Originally posted by McGuire
I agree with you about the Model A too. Lovely car with true personality, but if we are honest we have to admit it was not what Ford needed to compete with Chevrolet and Plymouth. Nor was the Model A up to the company's engineering potential. By then Ford had become a bitter reactionary, refusing to listen to the capable people around him, sabotaging their efforts with cruel and juvenile power plays, including even his own son Edsel. Ford dragged his feet until the T was far beyond obsolete, then rushed the Model A through development and into production. The Model A could have been far more.
McGuire,
However, and I believe most importantly, the Model A was a major achievement for Ford, reliant as Henry Ford was on self-trained, as opposed to degreed engineers.
In the development of the A, Ford is pretty well chronicled to have insisted on it's being an up-to-date car, but with still the almost brutal simplicity of the T, but also one of rugged constitution. In all three areas, I believe that Ford succeeded magnificently.
The Model A was right in step with the time it was introduced, albeit not really cutting any new territory. It was lightweight (my 1929 Tudor Sedan, fully restored, tipped the scale at just about 2,100 lbs, but coupled with the very torquey 200.5cid engine, and properly driven, they would "skin the pants" off most contemporary cars of the day. Tough and durable, they were; otherwise fully half of the approximately 5,000,000 Model A Fords would not have been still registered, licensed cars as late as 1960. Brutally simple? You bet! Unless one needed serious machine-shop work done on the engine (new rings, bearings, for example) nothing about maintaining a Model A was out of the realm of the owner-driver--those were, and still are, very user-friendly cars. Reliability was (and still is, if the restored A is properly cared for AND the owner is willing to do just a little bit of learning!) not something from the advertising department, it was, and is still, a fact of life with the A. Even a tuneup on an A is simple! A half-inch crescent wrench, a screwdriver, and two feeler gauges (.025" for gapping the points, .035" for the plug gap)and the ability to turn the crankshaft until #1 piston is at top dead center (as indicated by being able to drop the timing bolt into a depression in the camshaft gear!) is all that is needed, a complete tuning of the A engine requiring no more than perhaps 30 minutes. Valve job? Remove the head, re-lap the valves by hand, literally, then remove the valves, and lightly grind down the mushroom shape at the bottom until the valves seat with .005" clearance against the tappet--nothing could have been simpler, nor more reliable--in fact this basic setup remained almost all the way through the flathead V8 era--and Fords were noted for their very quite valves.
Poor Edsel Ford, of course, did seem to get the "short end" around his father, but then that's really not hard to understand. Edsel grew up in a household that became steadily, and rapidly more affluent in his formative years. Henry had, by the time he engineered the largest single leveraged buyout of his day (and for decades thereafter) become quite the autocrat, the "emperor" of Ford Motor Company. Edsel Ford, on the other hand, was appointed, by his Father, to be the "President" of Ford Motor Company at the ripe old age of 19--he'd never had to go through the "school of hard knocks" from which his father graduated. Edsel was, however, given the responsibility of managing Lincoln, upon his father's buyout of Henry and Wilfred Leland's fast-failing luxury car enterprise. In his role at Lincoln, Edsel developed a considerable sense of style, of design, as witnessed by the many beautiful Lincolns created under him (even though Lincoln Motor Car Division of Ford never made a nickel of profit until the epochal year 1961). In fact, it was Edsel Ford who gave the Model A (and every successor to the A out through 1942, along with Lincoln and Mercury!) its timeless good looks.
Interestingly enough, though, is the role that most historians give Henry Ford in the development of the Model A: That of consumer advocate. For example, after riding in, perhaps even driving a prototype A, Ford's cryptic written memo: "Rides too hard (bouncy perhaps?), put on shock absorbers" (thus the Model A became the first low-priced car in the US to feature double-acting hydraulic shock absorbers). After two of his engineers were critically injured in a head-on crash in a Model A prototype, when they were thrust through the plate glass windshield (plate glass was almost universal in cars of the day), he demanded that laminated safety glass be used in that part of the car (side and rear glass remained plate glass for several more years, and likely had he specified safety glass all around, no glass company could have met the production requirements--laminated safety glass being very, very new in 1927). Ford seems to have really understood the likely customers for his car. He retained the transverse spring layout, simply because it worked far better on a light car than anything else--and Ford seems to have understood that while city streets may well have been paved to billiard-table smoothness (well at least in comparison to what they might have been 10-15 years earlier, once out of the city, it was very much pot-luck (and ruts and potholes). And with the positive axle location provided by transverse springs and wishbone radius rods, the Model A front axle retains it's caster angle quite well, and as strong as that axle was, the camber was pretty solid as well--one almost never hears of "shimmy" (the rapid bouncing up and down, almost uncontrollably, of each front wheel on a beam axle) with a Model A--I never did, and I drove 3 different Model A Fords 1964-1970, a total of perhaps 35,000 miles).
While often castigated by rather unknowledgeable "safety experts", the cowl-mounted Model A gas tank was, in retrospect, far safer than most other cars (in fact, millions of VW Beetles had their gas tanks mounted in relatively the same position!). Nearly every other car, until the advent of the mechanical fuel pump, relied on manifold vacuum to draw fuel from a rear-mounted tank to a fairly substantial reservoir on the firewall--and many fires resulted from that setup, yet as of 1960 (the last year for which I ever had any information), no explosions, fires, or even injuries were ever ascribed to a burst Model A gas tank. Even in the worst of head-on collisions, the engine would be rammed UNDERNEATH the fuel tank.
However, if there was a failing with the Model A, it was that Ford never really thought it would be necessary to replace it, until it was almost too late (reprise of his experience with the Model T). So, when he did (with the Model 18--1932 V8), it was another case of crash-program engineering.
Art Anderson
