the last year for the tall skinny 24" wheels. From 1925 they were on 20s.

I had not heard of a Baron truck but I thought the cab looked familiar. Check this page - http://www.commer.org.nz/RestorationsCollections/NewZealandRestosCollections/RichardsonCollection/RichardsonCollection.html - scroll down to the 1955 Superpoise. More - http://www.nzmuseums.co.nz/account/5693/object/503469 The name appears on this list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_truck_manufacturers

The 'vin' is not a Vehicle Identification Plate in the modern sense, it is simply a chassis number. If The Standard Catalog is correct, then the Marquette's chassis plate is on the left side - 'on the frame beneath the left front fender' - whereas on all the other Buicks of the era it is on the right side. The number should be somewhere between 10000 and 52998. It does not fit into the regular Buick sequence.

The number 30509 tells you what you already know, that it is a Marquette four door sedan. The Standard Catalog says there were 15,795 of these built so a guess is yours is from mid way through the run. The Marquette is also known as a Buick Series 30 and the four door sedan was the Model 30-37, which keeps with Buick's standard format (the four door sedan were always *7 eg 30-47 and 30-57 in 1930). Your engine number should fall in the range of 10000 and 48450. Unlike later id tags there is no info relating to paint colours and options.

If you can extract the wheel bearings from the front axle you should be able to cross reference them in a very old catalogue. Maybe if the rear axle was stripped and measured there might be some clues though it is possible that the rear axle is not original to the chassis. If the brakes are hydraulics it is possible that it is a Chrysler product as not many others had hydraulics at that time. My guess for a date is either side of 1930 by not more than two years.

I can see the photo Jon.

It is similar in general appearance to this one we looked a couple of weeks ago - http://forums.aaca.org/topic/267230-early-akron-ohio-street-scene-identify-the-car/ - which I have had another look at and I think is actually a 1905 Cadillac Model D. This distinctive feature of that car is the front dumb irons of the chassis which curve sharply downward. This car does not have that feature. It might be a Northern from about 1905-6 but this car gives the impression of having its radiator forward of the front axle where the Northern's radiator was in line with the axle.

Even though the pic of the body tag as too small, the job number looks to be 32009 which makes it a Series 50. Series 60 is 32059.

In the photo with the yellow MG, the rest of the cars are Fiats.

The 1911 EMF did not have front doors and it was on a 108" wheelbase. This car has front doors and is bigger than that. The 1912 EMF had front doors but no outside lever. It also did not have the mouldings seen on the doors of this car. Find something with two round windows in the top and we will be getting into the ball park.

Maybe an first or second series Packard six??

The mystery car also has front door which not many cars had before 1912.

Dodge I think - not later than 1924 - http://www.dodgebrothersclub.org/gallery2/d/6902-3/1924+Dodge+front.gif

I haven't worked out what the mystery car is but I think the Pierce-Arrow is 1914 (maybe a 38hp??), the first year with the headlights on the fenders. I think the mystery car is 1912 from the shape of the rear fenders. That 'kick out' at the end was briefly in vogue at that time.

Still working on scanning a useable picture for this one. Having another look at the original picture I see it has the distinctive 'Atalanta' hood ornament that was used on Studebakers in 1928 only.

Another distinctive feature is the steering wheel. The majority of American cars of that era had wheels with aluminium centres and wooden rims. In the late 1920s they began to use hard rubber covered wheels but most had a larger centre hub than the one here. In comparison many British cars had a hard black wheel from earlier on. Also at that time most American cars had plain upholstery with no pleats whereas this one has pleats. Note also the raised centre on the bonnet (hood), similar to what Pontiac and Oakland, amongst others, used, I agree though that the instrument panel looks American. British cars tended to the have the instruments strewn all over the dash.

Bill-29 Buick, the car on the boat is something different I think, although I don't know what it is.

Leif, if you can find a copy of the Crestline book Studebaker Cars by James Moloney go to page 124 and you will see one of these. It is wrongly captioned as a Big Six but is in fact a Dictator. The bigger cars have 33 hood louvres and the Dictator has 26. That book has many pictures which are wrongly captioned but with a little study and comparing the various pictures it is not hard to work out which are earlier and later models. There was, I think, a lot of overlap of models, with newer styles being introduced at different time for the different lines, and there were no distinct 'year' models, the cars can only be dated approximately. As I said in an earlier post there were three distinctly differently styled versions of the GE series running from September 1927 to May 1929, each only in production a few months. I have a Third series GE sedan on wire wheels which must have been built in late 1928 as it was registered new in New Zealand in March 1929. The new 1929 GL series cars began production in June 1929. Total output for all three GE series was less than 50,000 and only a very small percentage (maybe 2-3%?) of those would have been open touring models. As we have found when opening up spare engines during a rebuild there are also internal differences on what look to be identical engines. Not only that a gearbox change also required a change of driveshaft as the splines were different. Fortunately we had enough spare bits.

The Subaru 360 doesn't really look that much like a DKW; it is much smaller for starters - it weighs about half what the DKW does and its engine is less than half the size. And it has its engine, which by the way was air-cooled where the DKW was water cooled, is at the back of the car. Not a lot of copying there.

The engine used in the MGA and MGB was the BMC B Series, which was also used in many other BMC products. The J was the designation of a line of commercial vans.

Changed my mind after a better look. It has 26 hood louvres so it is a second series GE Dictator probably built later in 1928. There were three different series of GE Dictators built from September 1927 to about the end of 1928 with quite significant styling changes. Probably quite a rare model even when new because there were so many variants.

1928 Studebaker, a Commander I think.

And it took some makes, for example Stutz, until the early 1920s to go LHD.

The thing with wooden artillery wheels is that they can be rebuilt with new wooden spokes and felloes where needed but the original iron ware from the old wheels is required to complete them, which is where the value, however small, in old rotten wheels lies. I suspect that Model T wheels will always have some value as there are plenty of other T parts available to rebuild the cars and as time goes by maybe more will go back on the road? But I guess that opens another can of worms as there may come a time when nobody is interested any more or the oldest cars will be legislated off the roads.