Between 1919 and 1923, Kenneth Balcomb was assigned a WWI Army surplus Model T while he worked as an engineer for the United States Bureau of Public Roads, traveling over 63,000 miles to survey, inspect, and construct highways in New Mexico. This important book is a snapshot of a unique time in America, right when the country was converting from the horse-and-buggy to that new-fangled contraption, the automobile. Trails and roads, if there were any at all, were deeply rutted from wagon wheels and littered with nails, screws, and spikes that had fallen off of supply wagons. Maneuvering through the countryside and over mountain passes, day or night, proved to be for the hardy of spirit and was a true test of stamina.
Driverless cars are on the horizon, but before the world falls asleep in the driver’s seat, let’s take a look back down the road from whence we have come. Ford Model-T Coast-to-Coast, documents the cross-country adventure of two brave drivers as they pilot a century-old Model-T on a 3,000-mile journey from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Coast. The book is as much a contemplation of early-20th century American life as it is a fond farewell to the automotive age. Can the car still be the vehicle of freedom and discovery, when we’re no longer in command? Or will we finally be able to fully appreciate the scenery rushing past? Accompanied by Michael Alan Ross’ evocative photography, author Tom Cotter stops in small towns, meets local people and hears their stories about cars, travel, and life. Cotter and Ross also explore back roads adjacent to his main route, the Lincoln Highway—the first transcontinental road. Significant cross-country runs, such as those by speed-record setter Cannonball Baker, and literary adventurers such as Jack Kerourac, John Steinbeck and Bill Bryson are considered in light of the driverless future. Cotter also drives some of the same roads that a young Edsel Ford traveled in his father’s Model T upon high school graduation in 1917. In addition to the central road trip, Cotter also visits interesting automotive and transport museums as well as “keepers of the flame” such as Model-T clubs, mechanics, junkyards and collectors across the country. He also records the numerous trials and tribulations in keeping a 100-year-old car operating on a 3,000-mile journey, something the driverless car of the future is unlikely to encounter. Join Cotter on his "slow drive across a fast country." You'll be glad you did.
Henry Ford's Model T forever changed the world. The car made "for the great multitude" (as Ford put it) first debuted in 1908 and proved so affordable and so popular that fifteen million were sold through 1927. The "Tin Lizzie" was the first automobile to be mass-produced on moving assembly lines, and built using interchangeable parts. It proved tough and reliable in everyday use, and cheap enough to spawn the automobile revolution: the car cost $850 in 1909 but amazingly by the 1920s, the price had dropped to a mere $260 due to the perfection of production techniques and economy of scale. Designed by a team that included Childe Harold Willis, Joseph Galamb and Eugene Farkas, the Model T had a front-mounted four-cylinder engine that produced 20 hp and had a top speed of 45 mph. It was a rear-wheel drive vehicle with wooden wheels, and featured a two-speed transmission plus a reverse gear. Although models varied - and many revisions took place over two decades of production - the original version weighed about 1200 pounds. Created in the 1920s and featuring information about the original Model T and the "New Model T" of 1925, this maintenance manual is an invaluable resource. It was originally intended to educate the men tasked with assembling, repairing and maintaining the Model T, and offers a plethora of information about the car, its design and operation. The text includes chapters on how to take apart and put together the car, how to overhaul the engine and transmission, valve grinding and carbon removal, rod bearings, fitting pistons and rings, correcting noisy timing gears, installation of camshaft bearings, cleaning oil lines, oil leaks, transmission band installation, axle overhauls, refurbishing and replacing springs, radiator repair, starting motor overhaul, and more. It also includes troubleshooting and general servicing information. A must have for any Model T owner, this book is also a terrific reference for the docent, historian, or anyone who ever wondered, "how did that work?"
Classic Speedsters: The Cars, The Times, and The Characters Who Drove Them chronicles the most significant vehicles ever to have traveled American roads and racetracks. Speedsters were the pizzazz cars of their era. Speedsters were owned by entertainers, captains of industry, the wealthy, and in some cases, the everyday guy or gal. They were often expensive, but always fast and sexy. Speedsters were America's first sports cars.Each chapter frames the birth and evolution of a company that produced a speedster model in its lineup and includes a biography of a famous owner of the period. This book traces the journey of the speedster concept across several time periods and among twelve automotive companies. It answers three fundamental questions:· Why were these cars so important and influential?· Why did so many prominent people own them?· What message do they have for modern design?
Tim Moore - indefatigable travelling everyman – switches two wheels for four as he journeys across Trumpland in an original Model T Ford. ‘Alarmingly full of incident, very funny – even mildly transformative’ Daily Mail Lacking even the most basic mechanical knowhow, Tim Moore sets out to cross Trumpland USA in an original Model T Ford. Armed only with a fan belt made of cotton, wooden wheels and a trunkload of ‘wise-ass Limey liberal gumption’, his route takes him exclusively through Donald-voting counties, meeting the everyday folks who voted red along the way. He meets a people defined by extraordinary generosity, willing to shift heaven and earth to keep him on the road. And yet, this is clearly a nation in conflict with itself: citizens ‘tooling up’ in reaction to ever-increasing security fears; a healthcare system creaking to support sugar-loaded soda lovers; a disintegrating rust belt all but forgotten by the warring media and political classes. With his trademark blend of slapstick humour, affable insight and butt-clenching peril, Tim Moore invites us on an unforgettable road trip through America. Buckle up!
In 1922, just out of college and at loose ends, E.B. White set off across America in a Model T. He left his map at home, but packed his typewriter— his true destination, he tells us, was the world of letters. White wrote the richly humorous "Farewell to Model T" for The New Yorker in 1936; it was the first of his essays to bring him fame. In "From Sea to Shining Sea," White conjures the unspoiled America that remained his most enduring subject. The first essay of E. B. White's to become famous, "Farewell to Model T" originally appeared in 1936 in The New Yorker as "Farewell My Lovely." It is rich in comic descriptions of the eccentricities of the car, the demands it put on its devoted owners, and the hardware and decorative accessories—from 98-cent anti-rattlers to the "de-luxe flower vase of the cut-glass anti-splash type"—that kept them pouring over the Sears Roebuck catalog. If there was an owner's manual for the flivver, it didn't begin to divulge what the owner needed to know. That's where theory, speculation, superstition, and metaphysics came in: "I remember once spitting into a timer," White recalls, "not in anger, but in a spirit of research." It is published for the first time with "Sea to Shining Sea," in which White conjures the America that he had discovered as a 22-year old during a cross country trip in his Model T. (The year was 1922, the same the year that Fitzgerald and Hemingway went to Paris to find themselves.) In it he would write: "My own vision of the land—my own discovery of it—was shaped, more than by any other instrument, by a Model T Ford...a slow-motion roadster of miraculous design—strong, tremulous, and tireless, from sea to shining sea."
"I will build a car for the great multitude," stated Henry Ford, and so he did. The Ford Model T, or the 'Tin Lizzie' and the 'Flivver' as it was also known, transformed American society, bringing mobility through car ownership to millions of middle-class Americans at a time when the horse and the railroad were the only real viable means of transport. Using moving assembly lines and the best possible materials, between October 1908 and May 1927, Ford built around 16.5 million examples of this extraordinary car. By 1918, half of all cars built in America were Model Ts and by 1925 around 8,000 a day were being produced, making Henry Ford one of the world's best-known manufacturers of automobiles. The selection of body styles varied from two- and four-seat open and closed models - tourers, town cars, runabouts, landaulettes and cabriolets - to vans and pick-up trucks, and customers could also have colours other than black!
When Mama gets behind the wheel of the new Model-T which her husband just drove into the yard of their Georgia mountain home, she proves that she can drive a car as well as the men of the family.
