All in the Family: 1930 Model A Ford

My 1930 Model A, shown here, has been in the family since 1935, when my grandfather bought it used. Some four million of these cars were made from 1928 to 1931. I have a picture of my aunt standing on the running board of this car when she was 12. In 1969, when the car was already 39 years old, my grandfather wrote me a letter, stating that the car was mine and sending the owner’s manual and some photos. The next year I drove the Model A away from his farm implement store started by his father, my great-grandfather, who was an authorized dealer for Case tractors, back when they were powered by steam.
    I was a high school senior. I drove the Model A through my second year of junior college. The car had a steady leak in the coolant system. The few times I drove to high school, I’d have to fill the radiator before leaving home and then, using a five-gallon bucket I carried in the car, once more before returning home. The car had one windshield wiper and an aftermarket cast iron “heater” that barely worked. It attached to the engine and was open at one end just behind the radiator. In theory, air would enter the heater, travel the length of the exhaust manifold, picking up heat, and then enter the interior of the car via a port in the firewall. The benefit was mostly psychological.
    I didn’t have a lot of money for repairs, though I did replace the oil pan and muffler and added an after-market air filter. (The car came with no air or oil filters of its own.) I had the chutzpah to join the sports car club at the junior college, reasoning that my Model A, equipped with wire wheels, manual transmission, and a rear-mounted spare, had some of the qualities that made a car sporty. Fortunately, the other club members overlooked the fact that my Model A’s 200.5-cubic-inch, in-line four-cylinder engine could only get the car up to about 40 mph.
    The engine had been rebored so many times that the cylinder walls were paper thin, and I finally had to replace it. Fortunately, my grandfather came through again. He gave me a spare engine that had been used to power a combine. This engine held water, so I was able to add antifreeze and drive the car even in winter.
    When I left town in 1973 to finish my college degree, I stored my Model A in a shed behind my parents’ house, where it stayed, unused, for the next 27 years. Then, in 2000, I rented a trailer, loaded up my Model A, and hauled it back to my home in Wyoming. There, it sat for another six years outside our house, under a tarp.
    When we moved here to Idaho, the car came with us. Now I’ve undertaken the monumental task of restoring it to be a presentable, usable vehicle, though I have no intention of making it into a trophy winner. As you can see, the Model A is in pretty rough shape. During its years in the storage shed, small mammals made their home in the upholstery. I had to remove the carcass of a fullgrown possum from the front seat.
    The Model A has about 3,200 parts in it, just about all of them needing replacement on my car. But I’ll just do a bit at a time. Fortunately, this model of car is one of the most popular for restoration, with all sorts of parts vendors out there. For example, I can buy an interior kit that will help me replace the upholstery and other appointments inside the car. I’ve already started the work. I removed the wire wheels and managed to get the old tires off of them. They had been sitting flat since Reagan was president, and had, in fact, fossilized. It took me hours to break the beads. I drove the wheels to a shop in Montana to be cleaned and powder coated. That’s an electro-static process that keeps the paint from chipping far longer than usual. I was able to order 23 cadmium-plated lug nuts for the wheels for just a buck nineteen each. That’s what I mean about the readily available parts.
    I mounted five Excelsior brand tires on the rims using just tire irons, to see if I could do it. That took a long time.
    My next step will be to photograph the interior, then rip it out and install the new interior kit. Some things, like rebuilding the engine, I will leave to more talented mechanics. I know next to nothing about auto mechanics, but I have purchased $100 worth of books, including a technical manual for the Model A, which should get me started. --Jeff Brown, Salmon, Idaho.