My Experiences With
Model A Fords

Our Best Model A

In the fall of 1964, we began restoring our second Model A. We didn't have a good body to use, but we started with the chassis and running gear.

We had to have names for our cars so we could know which one we were talking about. Dad dubbed them "Number 1" and "Number 2," so they wound up with those unimaginative names. Number 2, of course, is this second one that we restored completely.

Our Best Model A

During the winter, we spent many weekends and evenings cleaning up parts and getting them painted. It was much too cold to work outside or even in the garage, so we did all this work in our basement. As we completed the parts, we assembled the chassis there in the basement. When people came to visit, we always showed them our Model A in the basement. Of course, they'd always ask how we were going to get it out. We'd be obligated to reply with "good grief, we never thought of that!" or something to that effect. At my 30th year high school reunion a couple of years ago, a couple of people remarked about remembering our Model A in the basement.

When spring rolled around, we still needed to find a good body to use. By this time, we had several bodies lying around the yard, but none were in very good condition. We did have a really good Queen Victoria 4-door sedan body with suicide doors. I wanted to use that, but the fancier Model A models such as the Vicky had bodies made by various companies other than Ford and didn't use any of the same parts (as I recall, the Vicky had a Fisher nameplate on it). It was missing a few parts, and dad didn't want to mess around with anything other than the standard Ford bodies (2-door sedans, coupes and pickups). If we had found a good open body such as a roadster or phaeton, he might have been willing to try that. But the only good roadster we ever found was owned by a Native American on the Jocko who refused to sell to a white, and we never found any phaetons at all.

For the uninitiated:

A "sedan" was a 2-seater car like this one. The standard Model A sedan was a 2-door sedan, and had a Ford body. The 4-door versions were more luxurious cars, and had bodies made by several different manufacturers.

A "coupe" has just one seat and a trunk (or rumble seat). Model A coupes had Ford bodies.

A "roadster" is an open version of a coupe. A "phaeton" is an open version of a sedan (similar to earlier "touring cars"). Like modern convertibles, these cars had fabric coverings that could be raised. Unlike modern convertibles, they had no windows in the doors. They did have side coverings that could be installed. These rarer and more sought-after cars had non-Ford bodies.

About this time, someone told us about a 2-door sedan in East Missoula. We took a look at it. It was in pretty decent shape, except that sometime in it's life someone had used a cutting torch to cut out the back panel to use it for hauling stuff, and had later done a very poor job of welding it back in. Fortunately, Model A bodies weren't a single piece like todays bodies, and the rear panel was spot-welded into place. We chiseled the bad back panel out and replaced it with the good back panel from one of our otherwise useless bodies, and wound up with a 2-door sedan body that didn't need a whole lot of work. We cheated a little, and bolted the panel into place instead of spot-welding it.

One nice sunny weekend in May, we finally were ready to put our car together. On Saturday, we disassembled the chassis and running gear, carried it outside, and put it together. We then put the body on, which we had already done quite a bit of work on. We still had to spend quite a bit of time on the body. It was a 1931 body, but we had better 1930 fenders and radiator shell. So we had to remove the 1931 gas tank and put in a 1930 one to turn the car into a 1930 model. Then we did the final paint job (with a standard Model A color, of course). We made up the wood supports for the vinyl roof, put on the chicken coop wire, and got the vinyl roof put on. The only thing we didn't do ourselves was the upholstery work - dad got together as much information as he could about the original upholstery and had a professional upholsterer do this part.

In the summer of 1967, there was a statewide meet for antique car fanciers in Polson. Dad drove the sedan up and entered it in the Model A division (I drove my coupe up, but didn't enter it - it was far from restored). The person judging the Model A's and Model T's was Ed Towe - probably the world expert on Fords. Ed had amassed a huge number of Fords, and had a large exhibit at the museum in Helena. He later moved the exhibit to Deer Lodge. There were at least a couple hundred Fords in this collection, including two original Model A's (circa 1904), some Model K's and N's and R's and S's, at least one Model T for each year they were made, lots of Model A's, and Fords for every year up to 1950 or so as well as a few newer ones including Edsels and Thunderbirds. He had picked up at least two of the Model T's in South America and driven them to Montana under their own power. In addition to the Deer Lodge collection, he had an even larger collection on display in Sacramento. Unfortunately, Ed got into some trouble with the IRS, and awhile back the IRS forced him to auction off both collections.

Ed gave us a score of 97 out of 100 on our car. We got dinged a point because we had put on modern grease fittings, which worked much better with modern grease guns (the next weekend, we put the old type back on). I don't recall offhand what the other two points were for. Ed noted that we had put safety glass all around (Model A's only came with safety glass in the windshield), but didn't knock off any points for that (safety improvements were allowed). He noticed that we had used the correct dark green color on the engine - dad was quite thorough in learning the correct colors. Many restored Model A's have a lighter green engine, for some reason a lot of people seem to think the original color was this lighter green. Our score of 97 gave us the trophy for the best Model A. The runner-up got a score of 96 partly because of having the lighter green engine. All of the others had scores much lower.