Learned to drive on a 41 Studebaker Commander, and a 40 Buick Century. Didn’t buy a car until I was married with 2 kids, had already been in trucking for 5 years.
Bought a 52 Plymouth for $20,had to dig down to it through a snowdrift where it had sat all winter. Dropped a $1.50 junkyard battery in it, poured a little gas in the carb and started it up and drove away.
Quoting @GeorgeSanJose
“He said this isn’t true for the Model A, which is why Model A’s tend to be more commonplace as drive-'round-town cars.”That’s not why Model As are more commonplace than Model Ts. I’ve had both. The Model T is interesting, but not necessarily fun to drive. Most of them rotted away or simply wore out due to their bodies being made of sheet metal stretched over a wooden frame. It would be difficult to drive one across the country. It can be done, but only if one has a LOT of time to burn. A good cruising speed in a T is about 25 to 30 MPH. My '21 topped out at about 33. Breakdowns were a constant probability.
Now a Model A, that’s a Ford of a different color. A good one will cruise at 45 to 50, and top out about 65 on a good day, 70 downhill with a tailwind. I drove one of mine on a 1000 mile vacation trip, including a trip up one very tall mountain. No problems. Model As were largely steel, not much wood, except the Briggs and Murray bodied four door sedans. Those bodies were built by those companies. A Ford built Model A body that has sat out in the rain for decades is still a candidate for restoration or street rod production.
A Model T body will have collapsed onto itself long before then due to rotting wood. Even though there were only a little over 4Million Model As produced over a four year run, and over 15Million Model Ts over 19 years, there are far more As today than Ts on the road today.
Oh, my first car is my 1955 Hudson Hornet. I still own it. My second car was my first MGA. My fourth is my present MGA of 47 years. There was a Corvair in between #s two and four.
My first car, a 1950 Chevrolet with no high gear. An uncle sold it to me for $15. He took it as a partial trade on something. I drove it a year or two. My parents started driving it, then expected me to buy new tires so they could drive it some more. I decided I didn’t want to do that, since they had money and I did not.
I think that’s when I got the 1936 Chevrolet.
In 1925, my dad worked in Chicago for a construction season His job was on a sewage system. They would dig a ditch for the large pipes, then sit the pipe in it. He had a level he would sit on top of the pipe. If the needle was within the marks, they would cover it up and work on the next one. If not, they had to lift it up and move dirt around until it was correct.
It was a high income development. I assume today it is in a gunfire zone.
The day before Christmas the boss said it is getting too cold to dig, so here’s your money, go home and come back in the spring.
He had bought an old Model-T from the cook, I think he said he paid like $20. He started out, it was cold being late December, and it was an open car, no side windows, just a fabric roof over head. I have a scanned copy of a photo of him with that car.
The Lincoln highway west was open, today known as Hwy 30. Restaurants on the highway stayed open all night for the truck drivers. So, when the pain of cold became intolerable, he would stop and get hot coffee then go on.
He made it home, nearly 265 miles just as the sun was coming up. Which would mean maybe 14 hours including thaw-out times. He drove it for a year or two. In the early 50’s he still drove Model A’s until he bought a new 1951 Ford.
My dad and a friend of his youth once told us they changed the transmission on a Model-T and got it in backwards, so they drove it home many miles, backwards.
I do not know if that was possible, but I think I heard it was. I also do not know if it was this car, he never said, but it might have been.
Muchas Gracias irlandes! Yours is the oldest one so far. Yes, you can race a Model T backwards because of the design. Not sure what Henry Ford had in mind when he designed it that way!
Compare the Mosel T to other designs of that era and it’s quite advanced.
My dad and a friend of his youth once told us they changed the transmission on a Model-T and got it in backwards, so they drove it home many miles, backwards.
High gear on a Model T is 1:1 straight through the transmission so it can’t reverse direction. I think maybe they put the differential guts in backwards.
40 years ago, when I was teaching school, I had a summer job twisting wrenches for the local Ford dealer. I used to drive my Model A or Model T to work a couple of times a week. Usually the help was asked to park out back, but the owner asked me to park those cars prominently out front. One day I failed to finish a job on a customer’s car. (That’s another long story.) The service manager told me that the customer had been waiting all afternoon. HE wasn’t going to tell him his car wasn’t done. I was. So I explained the situation to the customer, and offered him a ride home. As we approached my Model T, he asked “Is THAT your car”? He was quite happy to get a ride, and told stories of how the crew of six full sized men he worked with in the 1920s would pile into a crowded Model T touring car, and drive it 28 miles CROSS COUNTRY to an oil field where they built wooden drilling derricks all day. I’ve seen pictures. There were hundreds of those wooden derricks. Then they’d pile back in and go back to town. He said there were no roads, just a rutted path to follow, streams to ford, and mud, lots of mud. About every six months the guys would chip in an buy another Model T for just under $400. They were buying them from the same Ford dealer I was working for about 50 years later. Their used ones were completely used up. Sheet metal, coming unpinned from the wooden body’s frame. They’d just push them off into a ravine, and drive away in the new car.
Quoting @the_same_mountainbike
“Compare the Mosel T to other designs of that era and it’s quite advanced.”I have made that comparison many times, and I must respectfully disagree. While the Model T's planetary transmission has been likened to a two speed automatic, it wasn't automatic at all. The transmission was shifted by a lever on the left, and foot pedals on the floor. Other cars of the era (1909 to 1927) used geared transmissions, mostly three speeds, and foot operated clutches. Those were were quite similar to today's manual transmissions. Henry Ford had to be practically dragged into the late 1920's when the Model A debuted. He didn't want change. He was satisfied with the Model T, although he did allow colors other than black toward the end of the T's long run.
What the Model T was, was cheap. It did put America on wheels, but advanced it wasn’t, unless you compare it to a horse and buggy.