I always wondered when or why car guys used Portawalls.Were these used if you could not afford whitewall tires,or did guys just prefer them,maybe some of our senior members could chime in.
Back then,some used car lots would use them to "Dress'up an old car ..make it look better to impress unsuspecting buyers
Just a matter of cost. Either you were buying new tires and were too cheap to pay the small additional amount for white walls .... or your existing blackwalls were too good to throw away and you wanted to look spiffy. Used car lots bought and installed a lot of them.
When I was a kid in the 70's, we couldn't find wide whites at the tire stores in our part of town, so off to the JC Whitney catalog we went. Then we found the guy with the tire buffing machine...
This is identical to my first car. I saved for 6 mos to get the cash for the car and the tags and insurance in 1963. Before I got insurance and tags on it I went to Penn-Jersey and bought some port-a-wals, baby Moons and trim rings. It looked a lot better. I couldn't drive it until the tags came in the mail but It sure looked good out of the dining room window in the back yard. People love to bad mouth them because they never lived with them or needed them. I have a fond memory for the first dress up item I ever bought. My port-a-walls were the 1" variety because the wide whites were p***e by then. The car had perfectly good tires on it. A teenager couldn't afford to buy new WWs when the BWs had plenty of tread left. Can you remember the first dress up item that you ever bought for your first car? I bet you can. I was making big money at 2.30 cents an hr.
i used them for the exact reason posted . got my tires out of a junk yard , then bought the port a walls to clean up the tires ............... steve
Portawalls ?????---Oh I know what you mean,Flopawalls. Had a set on my first car,went throu the auto car wash and auto tire brushs moved in and ate then up -then split them out on the floor.----------TwoChops
As I remember- if you had near new blackwalls & didn't want to ****can them for white walls- you bought portawalls. I'm betting nearly no one bought new blackwalls & portawalls at the same time.
In the post '61 era when the skinny WW's came out you couldn't find a WWW in a tire store or gas station without "$pecial ordering" them, so the Portawalls. They lasted one parking curb or one trip at freeway speeds If I remember right.
PORTAWALLS WERE ABOUT $5.00 if i could afford them , cheep compared to tires I bought 2 used 8.25x15 tires and think i paid $20 for them after that i started as a mechanic for $60 a week not much money available to most used a rubber mallet to get them seated, took a lot of beating to fit them in rim, but strong ,young ,and ambitious 4500
Easy way to change the look with the ability to change back. Some like to change it up more often than others and at $800+ for a set of new wide whites???
My buddy's dad is an older gentlemen. Took care of some things before he started a family. He would be what you call a "senior member". I love it when he tells stories and you guessed correctly. They were a cheap way to make your car look expensive. He tells a great story of someone stealing his portawalls. He installed his (I guess) the correct way by tucking the inner part into the rim and re-mounting the tire. Came out from the movies and all that was left was a thin band around the lip of the rim. He was hot. Also, he would tell stories of running his tire literally down to the cords because he couldn't afford new ones. He said even used tires at the junk yards were expensive. He may also have been a cheap guy, but after all these years of messing around with old Fords, he finally has the car he's always wanted: a '39 Four door convertible w/ a full dress MCF engine. Funny to note, this car has real white walls. Its just a gorgeous car.
Back in the 50's and 60's they were the used car dealers best dress-up tool. First came the white metal rings that snapped under the small poverty caps, then came along wide rubber port o walls later followed by the pinstripe white walls and even thin red lines became popular by the mid 60's My dad's used car lot consumed m***ive quan***ies of those things.
One factor was that back then we didn't have interstates so most of our driving was around town, consequently we put few miles on our cars every year...........tires lasted forever. If you had blackwalls when you bought the car it didn't make economic sense to s**** them for new ww tires, so Portowalls were one solution. In 1963-4 I worked at a Ford Dealership (saw the very first Mustangs coming off the truck and the riot that ensued) and every week a subcontractor would come in with a tire shaving machine and turn the blackwall tires on the cars on the used car lot into whitewalls. That made the cars worth more money and also they sold quicker. Portowalls actually held up well unless you curbed them and since we were not going at interstate speeds they didn't fly apart like they would at todays highway speeds. I think I paid 50 cents apiece for them back then, maybe a buck at most. Don
This jarred my memory. Those white plastic rings were factory equipment on MoPars in the '46-'49 period when true whitewalls were still scarce due to wartime shortages. Extending that logic, is it possible Port-a-walls were a response to the Korean-war whitewall shortage in '51-'52? -Dave
Pep Boys used to have 99 cent sales on portawalls in the mid to late fifties. We used to stock up with a couple of sets in 15" and 16" sizes for the next driver.
A friend of mine found 200 sets in a ba*****t of an auto parts store in Virginia about 2 years ago. stored correctly in a cool ba*****t out of the light they still sell good I only have 5 sets of 14 " red walls left !!! In the 50's and 60's we just couldn't afford new tires if the old tires were good, and that holds true today,as the price of new tires is about $800 and the portawalls are about $50 delivered to your door. only wished I had more CADILLAC DAVE
I found a set of double red line port a walls and a thin white line set in the trash at Autofair in Charlotte.
Around '73. My buddy and I "shared" a '64 Malibu. We worked at an Enco station. Every week we would pool some cash from our paycheck and buy something for the car. 8 weeks of that went into new tires (one every 2 weeks) , Blackwalls. Walking around the Rosebowl swapmeet one weekend, He saw a set of Portawalls. I thought they were ugly as hell. Wide whites on a '64 would look like ****. He bought them for 4 bucks. I *****ed and moaned about not wanting them on the car. He took them home and painted them out to look like a 1 inch whitewall and put them on. It looked pretty good. Painted the wheels silver and threw on a set of Baby Moons ($7 for the set at Pep Boys). We were sure we were cool as hell.
They could be a pain to get centered when the bead popped up. Put some on customers cars, never botherd to have any on my cars. Whatever was on the car was good enough for me.
back in my high school days every car lot would put them on all the use cars and a guy with a iron to rethread tires would rethread the tires so they looked better
When I worked at the local Dodge dealership, the truck would come along as mentioned before, He would mount the tire on a fixture, grind a contact patch, put some adhesive on and drop white wall in place and then apply some heat and pressure with a press and the tire came out with a white wall. This fellow had all kinds of appliques. Thin line, doubles, triples, stuff with gold or white diamonds, 2, 3, and 4 inch wide, red strip, blue stripe, came in 13, 14, and 15. I thinks it was started at about 8 bucks a tire for 13 narrow stripes and went up accordingly. This was back in 64-66.
J c Whitney also sold White Wall Paint.. port a wall did not need touch up and they were cheaper than the rubber paint......
I had'em b4 i could afford to import some thin w/w, and gotta be honest never had problems w/ highway speeds. But curbing them is an issue. I never curbed a tire since i got real w/w thou.......here i said it, jinxed for good.
I've ran portawalls since I got my car. I plan on repainting the rims soon so while they're off, I'll actually just paint the tires with some of that eBay tire paint. Portawalls were $40 for a set of 4. REAL whitewalls are a lot more than that. I don't care how they look now, but I did have to blow out a set or 2 to find out that they don't like being driven at highway speeds. With bagging the car and planning to put in A/C and other things eating at the cost, yes, portawalls work fine. Had to find an old as hell tire guy to get him to agree to put em on, but oh well. Some punk slashed all the tires on the cars on my block a month after I first got them. Luckily, they were $35 tires and I just popped them off and stuck the cut ports on the new tires.
I had one set and those were on my 55 Metropolitan Convertible. Dad sent me a new set of tires for it via Greyhound but they were blackwall and no one ran black walls in 1964. Reason for running them was simple. They were cheap and before the mid 60's damned few car guys drove cars with blackwall tires. Even when I ordered my 69 Cutl*** S with Blackwalls and poverty caps in late 1968 The salesman that my dad went to to order it had a fit because I didn't want whitewalls. The car got a new set of chrome reverse wheels the second day I had it with 76 miles on it. The only reason I didn't put them on the first day was that the dealer didn't have the car ready. The car got in on the train on Wednesday and I got home on Sunday night, did the paperwork and picked up the car on Monday.
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