1931 Model A Ford

1931 Model A Ford 2-door sedan and Cabriolet coupe, click picture to enlarge.

How many of you people still driving today remember being able to adjust the "spark advance" from the steering column? That's like setting the ignition points closer or wider even while you're driving down the road in order to get more power or to save gas. Well, we did that on these old Model A cars and it was just as normal as mashing the gas pedal to go faster is to us today. As I have said before the Model A was the car that my generation grew up with so it is very familiar to many of us. It was said about the old Model A that if you had a screwdriver and a pair of pliers and a roll of baling wire and just a little bit of mechanical aptitude that you fix about anything that might go wrong with it. That was more true than it was not true.

The Model A was,in effect, the transition from the very successful older Model T Fords with the old hand cranked starting where you put a crank handle that was shaped like a bent steel rod that had two bends in it, and a pin through the end of it that engaed with a notch in a pulley on the end of the crankshaft. When the handle was turned by hand it turned the motor enough to get it started. This way of cranking the old Model T was nicknamed as the "arm breaker" because if you did not remove the crank handle quickly as the engine fired up the handle would be engaged with the engine and would fly around and hit you if you still had hold of it. As I said the Model A was a transition from the Model T to the newer, more powerful V-8 cars that came along later. The Model A had a 200.5 cid, 40 hp four cylinder engine and a 3 speed floor mounted gearshift. It had expanding shoe and drum brakes on all four wheels and safety glass in the windows which was the first time that safety glass was used in cars. Some style changes in the 1931 Model A included a new radiator shell and running boards with single piece splash aprons. The two door sedan shown here was the most popular of the model A's and the Cabriolet Coupe was next to it. The sedan sold for $490 and the voupe for $430.

1929 Model A Ford Town Sedan

1929 Model A Ford Town Sedan, click picture to enlarge.

Since this is my blog about old cars I feel like I have the liberty to tell some personal experience stories here if I want to now and then. The Model A was the car that my generation grew up with so we can spin a many a yarn about what all we did with them. I remember one time that a friend of mine and I had taken a Model A way back into the Everglades of Florida for a camping trip for a few days. We left the car in a good place and then went on foot for a few more miles and stayed there in the Everglades for maybe a week before returning to the car to go back home to Belle Glade, Florida where we both lived. We had enjoyed a good time and was happy to get back to the car and go home. But.....the car wouldn't start!!!

Back then it was usually easy to push one of those cars by hand and it it would crank pretty easy. Not this time. We pushed and we pushed until we turned blue in the face but that Model A would not start. Finally, we pushed that car up into a man's yard and asked him if we could leave it there for a day or two so we could hitch hike on back home and get a big truck and come back after the car. When we got back with truck and loaded the Model A into the truck and brought it back home we went over that car with a fine toothed comb until we found what the trouble was and we fixed it. What was wrong? We fixed that car by putting a new rotor button in the distributor. For a 3 cent rotor button we had spent a whole day in pushing that car and another two days to go home, get the truck and come back after it. For 3 cents.

There was another unusual thing about a Model A that happened too. Several years later, in the late 1940's or 1950's there was a friend of ours that lived close by and his dad had bought the boy a Model A replica because they were a fashionable fad at the time. It was a kit car that needed to be assembled. The problem was that the day the kit arrived at the boy's house his family was moving from Florida to Ohio because his dad was being transferred on his job. Well, to finish the story quickly, the boy sold that kit car to me and another friend for $10. We put that car together and drove it all over South Florida for several more years after that.

!929 was the second year of production for the Model A and there were several body styles introduced that year including the town sedan shown here, the convertible Cabriolet, the two door coupe and three or four different four door sedans. The Model A had a 200 cid, 40 hp four cylinder engine and a 103.5 inch wheelbase. The one shown in this picture had a Murray body, we had a Murray two door coupe at one time, and was priced new at $840. This car has been driven 6,300 miles since it was fully restored in 1985.

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