Automotive American – Classic Vintage & Modern
Tag: Model A Ford
I’ve been meaning to apply the legroom fix described in the service bulletin above. Unfortunately someone beat me to it! Ah well did some trim tidying whilst I was in there.
Really interesting celebrity gallery from the MAFCA website
Model A’s were even popular with celebrities. The very first Model A off the line was given by Henry Ford to his good friend Thomas Edison. That car is currently in the MAFFI museum in Hickory Corners, MI.
Mr. Rogers, Television Personality
His 1928 Sport Coupe was featured on one of his television shows in the 1970s.
FDR – Governor of New York, 1929-1933
Before he was elected President, Roosevelt was photographed in many Model A Fords. This photo came from the FDR archives.
Doris Day – Actress
Doris was given this 1930 De Luxe Roadster by a fan in the 1980s and had it restored. She was often seen driving around Carmel California. Doris passed in 2019 and the car was auctioned off.
Andy Griffith
With his collection of antique automobiles at home in Toluca Lake, California
Plenty more on the MACFA page
Time to remove the Evapo-Rust and clean out the ultrasonic cleaner after cleaning the Model B transmission parts
Sludge and residue in the bottom of the ultrasonic cleaner
Ever since one of the bonnet/hood clips came adrift from the radiator it’s been impossible have both sides open at once. To that end a black hood prop kit was purchased from O’Neill’s
The kit is of good quality with all the hardware required for a quick installation and has options for wide or narrow applications. For the 1929 Model A utilises the narrow option
The cross bar attaches to the radiator support rods
A quick measurement to ensure the bar is level
The support arms are bolted to the end of the cross bar, as mentioned above these are the shorter arms for the narrow application. As you can see the edge of the hood sits in the coated part of the arm.
Now fitted the kit gives the option of having both sides open in a tidy and safe manner. One thing to remember, be sure to fold the support arms before closing the hood.
As you can see the caps above were still in a pretty rusty state and this was after some soaking in paraffin.
So onto the next stage which involved the double team of Evapo-Rust and the Ultrasonic Cleaner
And as you can see after about a day just soaking in the Evapo-Rust and then a few hours in the Ultrasonic cleaner the results are very pleasing.
The mount as you can see is in similar condition and is currently residing in the paraffin bucket and is destined for the Ultrasonic/Evapo-Rust combo if it it will fit!
Took the brake drum over to a friends for some investigation
Drum inspected and duly repaired and ready to test on the car
Previous post here
1930 FORD MODEL A HOT ROD
Hot rod fans of all ages, but particularly those who grew up in the 1940s and 50s will relish this authentic Ford highboy rumble seat roadster, stripped of its fenders and carrying a rare Miller-design cylinder head. It is unrestored, but complete with such delicious period extras as Guide headlights, 1935 Ford 6.00:16″ wheels and special aftermarket three-door hood panels.
The basic 200 cubic inch displacement engine, built by Ford in April, 1930, is equipped with a high performance rocker arm head designed by famed racing car builder Harry A. Miller’s engineer, Leo W. Goossen. The head was produced by the Miller-Schofield Company then by the Cragar Company. This rare piece alone is worth the purchase.
Miller conceived the cylinder head in 1928 when the Ford Model A first came on the market and shortly before he sold his racing car and engine business to Schofield Inc. of America, but Schofield produced it only briefly. The design is a typical overhead valve conversion, similar to the Two-Port Riley and the Rutherford, using forged steel rocker arms to actuate the valves. The conversion more than doubled the original horsepower from 40 to about 90 HP at 3,200 RPM, particularly with the use of two Ford Chandler-Grove carburetors as in this installation, which is on a slightly later Model B block with pressure oiling. The original compression ratio was 5.75:1, but with the availability of better gasoline that could be upped to 7.5 or 8:1. The engine also has finned aluminum side plates and a mechanical fuel pump.
The head provides two oversize intake valves and four exhausts. The original owner, Robert Rein, installed with it better ignition and a lightened flywheel. With aluminum pistons and a re-ground camshaft, the car would be capable of more than 110 miles an hour on a smooth course. At an original sale price of $82.50, it was a bargain, even in the Depression-ravaged thirties.
Unlike some other Model A conversions, Goossen’s design produces a deep, powerful exhaust note, not unlike that of the famous four-cylinder Offenhauser racing engine.
Schofield failed in December, 1930, when a director, Gilbert Beesemyer, admitted to embezzling more than $8 million from the Guarantee Building & Loan Co. he headed in Los Angeles. Harlan Fengler, the Indianapolis driver (1923-24) and later racing official, bought most of the designs and equipment at Schofield’s bankruptcy sale and continued production of the Miller-Schofield equipment under the name Cragar. The original Miller-Schofield heads are extremely rare since they were only produced between January and December, 1930, when Schofield declared bankruptcy. The later Cragar version is vertical on the left side, whereas the Miller-Schofield head is slanted inwards.
There is a great personal story about this particular hot rod. In 1953, shortly after Edward, the present owner bought the car his wife, Gloria, had a hot 1949 Olds 88 convertible, and did not really like the old Ford. She challenged him to a race. The bet: if he lost he had to sell the hot rod. The two lined up on route 83 just outside Oak Brook, Illinois. He won, so he has had the car in his stable for more than half a century.
Such hot rods, based on the popular Ford roadster body and chassis, have become highly- sought-after items. Although there are many reproductions using fiberglass bodies, the original steel- bodied vehicles with legitimate 1930s and 1940s provenance have mostly been snapped up by collectors. To find such a sound, unrestored original is indeed a worthy prize.
Harry Miller was an artist. His preferred medium was race cars—complete race cars built from the wheels up. They cost upwards of $15,000 (almost a quarter-million dollars, adjusted for inflation) and spent most of the 1920s dominating America’s tracks. Unlike such contemporaries as the Chevrolet Brothers, Miller largely kept out of the speed-parts business. He briefly produced a cylinder head for the Ford Model T, but didn’t pursue that market further, supposedly saying “I’m not going to make any more of those heads for the Ford. Those Ford guys don’t have any money anyway!”
In 1929, though, Miller sold his business and retired mere weeks before the beginning of the Great Depression. Unable to stay away, he came back in 1930. Thanks to the terrible economy, however, he had to produce products far less exclusive than his famous racers of the previous decade. One of the things he marketed in conjunction with financial partner George Schofield was an overhead-valve conversion for the Ford Model A. The cylinder head had been sketched up by longtime Miller collaborator Leo Goossen in 1928, shortly after Ford began Model A production.
An overhead-valve (or valve-in-head, as they were often called at the time) design, the Miller head moved both intake and exhaust valves out of the engine block and into the head where the air flow would be freer and more direct to the combustion chambers. The port arrangement was identical to the original Ford, which allowed the stock intake and exhaust manifolds to be used if the buyer desired. The distributor hole was in the same spot as well.
Miller only produced this head very briefly, although Cragar (yes, that Cragar) took over the design and continued it for several more years. Original Miller-Schofield heads like this are a rare find and they still add a lot of pep to a Model A.
All of that is perhaps a long way of saying that a head this special deserves a build to suit. Unfortunately, that’s less common than you’d think. A lot of Model A and T “speedsters” are really just some seats strapped to a stock frame and it seems like when you see OHV conversions for these engines, they’re often on stock-looking closed-cab pickups. All of that is fine and dandy, but it’s not for me.
It’s the weekend again and back to the mirror conundrum.
I worked out the grub screw thread using a thread gauge and ordered some shorter screws. The originals are 6mm x 6.5mm. So decided to try 6mm x 6mm and 6mm x 5mm. However upon trying both options the door still wouldn’t clear the mirror.
So back to the bracket and see how we go
As can be seen above the screws are proud and causing the issue
So the best option appeared to be to grind one of the original screws down to a correct level as it appears 6mm x 5mm are about the shortest available. To make things easier the screw was inserted into a nut and locked with another screw to allow an easier grinding operation.
Once the grinding was done and the threads cleaned up it was time to fit them to the bracket.
This now allowed the screws to be tightened with the right clearance to allow the door to shut.
Next step is to fit the arm and once again check the door for closure
As you can see there is a bit of paint damage from where a mirror was previously fitted, this will be touched in when the weather warms up a bit.
The fit was good, so the mirror head was attached and initially adjusted
Looks pretty good with the two mirrors and will help safety wise.
No such thing as an easy job!
It doesn’t happen every day, but sometimes you just fall into something really, really good. That’s how it was with me when I was researching an upcoming article on pre-muscle speed parts and my friend Kevin Carlson told me about the existence of an exceedingly scarce original Roof overhead-valve conversion for Ford Model A’s. And it’s what happened to Brandon Fish of South Kingstown, Rhode Island, when he answered a Worcester, Massachusetts, classified ad for a couple of Winfield SR carburetors, a homemade intake and what turned out to be that rare Roof OHV.
“I drove up, and it was a blizzard,” Brandon remembers. “It took me two and a half hours to go maybe 70 miles.”
And, truth be told, when Brandon saw the OHV conversion, he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at, but the price for the assortment of parts was too good to pass up. “I knew what the carburetors were worth, so I figured I couldn’t go wrong, and when I saw it [the OHV conversion], it was clean. It was a raced head, back in the day, because the water pump—the fan—was cut off, so it had external cooling. There was no scale. I’d say it was maybe used minimally. Minimally. It was mint.”
Brandon had been very close to missing out on the historic purchase because, like himself, a lot of other hot rodders had noticed the listing—planning, building and bench racing is what we do during the long winters up here in the frozen North. “They all had seen it,” Brandon says of some of his comrades, “and they laughed because they all tried to get it that same night. It was first-come, first-served.”
But, while Brandon had been considering an overhead-valve conversion for the engine in his Model A he was reworking for the 2014 Race of Gentlemen, a Roof hadn’t been on his radar. “We’ve done The Race of Gentlemen for two years now, and you don’t like to keep the same car … I had pretty much a stock B motor in my coupe. It was nothing flashy, but it was kind of a hopped-up B motor,” Brandon explains. “I was going to go overhead valve… I was leaning more toward a Riley.”
It took several months and some conversations with Charlie Yapp, of the banger-focused Secrets of Speed Society and Scalded Dog Speed Parts, before Brandon changed his plans to include the Roof. Charlie “…was the only person I knew who was knowledgeable,” says Brandon. After their chats, Brandon was hooked: “I thought, ‘Oh, I gotta build this, just to have this huge piece of history’
Image from the Roof family collection, shared by Jim Roof and the Secrets of Speed Society.
What, exactly makes the Roof head so special? Roof patented an OHV conversion for the Model T in 1919, and according to Charlie Yapp, while “Morton & Brett was the first speed parts company to advertise an overhead conversion for Model A Fords … Roof, of Anderson, Indiana, was the first to have actual product and 101-MPH race results for his promotions.”
With a four-cylinder L-head engine displacing 200.5 cubic inches and rated at 40 hp, a stock Ford Model A engine could turn between 60 and 70 MPH, given enough smooth surface to travel over, but Roof was claiming that his “Cyclone” OHV conversion could increase this figure by around 34 percent.
Charlie explains, however, that, while almost any OHV conversion would improve the airflow and increase the horsepower of a Model A engine, the original Roof castings would be considered rough by the standards of today, and the 101 MPH claim was likely possible only because of “having a longer run than the other guy.”
Nevertheless, along with the premium componentry—Winfield carburetion, Packard sparking, etc—that accompanied the Roof Cyclone, its F-head, two-port architecture utilizing 2-inch intake valves, resulted in a smoother, more powerful engine not unlike those then distinguishing themselves in professional racing automobiles.
But their enhancement to four-banger performance isn’t what makes them so desirable, especially when they are compared to the more powerful Riley, Cragar and Miller conversions that would soon become available. It’s that the Roofs were the first and that they are rare—”rarer than hen’s teeth” was a phrase I encountered a lot when talking with people about them.
Charlie doesn’t have any definitive production records, but “I’m pretty sure,” he asserts, “that only about 10 of these heads still exist, and only four or five are in a condition to run”—a fact that makes Brandon Fish’s find even more exceptional.
