Tag: Hemmings Classic Car

12 Motoring Classics From the 1950s Under $25,000 – @Hemmings

12 Motoring Classics From the 1950s Under $25,000 – @Hemmings

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The period following World War II was an amazing time of optimism and prosperity in the U.S., with industry booming and technology advancing rapidly. Meanwhile, Americans were feeling good about life in the free world and many were flush with cash thanks to the strong job market. This all meshed to create a perfect storm of consumer demand that was advancing beyond the need to obtain products that hadn’t been readily available during the war—now, people were buying to satisfy desire as much as need.

The domestic automakers were perfectly poised to satisfy that demand, coming off of war contracts that had been followed by frenzied car sales after years of halted automobile production. The war had also pushed the development of technology, and style was once again a primary criterion for car shoppers. Detroit spent the decade trying to outdo itself, yielding some of the most ornately styled and trimmed cars of all time, while also recognizing that even truck buyers thought about aesthetics. Meanwhile, European automakers were pursuing their own versions of performance and style, creating some landmark designs as the decade unfolded.

This period would shine brightly, but relatively briefly, as trends continued to evolve rapidly and the 1960s would see its own characteristic features. By the 1970s, cars of the ’50s seemed like artifacts of a long-gone era, and nostalgia for that time kicked in with substantial force, driving collectors and restorers to latch onto the remaining examples to keep the memories alive. That drive hasn’t ever fully subsided, and cars and trucks of the 1950s are still very popular with car enthusiasts and collectors, including many who hadn’t even been born when those models were new.

Yet, ’50s cars still make for an excellent enthusiast ownership experience. In many cases, parts are available, and if not, strong networks of fans and specialists are ready to help locate spares to facilitate restorations or even just to keep these models on the road. Speaking of the road, cars of this period tend to be decent drivers, as the highway system was coming online and the ability to cruise smoothly at 60-plus mph became more the norm.

We wanted to illustrate that there are models from the 1950s that are also still attainable by gathering a selection of examples that are enjoyable to own, fun to drive, and still affordable. In this case, we’re considering anything costing $25,000 or less in good, presentable, and driveable condition to be affordable—that seems to be what the market thinks, too. Ponder these examples from a fantastic period in automotive design and let us know what else you think ought to have been included

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This unrestored 1966 Dodge Charger offers a unique experience – David Conwill @Hemmings

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Plymouth folks are fond of telling you that Dodge stole every good thing Plymouth ever had. Whether that’s a fair assessment or not, it does put an interesting spin on the 1966 Dodge Charger.
In 1964, a few months before the Ford Mustang debuted, Plymouth brought out its own sporty compact. As the Mustang had its roots in the Falcon, Plymouth’s new Barracuda was based on the brand’s compact Valiant. While the Mustang used radically different bodywork from the Falcon, the Barracuda was essentially a new body style of Valiant, with a large glass fastback.
When Dodge dealers saw the success of the Barracuda, they clamored for their own sporty compact based on the Dart. In a rare act of defiance, the Chrysler board said no. Dodge would get a sporty, two-door fastback, but instead of being based on the Dart, it would use the midsize Coronet platform.

“You’re racing against something that isn’t human:” a short virtual film festival focused on all things Bonneville – Daniel Strohl @Hemmings

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Bonneville’s one of those places where, once you see it, you can’t get it out of your head. You could travel the world and not feel that you’ve ever really left home until you set foot there. You come away from the place transformed, with your perspective on horizons and scale and time absolutely demolished. You begin to reconsider what your limitations truly are.
And, it’s been said, nobody can take a bad photo at Bonneville. So it’s little surprise that documentary makers have flocked to Bonneville over the years in search of good stories and have come away with not only the stories they’re looking for, the lingering perfect-light shots they’d hoped to get, but also contemplative pieces full of prose and humanity.
There’s probably an entire film festival worth of documentaries that we could highlight in the wake of this year’s Bonneville Speed Week. So let’s do it.

One-off Holbrook of Wolverhampton-bodied 1934 Ford could best be described as modest luxury – Daniel Strohl @Hemmings

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Over the years, we’ve profiled a number of Thirties Fords coachbuilt in Europe, but we—and the rest of the world, apparently—have missed this 1934 Ford bodied by Holbrook of Wolverhampton for sale on Hemmings.com. By the time Holbrook took on this project, the Depression had already forced Ford of Britain to introduce its smaller and less expensive Model Y, making the regular full-size Ford something of a luxury. The folks at Holbrook apparently thought the rich needed to go on an austerity program too, thus the leather upholstery, sliding sunroof, and bustleback added to this right-hand-drive example. It appears to have remained in use in some sort after the war, judging from the newer flathead V-8 under the hood, and it would be interesting to fill in that intermediate history between when the car appeared at the Olympia Auto Show and when it made its way to the garage where it now sits, ready for a refurbishment or a full restoration. From the seller’s description:

This is a very special one of a kind 1934 Ford was built for the “Olympia Auto Show” stand for 1934. “Olympia” was the most prestigious of the London automobile salon events. It was custom bodied by Holbrook of Wolverhampton and has a sliding sunroof and a leather four passenger true sport sedan interior. It is RHD

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From Mustang to LTD to Mk VII, the ads that sold Ford’s Fox body – Jeff Koch @Hemmings

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Mighty men come from humble origins; oaks grow from mere acorns. Ford’s long-lasting, unit-bodied, rear-drive Fox chassis started as the Ford Fairmont and Mercury Zephyr, a pair of compact sedans (with coupe and wagon variants) that got the automaker in fighting shape for the ’80s. They arrived at a time when high performance was on no one’s mind, or at least, very few in Detroit. Instead, these models were created in the wake of the first oil crisis and arrived just in time for the 1979 sequel.
Horsepower wasn’t Ford’s focus then. But even when sheer grunt wasn’t available, Ford hyped performance: Fox’s rack-and-pinion steering, grippy Michelin TRX tires (on special suspensions, tuned for handling), and wide availability of a four-speed (and later, five-speed) manual transmission. As circumstances allowed, output improved: ever-larger power figures for both the 5.0-liter V-8 and the turbo 2.3-liter four would be advertised.
Now calling itself “America’s most popular sports car,” the 1980 Mustang is mostly trading on its rakish body and cornering excitement, both called out and implied—though the prominent fuel-mileage figures replace power ratings.

Ford Thunderbird field guide: Know your ‘Bird nicknames – Mike Austin @Hemmings

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Ford’s Thunderbird spans 11 generations and several thematic and mechanical variations. Keeping them straight, though, isn’t that hard because the collective Thunderbird enthusiast community has given each one a nickname. Yes, it’s part of the general habit we all have of delving into jargon, which acts as a conversational shorthand (which is good) but also makes it harder for newbies to understand what the heck everyone is talking about (which is bad).
Classic Bird (aka Early Bird, Little Bird, Baby Bird): 1955-’57
Thunderbird nicknames, however, are much easier than many other codewords, like the endless alphanumerics of BMW and Mercedes-Benz model generations. If, like me, you’re relatively uninformed on the full history of Ford’s personal-luxury legend, these appellations give context clues as to what each one generally looks like and what era it hails from. And with that easy entry point, you can then dive deeper into the details. So let’s take a quick tour of all 11 Thunderbird names and how they got that way.

Seeing really is believing – a Tucker did indeed race in NASCAR, and we found the photo to prove it – Jim Donnelly @Hemmings

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Joe Merola of Braddock, PA entered the Tucker in the 1951 Memorial Day race
One of the things you learn very quickly here is that there’s never any telling what the Hemmings Nation can uncover, especially on this blog. In that spirit, we present this photo, furnished by Ron Pollock of Niles, Ohio. If the name’s familiar, that’s because we recently posted a photo from Ron’s sold-out 50-year history of Sharon Speedway in northeastern Ohio, which depicted a 1961 Chevrolet bubbletop turned into an uncommonly good-looking pavement Late Model.
Ron checked in again this week. The photo above depicts what may be the only Tucker Torpedo ever used in a racing event. He used the image in another book he authored, a history of Canfield Speedway, a half-mile dirt track that operated between 1946 and 1973 at the Mahoning County Fairgrounds, outside Youngstown. Ron was trying to respond to an earlier question on the Hemmings blog about whether a Tucker had ever been raced in NASCAR. The date on the photo suggests it ran at Canfield over Memorial Day in 1951.

It sure looks like Ford had an experimental gas-turbine Model T running around in the Twenties – Daniel Strohl @Hemmings

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Don’t try to wipe your screen to clear up that blurry image above: It’s a screen-capture from a 50-plus-year-old promotional video uploaded to YouTube at a low resolution setting, so that’s about as sharp as it gets. It’s also about the only photographic evidence we’ve been able to find of a gas-turbine engine that Ford designed and experimented with in the mid-Twenties, long before other American carmakers started their own gas turbine programs.
As noted in Ford’s own 1966 promotional video on Big Red, the turbine-powered concept truck that was the predecessor to Ford’s gas-turbine engine program of the late Sixties and early Seventies, this little gas turbine engine predated Big Red by 40 years. “Since that time, Ford’s engineers have been interested in the potential of gas turbine power,” the narrator boasted, implying an unbroken thread of research and development into the engines. However, it appears Ford’s scriptwriters included the mention of the engine only to boost the company’s credentials; after a quick mention that Henry Ford and two associates built the gas turbine engine in 1925, the video switched back to the development of the 700-series gas turbines without elaborating on the earlier engine.
The gas turbine engine in the image appears to be a patent demonstration model, but we’ve yet to come across any such patent in our searches. A clearer image of the patent model would help, but we’ve yet to make any headway with Ford itself or The Henry Ford. Without much else to support the existence of the Henry Ford-developed gas turbine, we could’ve easily dismissed it as another wild Henry Ford idea or part of the accretion myth around the industrialist.

I Was There: How I got to be a part of the split-window Corvette design team @Hemmings

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Joe Feko Junior Detailer
Chevrolet Engineering Center
In the fall of 1961, I was an engineering student at General Motors Institute (now Kettering University). The school offered a cooperative education program that had me alternating between classes in Flint, Michigan, and work assignments at the Chevrolet Engineering Center in Warren, Michigan.
At Chevrolet, I worked on the drawing boards as a junior detailer. Detailing is the final step in the process of creating engineering blueprints for the manufacture of parts and components for new vehicles. Vehicle design starts in the design studios and, in those days, when a concept was finalized, the entire vehicle was drawn on large metal plates called layouts. This contained all vehicle information including all parts and sub-assemblies. Detailers took information from layouts to create individual parts drawings.
As a junior detailer, I was usually assigned to relatively easy tasks such as making drawing revisions, minor drawing corrections, and various drawing updates. Experienced detailers worked closely with the engineers and handled the more difficult and complex parts. They often made design-improvement suggestions during the detailing process. Detailers made design refinements and added the information required to make a finished engineering document. Detailing also served as a review process where parts were examined for conformance to design and manufacturing standards.

Are virtual car shows the future of automotive social life? – Daniel Strohl @Hemmings

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Last month, as stay-at-home orders proliferated and as notices of in-person show cancellations flooded email inboxes and Facebook timelines, car show organizers, museums, and clubs turned to virtual car shows – complete with judging and awards – to fill the downtime. Now, as questions about what our post-pandemic new normal start to arise, some car show organizers are beginning to envision a future in which virtual car meets become more common.
“In all honesty, desperation is part of it,” said Brad Brownell, one of the co-founders of RADwood, which hosted its own virtual car show in April. “People were looking for an outlet and this is part of it.”