Any of you guys know where I can find some information on this Northwest drag racer. I've found some images but thats about it. thanks Pat
Here is some real history “The Orange Crate” 1932 Ford Sedan all steel, Built by Bob Tindle from Portland,Oregon. It made the cover of Hot Rod two times 1960 and again in 1962. In 1963 the Revell Company created a 1/25th scale model of the sedan. Which you can still buy, they released it. It would turn 10.60 in the quarter mile back in the day. It is now owned by the Gord Family.
The Adventures Of The Custom '32 Ford That Could Hod Rod January 18, 2001|By Paul Duchene. Special to the Tribune. Bob Tindle's '32 Ford "The Orange Crate" might be the most historic American hot rod in existence. And thanks to Ted Gord, it still exists in rural Washington State, though few people have seen it in 25 years. It's a far cry from the horsepower-crazy '60s when The Orange Crate capped a win at the 1961 Oakland Roadster Show with a cover story in Hot Rod Magazine and a yearlong nationwide tour. Collectors may claim other "all-time best" hot rods exist in Southern California, but we're talking popular vote here. And how more popular can you get than a best-selling model? Generations of kids grew up making Revell-Monogram's one-twenty-fourth scale, tilt-bodied, chop top, '32 Ford sedan, marveling at the intricacies of its design. The plastic kit has been around for more than 30 years. The Orange Crate was featured in a hot rod magazine in England in 1967, and it made you wonder, how could anybody afford to build a car from scratch? And why would they? What's the fascination? "It was a transitional car," said Portland, Ore., historian Al Drake, who's written a half-dozen books on hot rods and still has his high school roadster. "It's really a '50s car but with '60s technology. Oakland show cars then looked like something you or I might put together. The Orange Crate anticipates the super-duper show car. "In the 1960s, hot rods went from being built in people's garages to incredibly complex projects you could only do in a professional shop. I went to Europe for a year in 1962-'63 and when I came back the changes were amazing." The Orange Crate first turned up in white, embryonic form in Portland in 1952, Drake recalls. It was one of only a half-dozen chopped, closed cars in town, testament to the difficulty of crunching the roof and maintaining the angles. Drake owned it briefly in 1955. "It jumped a tow bar when it was coming home from the drag races and sat by my house for a couple of months. I sold some pieces off it, then sold it to my sister's boyfriend," he said regretfully. The car next surfaced in Bob Tindle's hands, first in primer, then painted yellow. The Orange Crate was really Tindle's idea--his 1961 picture's still on the front of the kit box. Tindle was a Portland car collector, drag racer and Chrysler-Plymouth dealer. He died last March at 69. Tindle had won the Street Roadster Cl*** championship at the 1959 Oakland Show, then the world's biggest, with a tasty red '32 Ford. "But Bob wanted a show car," recalled his brother Terry, 66. "He had this chopped sedan sitting on '32 Ford rails and with a '57 Oldsmobile engine with six two-barrel carbs. We were racing it at the time, and it was a really fast car. Then Keith Randol got involved." Randol was a well-known Portland machinist who went on to build engines for Rolla Vollstedt. Vollstedt raced at Indianapolis for 20 years and is credited with developing the first domestic mid-engine cars after scoping out Jim Clark's Lotus. But that came later. In 1959 Randol was just starting his own shop "and the Orange Crate was my first project," he recalled with a chuckle. Randol, now 76, designed and built a new space frame from scratch out of 3-inch .120-wall seamless Shelby tubing. "That was in the days when everything had to be arc-welded," Randol said. "I actually did the frame twice because Bob wanted it so it could be dismantled and plated. I got a tube bender to kick up the frame at the back, but the curves in the center I had to shrink with a torch and cold water." In the middle of the tube frame is a central driving position with a ****erfly steering wheel that'd look at home on a Cessna. The seat is balanced in a flimsy-looking roll cage, the steering column terminates in an altered Willys steering box and the driver straddles a B&M hydromatic. (B&M is a transmission rebuilder that changes an automatic into semi-automatic with a ratchet shifter, so you hit it once and it shifts one gear instead of going up through all three or four gears like a regular automatic.) The brake pedal is an extraordinary crossways arrangement with scissors linkage. Underneath, a full belly pan is held in with Dzus fasteners. "The further along we got, the more I got involved," sighed Randol. "I went out and bought the front and rear end out of a sprint car from a buddy of mine in Sweet Home [Ore.]--all Halibrand wheels, rear axle and disc brakes. That car was built in about 1939, so those parts were all 20 years old." Upfront, engine-builder **** Maris punched the Oldsmobile mill out to 417.63 cubic inches with Racer Brown cam, Smith Brothers pushrods, McGurk rockers, Forgetrue pistons and Joe Hunt vertex magneto (according to the Hot Rod story). There's a front-mounted Potvin blower fed by Hillborn injectors with intakes big enough to **** in jackrabbits. Randol's curved exhausts tuck neatly under just the frame, and the powerplant's probably good for about 600 horsepower. Von's Body Shop repainted the car Naples orange and Dee Westcott of Boring, Ore., (who went on to built a lot of fibergl*** '30s Ford bodies) built the insert in the top. Painted on the closed grille (there is no radiator) is a crate on wheels. The rear of the car carries the back view under the question "Oregon Oranges?" (Because the Crate is designed just to run quarter-mile bursts and be switched off, and it ran on an alcohol mix, which tends to burn cooler, the engine is generating less heat and does not need a radiator.) Tilting the body posed problems for Randol. He had a ferocious 5-inch channel and 6-inch chop to cope with and the added weight of opening doors. "The hardest thing was getting the cowl and frame support right so the body would stay over center when it was tilted up and not mousetrap anybody's fingers," said Randol. "That body was not light." Current owner Ted Gord agreed as three people struggled to raise it for photographs in his garage. "In this cl***, a whole car doesn't weigh what that body weighs," he laughed. Gord should know. His history with hot rods goes back many years, and included some fiercely compe***ive top alcohol drag racing cars in from 1990-'95; a 7th place world finish in 1993; and 3rd place in 1994. On the street he's been a member of the the Demonos of Tacoma, an old-time hot-rodders club, since 1962. The lanky, talkative Gord is about to build a new shop and when he finishes, The Orange Crate will be his first project. It'll take its place with his '65 Police Special Harley, his '32 Ford roadster with the Eddie Meyer heads, his 1,500 model cars, hundreds of magazines and all his race suits and helmets. "I'm going to do it this year, because I have the resources put away. Once I start, it's going to be a night-and-day project. I don't want it to sit around in boxes. I've seen too many guys take things apart and never get them back together again." Tindle and his brother Terry ran a high-performance used-car lot until 1963, when they became Chrysler-Plymouth dealers in the suburbs. A picture of their lot in Fall 1962 can bring tears to your eyes. With the Orange Crate on the street, the front row comprises a red split-window '63 Corvette, red '57 T-Bird, white '60 Corvette, white '62 Pontiac Grand Prix (with 4-speed), and a red and white '61 Impala convertible. The back rows are mostly red and white Corvettes and mid-1950s Chevys. Terry got his own Mopar dealership 30 miles south in McMinnville, Ore., in 1964 and the brothers drifted apart, with Bob selling the Orange Crate in the mid-60s, Terry recalls. It floated around on the trailer Randol had built for it until 1975, when Gord bought it and parked it next to a barn outside Salem. Gord's been too busy to get to it until now. "I'm always asked about the car; where is it? Who's got it?... and I had this picture it's in the back of some shop with stuff piled all over it--some dusty, dirty body shop. I'm glad to hear it's in a nice clean garage," said Terry Tindle. "Bob said he saw the car once at a used-car auction. He said it was rusty, and the front-mounted blower was off it. But he never had interest in wanting to buy it back. Maybe if he hadn't got sick ..." Meanwhile the Orange Crate awaits Gord's time and energies, now that he's got drag racing out of his system and his fireworks business is prospering. Gord thinks it'll take $70,000 to rebuild the Orange Crate but it'll be worth it. "I want it to be right," he said. "Look at this, this is an original '32 windshield. I can't change that."' After 41 years, the only thing missing is the original instrument panel, which was right above the driver's feet. If anybody knows where it is, Gord would like it back. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...417_1_hot-rods-oakland-roadster-show-show-car
The Ultimate Dual-Purpose Hot Rod The Story of the Orange Crate By Calvin Mauldin Photography: The Rod & Custom Archives As any rodder knows, a '32 Ford of any body style never gets thrown away. Short of being run over by a freight train, a Deuce will just keep coming back in one configuration or another. Owners may change, engines may be swapped, but once this ever-popular Ford model has been hot rodded, it stays that way. Such was the case when Portland, Oregon's Bob Tindle bought a solid, albeit modified, '32 sedan in 1959, and over a period of five short years, dazzled the difficult-to-impress car-show faction as well as magazine editors. Bob's '32 came complete with such rodder's touches as a radical chopped top, a gutted interior, and rear fenders that had been bobbed and molded in for that mean and hungry look that could intimidate the compe***ion just by standing still. Bob's younger brother, Terry, remembers what his brother purchased. "Man, that was a long time ago," he says, "but I remember the body was in excellent shape and covered in light-gray primer. It had a real hot flathead bolted in, but the guys Bob bought the car from wanted to keep that engine. Dave Bell had built a heated late-model Olds engine with six carburetors and put it in his '57 Corvette, and that engine would really run. Bob bought the Olds and had it put in the '32. We ran a Cadillac/LaSalle transmission with Second and High gears. I'll never forget sitting at the starting line, ready to go. The whole car shook, and really took off when the flag dropped." Keith Randol kept the '32 tuned to a razor's edge for drag racing so the Tindles made a good showing at the strip, but Bob wanted to get more into the car-show side of the hobby. As Terry tells the story, "The car was painted lemon-yellow. It looked nice when it was entered in the Portland Roadster Show in 1960, and it did well. Then Bob decided to create an all-out show car. Keith Randol had just started up a shop, and Bob took the '32 there for a drastic rebuild. I should mention that Keith was a machinist, and years later went to Indy with a rear-engined racecar owned by Rolla Vollstedt. This was a short time before all the teams made the big move to rear-engine cars. Keith was a real pioneer. I don't know if Bob intended to go all-out with the sedan, but he would dream up an idea and Keith would take that idea a step or two further, making the '32 very innovative and far ahead of what was being built at the time." The reconstructed show 'n' go Tudor turned out to be a quarter-mile, straight-line compe***ion sedan riding on a Sprint Car-style ch***is. The ch***is itself was almost jewel-like in construction, having been fabbed from 3-inch-diameter, 0.120-inch wall seamless Shelby tubing, bent at curvaceous angles by Randol with a torch and tube bender. Adjustable suspension was added, along with a complete front axle ***embly and Halibrand quick-change setup pulled from a 20-year-old Sprint Car that also gave up its Halibrand wheels. Obviously, Randol was honing his skills for future forays on circle tracks, but the blending of the two styles gave Bob's '32 an unquestionable "Wanna race?" at***ude. **** Maris rebuilt the Olds with meticulous attention to detail. Case in point: After hours of porting and polishing the heads, the combustion chambers were slicked up and given a final polish with jeweler's rouge. Enlarged to 417.63 ci, the mill was equipped with Hilborn injectors, using a front-mounted Potvin blower. A B&M Hydro trans capably handled the 600-plus horses that Marris concocted with the trademark wham/bang shifts. The ch***is/engine package was treated to a liberal dose of chrome plating and polishing, which made it a shame to cover it up with the body and hood panels. Therefore, Bob gave Randol another engineering puzzle: make the all-steel body tilt for display. Keith, the wizard machinist, went through the body, adding anti-flex support members. It was a strain on the average muscleman to raise the body, but the extra grunts and groans were worth it when the eye-popping engineering was revealed. What the completed showpiece ch***is needed was an equally exquisite body, and Von's Body Shop was ***igned the task of getting the panels straighter than Henry ever made them. Reproduction fibergl*** Ford parts maker Dee Westcott was given the job of building the top insert. When the metal was deemed worthy to paint, Von's covered the panels in Naples Orange (minus the peel), and thusly, the tart, tangy Orange Crate was officially born. The fresh Orange Crate blitzed the '61 Winternationals, handily took the America's Best Compe***ion Car trophy at the '61 Oakland Roadster Show, and graced the Feb. '62 issue of Hot Rod magazine. This was quite an accomplishment for the Orange Crate Gang from Portland, Oregon, considering that at the time, California was considered the leader of the pack when it came to hot rods. For the 1962 show-business encore, the Orange Crate was treated to some additional, point-gathering details (as if it needed any more). It also competed once again at the Winternationals before Bob sent the wild, trophy-winning sedan on a whirlwind tour of car shows throughout the U.S. Afterward, Revell sent an engineer to Bob's high-performance automobile dealership, where the Orange Crate was diligently measured inch-by-inch for a model-car kit that would become a solid seller. In 1963, the hot rod celebrity made what was to be its final showing at the Oakland Roadster Show, once again winning the coveted America's Best Compe***ion Car trophy. Then, the Orange Crate was retired from show business and touring to a space at Bob's hot-car emporium. The details of the story after that become vague. As Terry says, "One possible thing that led to the Orange Crate being retired was the fact that we opened a Chrysler/Plymouth store that year. That took up a lot of extra time." Being a compe***ive dealer also meant there was less time to keep the Orange Crate in tip-top show condition. Terry continues, "In 1964, I bought my own Chrysler/Plymouth store in McMinville, Oregon, and moved there. I sort of lost track of what Bob was doing with the Orange Crate, and by 1965, he'd sold the '32 to a couple of guys he knew who were in the used-car business. That's really the last time I saw the Orange Crate, though people still ask me about it. That's how famous that car was, and still is." Could the decision to sell have been a response to a gentle nudge from officials at Mopar? After all, here was a famous Oldsmobile-powered Ford sedan on a lot where stock Chryslers and Plymouths were being touted as the latest Michigan giant-killers. No one will ever know. Over the years, the Orange Crate could be seen occasionally, whizzing by on the custom trailer Keith Randol built for it, or on hand at a used-car auction or swap meet, each time its once-dazzling appearance a bit more tarnished. Terry states that Bob looked at the sedan a few times, but never expressed any interest in buying the Orange Crate back for old times' sake. Besides, nostalgia drag racing hadn't been born yet, and few of us were very nostalgic about anything in the early '70s. An old compe***ion sedan was virtually useless. Shortly after, the Orange Crate disappeared. Over the last two and a half decades, rumors have abounded about the whereabouts of the Orange Crate. Paul Duchene, an enterprising writer for the Chicago Tribune, recently found the missing Crate. It's alive, if not too pristine, and living in rural Washington, owned since 1975 by drag racer Ted Gord. Gord knows what he has, as well as what needs to be done to get the old warrior back in show condition. He plans to build a shop for just that purpose and have the venerable sedan ready by the end of this year. Wouldn't it be a stupendous comeback if Gord took the Orange Crate back to the Oakland Roadster Show just one more time? Sadly, Bob Tindle wouldn't be there, as he p***ed away recently, but we're sure Terry could be coaxed into coming to Oakland. He might even sign a few Revell Orange Crate kits (recently re-released from Revell-Monogram) for old fans that remember the unforgettable '32 from the early '60s or for new fans taking their first look at this resurrected cl***ic. http://hotrod.gregwapling.com/hot-rod-history/the-story-of-the-orange-crate.html
The Orange Crate was sold last year to a father/son team here in Vancouver, Wa. It lives less than two miles from me. It is being worked on, but not restored. I will not say any more except that the son is a hamber and will post when he is ready....
Thanks guys I'd seen part of that write up but couldn't find it again. I'm not really a car show guy, but it would be cool to see it show up at SIR when the good guys come through. Even if it's on a trailer. great story Pat
I think I built this kit 2 or 3 times. Loved the car, hated the mural of the orange crate. But somehow the ugly cartoon looked ok on the car... does that make sense ??
The car is being readied for a California Hotrod Reunion near you. Stay tuned. Hopefully it will get done. Knowing the owner like I do I'm sure it will. It's a bad*** car.
If you have time to do a little digging,I believe there are some great pics of the "crate" before Bob Tindel bought it, when it was blue and flatty powered. http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=662536
The Orange Crate was built as a drag race/show car only. It was never intended for the street. The block was filled solid and they only ran water in the heads. This was fairly common on early 60's drag race engines. The Potvin front drive blower makes it necessary to remove the stock water pump and stock front cover. A radiator and the additional pump and plumbing would have added unwanted extra weight.
One of the early great cars! I was always proud that Bob was a local guy and got so much recognition for the Orange Crate. Nice to know it will be back again, finally!
Glad to see that its still surviving since its been out of circulation. Orange Crate is one of my all time favorite Hot rods Fryguy
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