Shabby tudor

D

Dave Mellor NJ

Well-known member
Few owners cared about the appearance
 

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'30-31 headlights with sealed beams on a 1929 Model A Tudor. Note the aftermarket cowl band with cowl light bracket sans cowl light. I have seen period advertisements for that "dress up" cowl band w/cowl lights for '28-29 Model A's.
Marshall
 
Even the best of our Model As was once just another tired old car ready for the scrap heap. Fortunately, some escaped that fate.
 
If you got a 'dress up' cowl band, did you need to shorten the hood? Or did you just slide the radiator forward a bit?
 
Shabby ? Look at the world it was living in, traveling on dirt & gravel roads.

I'd suspect the photo from the early 1950's with those retro fit sealed beams.

Without the fenders all busted up, not too 'shabby'.
 
I'll see if I can find that aftermarket cowl band/cowl light accessory advertisement in a back issue of "The Restorer" or in one of Flod Clymer's fractured fairy tale booklets. Maybe by tomorrow night...
M.
 
Just a piece of tin laid on the top to keep most of the weather out.Up into the early 70's there were a lot of A's parked at the mills in Newmarket.A huge portion of the workers lived within 1-1/2 miles of the mills,so they ran junk cars to work.Start it,drive it a mile,and shut it off.Just a step above walking.They didn't need their good car to do that.There were a lot of plywood roofs in those parking lots.
 
No hubcaps.

But, look at the smile on his face. This guy is happy as hell to be driving his baby.
 
He's not running hubcaps so he can let the road dirt bed in the front wheel bearings.I see the windshield has a couple of cracks,but he can still see through it,so he is OK.I am wondering what those wires are in the background.Power?? Phone?? Kind of an odd configuration.Car looks to be in a prarie setting,so could be in the midwest US or Canada.Or,could be in potato country in Maine or Canada.
 
Typically, the center clamp in the front bumper has vibrated loose and is gone. A poor design to secure it to the bumper bars: in the center where the most flex would be. Had the backing plate been longer and been furnished "ears" to hook over the bumper bars, chances are that so many of these clamps would not have fallen off. Look at photos of well-worn Model A's from the late 30's and into the 1950's and very often that center clamp is missing. How much more money would it have cost Ford to extend that backing plate this way, three cents per car? Add that to the dealer price and keep owners happy.

Following up on the nit-picking topic, I find it fascinating to look at these pictures and see the wide range of ingenuity, resourcefulness and imagination humans can come up with to make their old jalopies roadworthy and still usable. No two such survivors seem to be exactly the same, although there are some recurring commonalities. I love finding abandoned Model A and T Fords in barns, ravines and on the "back 40" and see what changes people had made to them over the years in order to squeeze a few more miles out of them or make them distinctive from the other 5,000,000 Model A's on the road. Human adaptiveness is a bottomless pool.
Marshall
 
Marshall V. Daut said:
Typically, the center clamp in the front bumper has vibrated loose and is gone. A poor design to secure it to the bumper bars: in the center where the most flex would be. Had the backing plate been longer and been furnished "ears" to hook over the bumper bars, chances are that so many of these clamps would not have fallen off. Look at photos of well-worn Model A's from the late 30's and into the 1950's and very often that center clamp is missing. How much more money would it have cost Ford to extend that backing plate this way, three cents per car? Add that to the dealer price and keep owners happy.

Following up on the nit-picking topic, I find it fascinating to look at these pictures and see the wide range of ingenuity, resourcefulness and imagination humans can come up with to make their old jalopies roadworthy and still usable. No two such survivors seem to be exactly the same, although there are some recurring commonalities. I love finding abandoned Model A and T Fords in barns, ravines and on the "back 40" and see what changes people had made to them over the years in order to squeeze a few more miles out of them or make them distinctive from the other 5,000,000 Model A's on the road. Human adaptiveness is a bottomless pool.
Marshall
Click to expand...

I agree. Don't forget that times were hard for a lot of folks. I can still recall the stories my grandparents told.
 
Same car and comments were posted on Facebook. Apparently he put a pile of miles on the old Ford!! Many people commented that they remember him delivering for years. The original picture in post #1 was also in the writeup.

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Life as a rural mail carrier would have been easier for Elmer if he'd had a right-hand drive Model A. Then he could just lean out of the passenger's window and put the mail into the mailboxes without the need to slide across the two seats to do so. 'Course, he could just drive on the wrong side of the road and put the mail into the mailboxes from the driver's side. Back in those days, country roads probably weren't traversed heavily enough to cause problems. You could see way off in a distance if a car was coming at you on the wrong side of the road. Besides, people in that farming community would have most likely been used to seeing Elmer delivering mail on the wrong side of the road.
I wonder how it all ended for Elmer and that workhorse Tudor??? Both look like they had a LOT of miles on them!
Marshall
 
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