1937 Chrysler Airflow

1937 Chrysler Airflow four door sedan, click picture to enlarge.

Chrysler had offered the Airflow series of cars before 1937 but this year was the first true Airflow produced that actually had pneumatic, and/or hydraulic, shocks and brakes. This was the 1937 Chrysler Airflow Series C-17 only. This car had a 128 inch wheelbase and a 130 hp, 323 cid 8 cylinder engine and a 3 speed manual overdive transmission. Other features included hydraulic brakes and telescoping air shocks and a hypoid gear rear axle. Some of the cosmetic changes were a more V-shaped front grill and horizontal hood louvers. There were only 4,600 of these cars produced in 1937.

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1956 Ford Thunderbird

1956 Ford Thunderbird, click picture to enlarge.

The rivalry between the Ford Thunderbird and the Chevrolet Corvette has been the strongest of any other two cars ever made for people of my generation. This is a strange feat considering that the cars are not classed the same by the manufacturers. The Corvette has always been called an American Sports Car as opposed to a European Sports Car. The Thunderbird, on the other hand, was called a personal luxury car. It was called a personal car because it was first made as a one seater that could carry two people. To compare the two cars, at first the Thunderbird outsold the Corvette in 1955 and 56 but since then the Corvette has generally outsold the "T-bird" judging by the number of each car that you see while just driving around. Performancewise the Corvette has more power and speed than the Thunderbird and the Corvette has been more of a consistant production car than the Thunderbird since the Thunderbird was stopped and restarted a few times during the production years from 1955 through 2005. Even with these factors showing the Corvette to be the better performer in many categories I still liked the Thunderbird the best, probably because I am just a strong Ford man anyway.

The 1956 Thunderbird had an optional 312 cid engine but the standard engine was the 292 cid V-8 with a Ford-O-Matic transmission. The open top convertible, by far the most popular model, came with two tops, a removable hardtop and the conventionl cloth top. The hard top had a round port hole window on both sides of the rear of the top that made it very appealing to the public. The car had a 12 volt ignition system that was a change from the six volt systems of the 1955 series.

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Sincerely,
Maynard Wright, Georgia Boy
mrw-ss@hughesnet

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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