wayne sheldon
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Posts posted by wayne sheldon
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I believe that is one of the "Duplex" series of Studebakers. Well in known in Studebaker circles, they were in effect factory offered "California" top cars. They came in both roadster and phaeton styles, in basically all model lines from about 1925 into 1927. It was a short lived thing as by 1927, sedans and coupes were taking over as the most purchased model automobiles, and an "open/closed crossover" style quickly became a waste. The duplex phaetons were much more common than the roadsters. I have personally seen at least a dozen of the phaetons, and known four or five owners of them, while I have only seen maybe three of the duplex roadsters up close (none owned by good friends).
Buick also offered a similar series of cars about the same timeframe. Removeable fixed top roadsters and touring cars, in Buick's case didn't stand out much differently than the typical roadsters and touring cars.
Except for the colors, it looks like a fairly nice car.
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16 minutes ago, Pquinn said:
Do you think it could still be usable to a collector with the modifications that were made?
Difficult to know. It appears really rusty from sitting outside for probably decades. However, a couple of the best model T engines I have used in my restorations have been the rustiest worst looking ones when I got them. Took them apart and inside they were like fresh rebuilt. On the other hand, the worst model T engine I ever rebuilt and used was one that ran as a power supply for who knows how long! Everything inside was the most worn out I ever saw! I cannot imagine how bad it must have sounded as loose as all the rod and main bearings were. The cast iron timing gears were worn down literally razor sharp! That one cost me more dollars than any other model T engine I ever restored. But it did in fact make a great engine in my model T which I drove a lot for many years.
As for the modifications? They probably did not hurt anything. The belt pulley addition may simply unbolt and come off trouble free? Those parts themselves may even be worth a few dollars to the model T crowd. They often collect anything connected to model T history.
The sellable value of the engine can vary a lot. Where it is located can make a big difference, due to transportation costs. The value seriously could be anywhere from five dollars to maybe five hundred if it is in really nice condition inside? I would guess likely between two to a bit over three hundred guessing from the outside.
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1926 or 1927 model T Ford engine. The "box" on the top of the engine is the coil box, 1926/'27 style only. They had four coils, one for each cylinder (model Ts were famous for their low voltage timer and four coils ignition system!).
Looking at the back of the engine block. there are two bolts between the "hogshead" transmission cover and the engine block. Those bolts were added late in calendar 1925 for the 1926 model cars to strengthen the engine/transmission unit. Earlier model Ts (1909 through 1925 models) did not have those two bolts.
The engine was modified for use as a stationary power supply. That is what the big flat-belt pulley wheel is for on the back end of it. That would have been done after the car had outlived its usefulness as an automobile, or maybe been wrecked somehow.
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Charles Montier was a Ford dealer in France following the first world war (I don't recall offhand exactly when he began dealing in Fords?). Along with the business of importing standard model Ts, Montier enjoyed racing, and used racing to publicize his product. That he built his own overhead valve heads for the model T engine is a known fact! I am not an expert on them, but this does look like pictures I have seen before.
He built some number of special racing cars, keeping and racing several of them himself, and selling others which were raced all over Europe, England, and various colonies.
There are about a handful of real Montier Ford racing cars surviving today. One is owned by a fellow in Australia that has frequented the MTFCA forum off and on for years! A few years ago, he wrote a book about Charles Montier and his racing Fords! I highly recommend that book!
Among other places, it can be found on Amazon, link:
(I am not endorsing Amazon, but they do have a nice presentation about the book)
https://www.amazon.com/Charles-Montier-French-racing-Fords/dp/B0B6L3Q5TW
Charles Montier began racing Fords in the model T era, and continued into the early V8 era 1930s
I do not know this car personally, and cannot verify its provenance. But it looks pretty right in the photos from the pictures of other Montier racing Fords I have seen.
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On 1/16/2024 at 7:20 AM, Leif in Calif said:
VERY nice example of a an important car you rarely see today. Take it to the Cars and Coffee and leave it idling with the hood open...people love that exposed valve gear!
Leif, So right you are! Most people do not realize that the 490 Chevrolet was the model at which Chevrolet truly became a serious competitor to Ford's domination of the low price market. It was also one of the first car models which one could buy a sedan for the same price as a touring car, therefore speeding up the enclosed car's becoming more popular than open cars for most buyers.
Sadly, today, there aren't a lot of nicely restored 490 Chevrolet cars to be seen. They don't have the club support or parts availability that the Fords have, and that hurts their popularity.
This is a very nice example (with a few things not quite correct?), and deserves a good home that will care for and drive it often! (Price might be a bit high? Although one could not restore another car for that amount!)
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The shop IS the pot of gold!
(Know what you have.)
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Difficult to say. Does it look like anything is missing from the inside/backside of the wheel? Most similar style and size wire wheels have a mounting plate back there that would have the lug bolts pattern in it. It is possible that these may have been held on by a single "spin on" hub cap from the outside. But to me they don't look quite right for that type of hub.
Is it possible the wheels were never sold universal replacements that needed to have the appropriate fitting mounting plate welded in?
Some good pictures of the backside might help.
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And John E G comes through again! Fantastic link to a wonderful Locomobile thread I had not seen before.
1 hour ago, Henry Holt said:I think it maybe aircraft.
Thank you
Henry
That thought did cross my mind when I first looked at the pictures. But it quickly left when I looked closer. While the simple "all business" look of the Locomobile's gauges does have a 1930s into 1950s aircraft look to them? Aircraft do not measure speed or distance in "miles" per se. "Speed" may be measured as "wind speed"? But there is no mechanical connection to the ground to measure actual speed or distance.
The other key clue is in the name. Warner Auto Meters was one of dozens of companies making speedometers for automobiles in the early couple decades of the automobile. Warner Auto Meters was in fact one of the highest quality and fancy designs companies in those earlier years. Stewart was another business, and expanding. I had to google for the year the two businesses were merged, it was 1912. I knew they continued to do business under both (and other) names for quite some time. Hence, speedometers were manufactured and sold under both the Warner and Stewart names into the early to mid 1920s. During the 1920s, some speedometers were sold under the combined name of "Stewart Warner". By that time, the "Auto Meters" was largely dropped from the faces of speedometers and odometers.
Also interesting to note. In the earlier days of automobiles, odometers and speedometers were often sold singly and separately. That in part was due to the high cost of the devices, and the fact that most automobile owners did not travel very far. Speed limits were low, and some cities strictly enforced things like 8 1/2 miles per hour! Depending on where one lived, and how far they themselves drove, one or the other might be much more valuable. If your driving was mostly in town? You might really need that speedometer to make certain you did not exceed that last half a mile per hour speed! (SERIOUSLY!) On the other hand, if one drove out away from the town, given the terrible maps available in those days, you might really need the odometer more to keep track of how far you had gone, and whether it was time to oil the shackles or valves now? Every car's "owner's manual" had a list of things and how often one should oil them.
Warner Auto Meter often sold high end units that were in fact two separate meters mounted together.
So much stuff that to me makes automobile history so fascinating!
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Oh yeah. Like the Davis for sale (way too high price!) in the "Not Mine For Sale" section? This car just oozes the roaring '20s!
Anyone know what the car is? Although, I am pretty sure I have seen this photo before, I cannot remember if the car was identified or not.
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Great story! I enjoyed reading it.
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My opinion. Much better to have a genuine eight cylinder convertible sedan than a similar fake twelve cylinder convertible sedan.
It is also better to have a genuine sedan than a fake roadster.
That said, a chassis is just a chassis. Better to create something marginally impressive and fun than send the chassis off for scrap.
That said, I have been a long time fan of speedsters, I personally restored and extensively drove five model T speedsters over my years! There are great fun! Mine I made a serious effort to keep them as era correct as I could. Literally thousands of speedsters, model Ts and hundreds of other makes, were built during the speedster era. But the speedster era ended in the late 1920s. Custom roadsters of the 1930s are very different from what the speedsters in the speedster era were. And the custom roadsters of the 1930s were built in relatively small numbers.
I can very much appreciate a properly done custom roadster in the 1930s style. But building an earlier style speedster out of a later chassis never looks good.
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Don't give up! It is a very unusual piece, and may take a bit for someone who would recognize it to see it. Warner Auto Meters were a fairly early and high end type of speedometer, used by several expensive automobiles. I do not recognize this one, and really cannot be much help this time.
I doubt it is very valuable in a dollars sense, but I could be wrong there. And condition, especially internally, is very important to value. They tend to be fragile (pot metal inside most such things). So best to not mess with it.
Good luck! I hope it finds its way onto the right sort of car.
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Single port exhaust I think makes it 1927 or earlier. Looks like a rocker arm cover with it, but I am not sure when those began?
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Before most of the timeframe of this discussion? In the late 1910s, and throughout the 1920s, it was common for some automobile dealers to affix small brass plates to the interior of cars they sold. They were usually nicely made (by modern standards), and about one inch tall by three to four inches wide. Similar in style to engine or serial number tags, they would show the dealership's name and cars they represented, and maybe the dealership's address or just the city and/or state they were in. A few dealers even put serial numbers on such plates to track (or brag about?) their sales.
Ford dealers did this a lot through the model T era, and still to a lesser extent during the Model A years. I have personally seen a dozen or more from Chevrolet dealers also. Other marques to a lesser extent, however I recall seeing ones for Buick, Reo, Cadillac, and Studebaker a few times.
The MTFCA forum used to discuss these fairly often. I have personally seen probably at least fifty of the things myself, however, I have only had a couple, and they went on cars when I sold them.
Jay-In Northern California, is a well known collector of model T Ford accessories, and a good friend. A quick google search found a thread he posted about ten years ago. I highly recommend you check in on it if you are interested. A small portion of his dash plaques, as well as a few from other forum members are pictured there. However, be forewarned, due to the age of that forum thread, it is not currently considered "secure". It should be fine, I personally search through their archives often, and have not had any issues from it.
The link;
http://www.mtfca.com/discus/messages/411944/457626.html?1420073941
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Neat! Really sad if they do scrap it.
It looks like they went out of their way to make the tractor really heavy to press fresh asphalt. Later ones had heavy steel hollow drums that would be filled with water to add weight for pressing asphalt, and then emptied to make handling and moving the machine easier.
Just a guess on my part (perhaps an "educated guess"?). That "road roller" was likely built between the late 1920s to maybe as late as 1950.
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5 hours ago, Matt Harwood said:
The yellow one and its mate are 30-31 Ford Model A.
I believe Matt, that those two model A wheels are 1928/'29 model.
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Grimy gave the most obvious and common answer. (Thank you G!)
Beyond that, there were a few oddities out there. I wish I could recall what it was? It was years ago. I was visiting a friend's shop that had a wonderful collection of antique automobiles, and they were working on some unusual car. I can't remember what it was. But what caught my attention was the odd setup in that the cylinders were deep, with so-called "L" head side valves down-set on the side of the block. The surface of the removeable head was almost perfectly flat, but did of course have a water jacket above. The piston travel did not go to the top of the cylinder, couldn't, not with the valves on one side set about an inch below the top. The combustion zone was all in the cylinder and over the valves, not recessed in the head. What caught my attention was poking in from the side, just above the top of the piston travel, was the business end of the spark plug. The plug would need to be removed, or at least backed partway back to pull the piston out the top (which if I recall correctly they were just working on the valves and not needing to pull the pistons out?).
I have seen several other antique automobiles that had deeper cylinders that the piston did not travel clear to the top, and had flat surface heads. Studebaker standard sixes of the 1920s and four cylinder Chevrolets with overhead valves in the 1920s immediately come to mind. However both of those still had the spark plugs in the head, not in the block.
I meant to include a final comment, that there were a lot of unusual automobiles throughout the history of the automobile! And oddities are out there. I have a clear image in my head of that one engine, sitting there, head off, and the end of the spark plug poking in from the outside. I would imagine there must have been others?
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Wow! Some wonderful photos there John E G! Thank you for finding and sharing them.
The model T is interesting to me. If I recall correctly, there was a Ford assembly plant in either Brazil or Argentina (I forget which?) in the mid to late 1920s. If I recall correctly, that model T may very well have been from that assembly plant? It is clearly a 1926 or 1927 so-called "improved model T" Ford. Compared to the USA assembly cars, that appears to be a fairly early 1926 model based upon the fender mounted headlamps (no cross bar between the fenders which appeared early/mid 1926 model year on USA cars). However, if the car was assembled in Brazil (or Argentina?), the timelines for that change may have been different. The T also has nickel plated radiator shell and headlamp rims which became optional on open model Ts for 1926.
They were quite the modern city at that time!
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7 hours ago, hyeline@aol.com said:
Vaughn Vartanian 818-886-9900 Hyeline@aol.com
I don't have any, or I would have phoned.
No promises. And I don't know how or why? But the past couple months a couple different regular posters on the model T Club forum have advertised and sold several Bermuda bells, by a few different manufacturers, most were real vintage ones. Most were marked "Sold" within a day or two. Whether there will be more or not? I do not know. But it may be worth keeping an eye on the MTFCA forum site for awhile?
Link to parts for sale and wanted;
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The last new center-door sedans were sold as 1923 models, but most were left over 1922 production. The later two-door and four-door sedans began production late in calendar 1922.
The "L" shaped door handles were used about late 1920 onward, but could have been changed at some point. The car and wheels do all appear to be 1919 or later, with the starter/generator standard "electrics" package that began and became standard on enclosed body Fords in 1919.
Due to the reflections on the windows? I can't tell for certain, but it does not appear to have the side window latches used the last slightly over a year of production (they were used inside to hold the side windows in their up or down positions).
With all the minor variations, the car is most likely a late 1920 to early 1922.
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7 hours ago, Peter J.Heizmann said:
Sorry for the long winded high-jacking.
However, interesting and educational!
5 hours ago, Pfeil said:Aren't cylinder heads supposed to have spark plugs and not blocks?????????
Technically correct! Not always, but usually.
Jack B, A great question! Something I have noticed all too often myself is engines ruined by being left out too long with spark plugs removed. I have often wondered "why" myself. Generally, I would think that the old spark plugs probably wouldn't have been worth the trouble to remove them. And if someone was like me? They probably already have enough used plugs to not need any more.
However, one thing that crossed my mind awhile back, was that maybe someone had put new plugs in the struggling tired engine hoping for a miracle cure before they removed the worn out engine. The new plugs couldn't make the nearly dead engine any better so they might pull the nearly new plugs and not bother putting old ones back in.
Just a thought on my part? But for all the times I have seen it, there must be other explanations?
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Thank you Walt G! Nice to know I am not the only seriously crazy one here.
I see cars like this and inside my head starts playing popular music from the roaring '20s! I just love it. I have extremely eclectic interests in music, listen to almost anything from around the world (except for most heavy metal and rap). 1920s popular and jazz is my very close second to only the great classical music, symphonies, opera, and all that surrounded the music of that genre.
Frankly, if I had more money than I knew what to do with? I would probably be that person out there that would pay the price just because I like it so much!
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Well I am certainly no expert when it comes to Lincolns. However I have been around a lot of the model L Lincolns over the years, and I am fairly certain that parade phaeton is a late model L Lincoln. Not to disparage the Dodge 8 in any way! It is a fine automobile with great lines and what I hear about them that straight 8 is a marvelous automobile!
Although the look is similar, too many of the lines don't match. The curve and sweep of the fenders is a big one! The front of the fenders is quite different also. Bumpers (could have been an option or export variation?), windshield stanchions and frame are different, as is the belt moldings on the doors.
The parade car with steel disc wheels is unusual for Lincoln, but they were an option! A very good friend had an earlier model L Lincoln that originally had the optional disc wheels on it, and he had the literature to prove it!
Another issue with the photograph. I am not myself familiar with the people in the car, but I doubt the speculation that the photo was taken in 1928. I don't recall offhand when Lincoln went to the later style radiator shell like this car has, but I am fairly sure it was later than 1928. My first reaction upon first seeing this photo was that the car was likely a 1930 Lincoln.
If somebody can pin it down more precisely? I would love to read it.
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I love the style and look of this car! Quite a few better known companies offered bobbed fenders with step plates from late brass era into the mid 1920s. Years ago I seriously considered buying a 1926ish Kissel convertible coupe with a rumble seat that the short running boards didn't connect to the front fenders. I often wonder what ever became of that car, I really liked it! Early Jewetts offered that option on their touring cars, and a good friend has a 1921ish Chandler sport touring with the step plates instead of running boards. The same friend also has an originally custom built 1915 Biddle with no doors or running boards and step plates on the side of the body to climb in! THAT car is a whole another lot of WOW factor!
I have over the years seen quite a few cars with the close short front fenders and either no or very short running boards, both open and enclosed body styles.
To me they simply ooze the "Roaring '20s"!
All that said, I doubt that feature will add more than a couple thousand dollars to an otherwise ten to twelve thousand dollar car. But, who knows? The right person with more money than they know what to do with might be out there somewhere? Seriously though. Not many people with that kind of money want an oddball car like this. Most of those people would rather spend ten times that much for a high end Packard or bottom-feeder Duesenberg.
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Possibly the Ultimate Model T Speedster
in "Not Mine" Automobiles For Sale
Posted
Thank you motoringicons,
I saw the thread title, "possibly the ultimate model T speedster" and immediately thought "oh great, I wonder what kind of pile of junk someone put together this time?" Seen too many of them. But I clicked in and scrolled down to the photos and---- what a pleasant surprise! I knew in an instant what it was.