History We ALL Love a DARE! PIX of TRULY Extinct Makes?

Fortunately, there is a fairly simple answer to posts #4656 through 4658: It was about six months ago that all the regulars on the thread agreed to broaden the search to include ALL FOREIGN MAKES and, yes, COACHBUILT cars, just so long as they are 1965 or earlier and rare, super-rare or impossible to find, save for old pix or ads, etc. As you can see, it's also led to discussion of some VERY interesting powerplants and other components. Notably, some of the vehicles, and engines as well, exist today in photos ONLY -- if at all.


Myself, I like the broadened approach in the thread, but it's a shame we can't tweak the main title occasionally on Post #1. Obviously, a steady stream of folks say they love the thread, learned something they didn't know, or want to contribute a piece of knowledge or just ask a question. Yet, for some reason, the thread rating has declined, albeit very gradually. I do wish those who like the thread would keep it alive and vibrant by VOTING at the top of the page.

 

Separate matter: Ray, VERY good point about the Lusitania and Titanic tragedies and their ultimate NEGATIVE and very direct impacts on the Trumbull and Mercer makes. Also, I believe Alfred G. Vanderbilt I gave his place in a Lusitania lifeboat -- and his life -- to save women and children. He'd been quite prominent in sponsoring and building racing cars, as I recall. I'm just rusty on the details.<!-- / message -->

 

So we are all in agreement that this thread is awesome, and should stay the course then!

I only asked because I guess I missed the posts that had the change in them, thanks for the enlightening guys!

 

THANKS, LN7. But I do wish there was a way to let everybody, including casual thread visitors, know about the broader scope of what we seek and WELCOME.

If it's extinct, very rare or ultra-rare, BRING IT ON!

LOL

 

The thread just got a 5-star vote from me. I'd encourage others to do the same. Now I gotta go back to work on my salt flats car.

 

Well I love unusual and one off stuff, I own a lot of it, which may be unusual in itself for a 28 year old...

My favourite is my 46 Ford Glass-top bus Click here

 

Thanks, Ray! And LN7, it's good to see one of those glass-tops survived. Fate is often not very kind to commercial vehicles, is it? Somewhere recently, somebody posted an old pic of several of these in a tour caravan out west -- back in the days when the "vista-cruiser" roof was all the rage. If I run across it, I'll post it here.

(BTW, I wish I were 28 and just had a PLACE to keep cars and trucks with neighbors or authorities bugging me! I get bummbed when I think of all the stuff I could have for a song when I was young, IF I'd only had a place to put it. Ouch.)

 

These photos?

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I only have 1 acre, so I have very limited space for cars, I'm 15 feet off of a highway and have neighbours close to me, close enough I can see inside their houses from mine, it is in the country but it's an old ghost town.


But my neighbours are pretty cool and into cars too, I am cleaning up my yard and downsizing this summer... if we get a summer this year.

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Definite yes on the first one and a probable yes but I don't know for sure on the second one.

 

the dixi flyer 1922. kentucky trailer now owns this car and i work for them so its kinda my car also right? lol here is a link with photos of the car.

http://www.f150online.com/forums/ge...2-dixie-flyer-firefly-made-louisville-ky.html

 

Nice to hear from someone who's close to Bernie Jacobson's restored Firefly. Your enthusiasm shows! The ultra-rare Dixie Flyer is, IMO, one of the more interesting cars we've discussed in this thread. Certainly, they were especially STYLISH, too, in their day! I wrote two posts (#3603 & 3604) last July when Bernie shipped it from his native Brisbane and, while here, left it permanently with Kentucky Trailer -- for display "back home" in Louisville where it was built in 1922, before its voyage to Australia! Neat back story there!


Located by SunRoofCord, this actual photo shows what a snappy model the Firefly was.

 

I tried a "google" search and found this book reference:

http://books.google.com.au/books?id...6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=12 cylinder voisin&f=false

So there was the V12 in the record breaking car in 1930 and a similar engine in the Bucciali.

Then there was the straight V12L in the Voisin Aerosport, shown at Paris in 1937.

 

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Only the French would even try to build a
straight-12! Can you imagine the amount
of crankshaft whip at high speeds??!!

Mart3406
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The photograph, below, is date stamped 28 October 1966. To have reached the stage at which it was photographed, this Ford Mustang Wagon would have been in the planning stages in 1965 or earlier. (Check the Corvette in the background. Somewhat unusual to have an "opposition" brand in the photo).



http://www.motorpasion.com/ford/el-ford-mustang-station-wagon-si-existio-como-prototipo

It obviously existed, but, does it still exist or ????

 

Here is a link to a very complete Voisin web site... in french
http://www.automobiles-voisin.fr/index.html

 

Photo

 

Going by the fake windows I would guess it was a clay styling study, maybe even on a pre-production body, so it was likely destroyed after it was no longer needed.

 

I don't know Spanish, but from what I can ascertain, it was a prototype and in fibreglass when it was presented at the styling studio.

I agree with you that it was most likely destroyed, but there can be exceptions.

 

Very true, can you imagine if it had been a production car with that hardtop roof line? Neat stuff!

 

Speaking of destroyed prototypes, rare and extinct, the Citroen Traction 22 is the stuff of legend, introduced to the public in 1934 at the Paris Auto show, then at Bruxelle, it was suppose to be the top of the line Citroen with a V8 made of 2 11CV 4 cylinder mated together. But Citroen had very big financial problems and when Michelin bought Citroen they discarded the program at the end of 34. The interesting thing is about a dozen car were made (even the very first one with a Ford flathead in it) 2 of those were destroyed in accidents, one of those destroyed one might not have been put to the crusher but nobody knows exactly. The 10 others are supposed to have been converted back to regular models, but a couple of then might have been saved by employees. So it means that there might be somebody right now who's driving a 22 not knowing it's one (there are differences in the chassis) thinking it's just a regular Traction... Plus there is a story of an officer of the Patton army who could have found a 22 roadster and took it back with him in the US, but the familly stays lips sealed about what was passed on to them... To confuse even more there was an ingenior who actually saved an original 22 front clip and fitted it to his roadster, making a bunch of people believing that they saw one driving on the road.
Anyway the only thing left from those car was an engine that was junked in the 60's by some stupid Citroen employee on clean up day and a headlight bezel found by chance in a junkyard in 66 in lyon (one might ask why so far from Paris where the cars were and supposed to have been converted back toregular 11)
Here's what they looked like

Here's a link to the most complete technical data available on the web about those cars
http://www.ac-good.com/tractionavant1934/index_fichiers/plans_techniques_22_Schook_1.html

These 12 or so cars buit in 1934 are the holy grail of the Citroen collector. People are still looking for them...

 

Cool discussion. Never heard of any of them before.

 

Not to disparage your tag line, Duck, but rather to inspire some discussion, I don't bleeve Henry ever said anything about a"any color as long as it's black." Here are a coupla paragraphs from www.modelt.ca that seem to support what I've read in other places: that black was chosen because it was the fastest-drying color of any.

"No one really knows if Henry Ford ever said that the buying public could have Model T Fords "in any color, so long as it's black", but it is commonly attributed to him. While this saying is true for the model years after 1913, earlier cars were available in green, red, blue and grey. In fact, in the first year, Model T Fords were not available in black at all. The switch to all black cars was due to Ford's ongoing obsession with cost reduction, and not, as is commonly believed, to reduce drying time and hence increase production.

Over 30 different types of black paint were used to paint various parts of the Model T. The different types of paint were formulated to satisfy the different means of applying the paint to the different parts, and had different drying times, depending on the paint and the drying method used for a particular part. Ford engineering documents suggest that the color black was chosen because it was cheap and it was durable. In 1926 colors other than black were once again offered, in an attempt to boost dwindling sales."

 

Since you guys are talking about Citroen. Here is a one that I believe is extinct. M. Dimitri Sensaud de Lavaud was an ecentric genius brazilian living in Paris who had designed an automatic transmission. They tried to use it in the first traction avants but the engine was too small for the transmission to work properly.

This is a 27/28 Sensaud de Lavaud.

 

That's pretty cool. That is a Ford Courier/Mazda B series truck cab and doors.

 

I rummaged thru my photo collection and found several Mustang Wagons. I dunno if they were all prototypes or kustoms, but they were far beyond the clay model stage.

The GT350 wagon appears to be a "driver"...maybe not a daily, but it seems to be licensed and driven. Might just be the result of somebody's handiwork, tho.

Here's a web site that claims that Ford built 2 of 'em and another one was built by Intermeccanica in 65 or 66.
http://www.amcarguide.com/muscle-cars/mustang-sedan-and-station-wagon-myth-busted-or-not/

More food for thought, I guess. That GT350 wagon sure seems like a tender little morsel that I wouldn't mind having...even with my predilection for Chevys.

 

Never heard of him before, but after a quick search, plenty of info is available on the stuff he invented, notably the ratcheting continuously variable transmission : an auto trans without gears like the Prius ...sort of. His first attempts were more like just a torque converter directly mounted on the driveshaft by what I read, it had the tendency to overheat.
An exemple:

 

RE: Citroen 22CV version of Traction Avante.

Worth a read, and it gives a bit of information on another proposed variant of the 22CV:
http://www.citroenet.org.uk/prototypes/22cv/22cv.html




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A French forum with some photos of the Bouwe De Boer car on page4.

http://www.autotitre.com/forum/Citroen-Traction-Avant-1934--65435p1.htm



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from another forum:

http://www.forum-auto.com/automobiles-mythiques-exception/section5/sujet384928.htm





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"In his autobiography Bernard Citroën also described how in the summer of 1934 he had been driven with his father from Paris to Deauville in a prototype example of the V8 engined 22CV version of the Traction Avant, exhibited at the 1934 Paris Salon but never commercialised. At the wheel was Dennis Kendal, the Anglo-American engineer who represented the suppliers of the body presses and tooling that André Citroën had ordered from the USA to construct the Traction Avant, the Budd Manufacturing Company of Philadelphia."

From:
http://www.citroenet.org.uk/miscellaneous/obituary/obituary.html

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I doubt there are any survivors of the 22CV.

 

That's a nice looking car.

Were they built on ALPAX chassis or am I mistaken (again)?

(Explanation: ALPAX was a cast aluminium alloy that was used on a number of car makers chassis around that time. ALPAX was "discovered" by another well known auto industry personality of the time- Gregoire).

 

No Citroen never used the Alpax, but Panhard did which caused it's downfall and allowed Citroen to take over, Gregoire build some cars like this too and went bankrupt... Thing is that they had hard time to control the wrappage and shrinking of parts made with Alpax so they spent a huge amount of time and money to overcome these problems. Panhard used it massively on the little X86, but for such a small car the price was too steep, Audi did the same mistake with the A2. Then Panhard used it on the Z1 on which they were loosing money because they didn't expect to sale the left over aluminum for such a low price and they didn't think of including that in the sale price of the car.

 

A fellow by the name of Charles Dechaux converted several Cords to Citroen running gear.

This one is on display in a museum called "Aalholm automobilmuseum" and was found and purchased by the museum in France many years ago.

Originally it was a Geneva Blue 812 S/C Beverly but now it has a Citroen 4 cyl. engine and a 3 speed gearbox.

As you can seen from the pictures the condition is not mint and because the museum has no money, it probably never will be.