Taylormade

My dad always had the dealership paint the visible outer rim red on his Buick’s all through the fifties. He was a GM exec and got a new Buick every year from 1954 to 1959. Then he got high enough to get a Cadillac every year as his company car. I vividly remember riding around town in the monster 59 Caddy he drove.

Matt, I agree your roadster is a great looking car. I have always liked early thirties Chrysler Corporation styling - with the possible exception of the thin radiator shells at the turn of the decade. Even my pedestrian 32 Dodge Brothers DL sedan draws appreciative comments, and I’m often asked how much I chopped the top. Most folks are amazed when they discover it’s dead stock. It’s also hard to beat the front styling on a 32 DeSoto. Two things are preventing me from rushing to Cleveland to buy your roadster - the lack of having seventy-five large readily availible, and the color. I just can’t get past those two-tone brown paint jobs that were so popular a few decades ago. Just a personal opinion, not a dig at the car.

Were they using up surplus 32 bodies for this series. That sedan really looks like my DL, minus the different bumpers.

I still have my 1932 Dodge Brothers DL sedan that I bought in 1965. I sold it and then bought it back. Selling it was the worst move I ever made. Buying it back was the best move.

I have tried to explain the Floating Power system to Sactownog several times in the past. I must be doing a bad job, as it doesn’t seem to be getting through. This system makes it difficult to install a different transmission due to the design of the motor/transmission mounts. The car already has a non-original, later engine, so originality isn’t an issue. If you get by the mounting problem, you may find the the design of the X-frame may not give you enough room for the much longer overdrive unit. Anyway you cut it, this isn’t a drop in swap. You will have to remove the motor and trans, design and fabricate new mounts and supports, and probably have to cut on the frame. If you current;y are confused as to the difference between Floating Power and freewheeling, you need to do more research before taking on this project. It would be easier and less work to get a modern overdrive unit designed to work between the trans and the differential. They have been discussed many times on these forums.

I bought a set of bumpers for my 32 Dodge Brothers from him five years ago. He was quite a guy, a bit eccentric, but very nice. He threw in 3 hubcaps for free when we made the deal. I hope he gets some help.

If you’re using 85W-140 in your crankcase, you have a problem.

Considering the shabby interior and the amount of rust in the trunk floor, this looks like an old modified car that had seen better days before the accident. Still, a shame to see it destroyed.

While certainly not anywhere near the quality or rarity of most of the cars on this thread, my 1932 Dodge Brothers DL sedan has a rather interesting story in the "where did they go" category. In 1965, I bought this car while a sophomore at Syracuse University. The picture below is the day I purchased it. It was owned by one of the professors at the school and came out of Maryland. Back then it was just an old car, 33 years old, but even then, prewar cars were a bit unusual and it always attracted a certain amount of attention around the campus. I always thought it was a particularly nice looking car, even though the Dodge Brothers eights had a slightly longer hood. Sadly, in 1967 I was forced to sell my beloved old heap and a fellow fraternity brother, Phil Kennedy, took possession of my car. Here's a photo Phil (now Editor of the Dodge Brothers Club Magazine) took soon after he acquired it. Not bad for a mid-priced car. After college, I lost track of Phil and my old car, often wondering if it had survived, who now owned it and where it was. I bought and restored other cars, but the Dodge was always in the back of my mind. Then, while reconnecting with another fraternity brother a few years ago, Phil's name came up and the discussion came around to the old Dodge. He said Phil still owned the car! I was stunned. In, fact, it could be seen in his driveway in the then current Goggle Earth photo of Phil's house. I managed to contact Phil and discovered the car had been slumbering in his grandmother's (now his) garage since 1970. He had since purchased another very original DL and told me he wasn't up for restoring my/his car - would I be interested in buying it back! I flew to Connecticut and laid eyes on my first car after 44 years. There it was, in the garage, just waiting for me. I'm almost done restoring her and hope to have her back on the road this summer.

I grew up in Detroit. I last visited the city in 2014 for the Dodge Brothers Club Centennial Meet. I doubt if I will ever go back. I know why your wife was crying. Everything I knew and loved in the city was disintegrating or gone. Urban blight was just a few blocks away from my maternal grandfather's wonderful Tudor-styled home, built in 1927. My dad was an executive with General Motors, working his way up from claims adjuster for the old Motors Insurance Corporation to regional vice president at GMAC. When we went to look at our first house (1950) it was a gutted, collapsing shell in what had once been a nice suburban neighborhood. My fraternal grandfather was the chief engineer in the design of the Chevy Stovebolt six, and designed the Chevy assembly plant in Brazil. He was also an engineer for Gar Wood Industries (Wood became a multi-millionaire after designing the hydraulic lift for dump trucks) and worked on one of the first rear-engined city bus designed. See his house was the only bright spot as it was out in Rochester, near Meadowbrook - the old Dodge estate, and was still in a nice area. What was once a thriving, energetic city is a run-down mess, it's architecture, history and very life slowly fading away. All I could think of was the ruins of ancient Rome.

Electric cars for everybody simply asks the question - are there enough natural resources to sustain such a thing. Currently, no. Lithium supplies, energy grid output and other factors will be a problem. As it usually does, civilization will solve the problems in unexpected and sometimes disturbing ways. Travel bans, edicts making people work out of their homes, restricting households to a finite number of jobs - many such unpleasant things may be coming down the road (or whatever travel means may be in effect at the time.) I'll be long gone and won't have to worry about it. When I graduated college the big thing was flying cars and colonies on Mars and the Moon by the year 2000. Never happened. Nobody saw the coming of portable computers, social media, cell phones, flat screen TVs and the changes in social attitudes. How many science-fiction films or books predicted same-sex marriages, universal abortions and all the other social mores we take for granted these days? Every generation comes up with their own doomsday scenario. They rarely get much of it right. My grandfather always told me he was amazed that he saw Haley's Comet, the Model T, and man land on the moon in his lifetime. When he was born, there were no cars on the roads, when he died, he had two nice Pontiacs in his garage. Things change and so do we.

What type of sewing machine are you using to do the top?

Good news. I assume your engine has the screw off cover (like a large domed acorn nut) that gives access to the relief valve. Did yours have a gasket? If not, did you get any leakage around the cover when you had the higher oil pressure. My car has the same problem and I got some noticeable leakage from the cover when I first started her up.

I’m organizing my remaining parts for final assembly this Spring. My wife and I gathered everything, boxed and labeled each part down to the last nut and bolt. We are about 2/3 of the way through and should finish up this coming week. I’m worried about several parts that don’t seem to be turning up so I’m asking in advance in case anyone can help me out. I’m missing one door latch striker and one of the headlight sockets for a headlight. This is the socket that plugs into the bottom of the headlight from the outside with the flexible wire conduit attached. l’ll post photos and dimensions tomorrow. I was relieved to find most everything else was safe and sound after five years and a move to a new house.

Unfortunately it all started with American Chopper, which began as a show about a small motorcycle shop building custom rides, but quickly evolved into a soap opera with father and son screaming at each other for an hour. The network quickly took notice of the show’s popularity and determined that the viewing audience wanted angst and hyper personalities over motorcycle building. For years this conflict/aggression/soap opera approach dominated car and bike shows, and still rears it’s ugly head at times today. CCC and Bitchn’ Rides have toned down the format, but the shows still use more gimmicks than actual restoration footage. Graveyard Cars has some good restoration information, but all the cars are similar and you can only show pieces on dashboard restoration (farmed out) and installing the k-member and motor from the bottom so many times before viewers nod off. So Mark Worman makes faces and annoys everyone in the shop and we are supposed to be amused. CCC bothers me because we always get to see what Wayne gets at the big money auctions, but never see what he initially paid for the car. It’s always him going off to negotiate with the seller, then he’s putting it in his trailer. Bitchn’ Rides is strictly for the resto-mod crowd. They do really nice work after they set up their Art Morrison chassis, but the “funny” bits are not all that funny. One thing producers finally learned is that viewers wanted to see a finished car at the end of the show. The bit about having to complete a car for some show or event in record time got old and actually comical. Now they shoot footage over a period of several years, then condense it down to a show or two. That’s why you see unfinished cars from last season in the background of some shots in current shows. I’m sure Phantom Works quit shooting a long time ago. They are just using the remainder of the footage already shot. We are basically a small group of restorers, affectonados and and enthusiasts. A nut and bolt show about cars and restoration, played totally straight, would not have a large enough audience to survive. I put together a long show on the 100th anniversary Dodge Brothers Meet in Detroit a few years ago ( I make videos for a living) that contained great shots of the cars, interviews with the owners, stories of their cars and restorations, the car parade at Meadowbrook Hall and visits to historic automobile sights in Detroit. When I show it to car folks they watch with rapt attention and want a copy. When I show it to friends and family they generally nod off. There just isn’t a big enough audience to support the type of show we would all like to see.