Featured Folks Of Interest Fram & Autolite belly up?

Several decades ago, Consumer Reports magazine did a comparison test on several different brands of oil filters and Fram came out as being one of the best. Go figure....!

 

Jack do you think some of these Brands along with their hard assets (manufacturing facilities, equipment and inventories) will sold in such a way as the Brands can continue as a stand alone company or part of another company?
Dan

 

No, probably not. with the accusations of "creative bookkeeping" (Fraud), those individual brand assets could be tied up in criminal and/or civil litigation for years.

 

When accountants figure, figures lie...

 

Curious what NGK plug number you're using, as I've found several.

 

NGK 7373. BBF engine. I’ve been in a spark plug hunt for ages as Autolite hasn’t made AF-32 plugs in decades, so I’m relying on NOS for my Boss engine.

 

Brands will get sold off and someone will start printing labels and filters with the name brand on them again and the consumer won’t even notice.

 

These brands are popular and profitable. They are all made in China so the supply will continue unless they can't emerge from bankruptcy. But there will be empty shelves unless the exporter gets paid. It's a privately held company so it's future is nebulous unless they can find a Shining Knight. Maybe Warren Buffet who has made major bucks from his acquisitions.

 

My application is Edelbrock heads on a FE Ford. Edelbrock recommends BKR5E and/or 7938, but I've also found 7390 and BKR5EY.
Is the 7373 a new style plug, or a new number of an previous plug? Thanks.
Bob

 

Not all of them, for example I've seen fram oil filters made by hastings. I think it just depends on the application or how old the stock is. I still won't run them on anything though haha.

 

Yes - see if you can find it on Ebay. Those sellers don't seem to care. But it did take me 3 orders one time to get someone to ship to CA. The first 2 sellers just cancelled the transaction and refunded the money without explanation.

 

Autolite still has a couple of midwest US factories, but most are made offshore.

The history of the 'big three' US spark plug manufacturers is interesting. Albert Champion founded his namesake company in 1905, but control rested with his financial backers so he left in 1908. He looked up William Durant who was building Buicks at the time and Durant backed him for the 'Albert Champion' company. There was a court battle over the names, and his company (by now part of the newly-formed General Motors) was renamed AC...

Autolite was formed in 1901 and eventually produced all sorts of electrical parts successfully. By the mid-'50s they were aggressively marketing their spark plugs and had a lot of success in racing. If you go back and look, Autolite decals were everywhere on US racer's cars. No less of a GM guru than Smokey Yunick picked them as his first choice for performance applications, with AC second and Champion a distant third.

In the late '50s Ford started making a concerted effort to reduce maintenance cost on their cars. Features like 'lubed for life' suspension/steering and aluminized exhaust appeared in 1960. Now Ford had used Champion spark plugs for decades up to this point but was unhappy with their longevity. Autolites held up longer, so Ford bought the spark plug and battery divisions (along with the name) from Autolite in 1961 with the remainder of the company being renamed the Prestolite Corporation. They quickly became the OEM plug in Ford products and Ford aggressively marketed them into the replacement market. Champion suffered a double whammy; not only the loss of OEM sales to Ford, but also a much-diminished share of the aftermarket. AC suffered too, but not as badly as they remained as OEM at GM. Complaints from Champion and AC resulted in an anti-trust lawsuit being filed by the Feds which Ford eventually lost (I guess being too good can be a problem) and the Autolite plug division (plus the name) was sold to Bendix in 1973 which is when Ford switched to the 'Motorcraft' name.

Ford continued to buy plugs from Autolite for OEM use (with Motorcraft branding on them) but Autolite was passed around due to all the corporate mergers and whatnot, having multiple parent companies. Somewhere along the line, they let quality slip, and rather badly. Ford started having warranty issues with plug failures on new cars in the late '70s. There was a period for a while that if you bought a set of 8 of either brand, chances were good that at least one would fail by 10K miles (I know it happened to me). Apparently Autolite didn't address the problem, so Ford went back into the spark plug business and once they had enough capacity to supply more than just themselves they aggressively re-entered the aftermarket. This was very nearly a repeat of the '60s and they were warned off by the feds. Motorcraft plugs disappeared from most parts houses for a few years, eventually re-appearing with nearly zero advertising this time. Applications are now limited however. I'll note that if you run into NOS Motorcraft plugs from the transition era, the Autolite versions have all-white insulators, the Ford-built Motorcrafts have blue rings on them.

Autolite did address the quality problems eventually, but for a while they were offering 'lifetime warranty' on them to lure customers back. Yeah, they got that bad....

 

Thanks for the history lesson.

 

I have a nice big sheet of fabric-reinforced nitrile rubber, and when I have a diaphragm fail in a fuel pump that is rebuildable, I just cut out a new one, "manufacture" a new fuel pump rod out of a 1/4 inch bolt, and Bob's yer uncle.

 

You might be right. Maybe someone in the company saw the writing on the wall and decided to do a cash grab. Maybe it was just a cash grab.

 

Excellent history
Thanks
Dan