My Experiences With
Model A Fords

Our First Model A (continued)

Now that we had our Model A home, the next question was: what in the heck are we going to do with this thing. I know when I looked at it, I just saw a hopeless corpse of a car that was never going to run again. But Dad seemed to see something different.

The first step was to get the thing running. It did have a complete engine in it, and the hood had remained intact so that it wasn't hopeless. We took the carburetor apart and got most of the rust out. Did the same with the distributor. Cleaned the spark plugs. Put in a battery. Did a myriad of other things, I'm sure, though I've forgotten most of this by now. But eventually we were ready to give it a try. Except ...

In a Model A, the gas tank is located right behind the hood, where it's higher than the engine. In fact, the gas tank is the dashboard. A small instrument panel cluster mounts right onto the gas tank. There is no fuel pump - it's gravity feed. The gas cap is located right behind the hood. This particular Model A had not had a gas cap for years, and the gas tank was full of rust and would never be usable. So what were we going to do for gas? Well, Dad was quite an inventive person and wasn't about to let a little thing like this stop us. He took a coffee can, punched a hole near the bottom, and ran a fuel line from there to the carburetor. I sat in the passenger springs, holding the can higher than the engine. Dad dug out the crank and turned the engine over - and it ran! He got in and sat on the driver's springs, and we managed a trip around the block. No muffler, of course - all our neighbors knew we had our Model A running.

The next time we stopped at Harold's, he mentioned seeing a Model A body down at the Arlee dump. So Dad and I drove down there. Like just about every small town in Montana, Arlee had found a little cliff near town that it used for a dump. We climbed to the bottom and looked around, and buried in garbage we found at least two Model A's (and several other old cars that we couldn't identify). One of them had a good usable gas tank. Between the two of them, we got lots of useful parts.

We now had a new hobby. We started visiting town dumps all over the area. It was amazing how many Model A's we found in these dumps, and how many good useful parts we were able to get from these dumps. The women in the family didn't care much for these pursuits, but whenever we took a family outing, we usually tossed in a tool box or two "just in case." One time we made a quick stop at the Phillipsburg dump and found a car with some parts we "just had to have." Only took us 10 or 15 minutes since we didn't have time to fully harvest it, and then we were ready to leave. But a dump is a very inviting place to the family dog - and our beagle found lots of interesting stuff herself, and like dogs are wont to do, rolled around in it. The trip home wasn't pleasant. After this, dumps were off limits on family outings.

Over the course of a year, our car gradually turned into a good, usable car. But this was our learner - we never fully restored it. Dad had thoroughly caught the old car bug, and wanted to do a really good restoration job. We didn't want to put our only Model A out of commision, so we decided we needed another one. So we started watching for more. A number of opportunities came up, and we bought a number of them. We usually paid $5 for one, occasionally as much as $10 - so most of them provided us with a few parts but weren't really candidates for restoration. At our peak we had carcasses of 18 Model A's scattered around our yard. Our neighbors loved us.