Does anyone else remember this thread?- https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/my-dream-hot-rod-build.724986/#post-8055192
Actually the 39/40 Ford can be improved . Up till a couple years ago I would have said a very a mild rearward chop to take the hump out of the roof, { the 41 to 48's where even worse!} but then I saw a 40 at back to the 50's in Minn. where the owner used 2 door sedan doors , recontured the window frames and made a three window coupe very much like a 35/36 Ford coupe. It was perfect ! and I am a die hard customizer and I had a 40 coupe back in 98 and could not bring myself to touch it, because like most I thought the 40 Ford was perfect! But that 3 window version was a step up and beyond ! Who knows I might still own her if I had thought of that idea! lol Larry
Regardless if ‘this one‘ is the same described in @ONE BAD 51 MERC post above or not, I think the arched upper door/window shape is ......well....very off the mark, to put it mildly. If this design had been ‘factory built’ rodders would be chopping that hump and lowering the rear portion of the roofline as standard practice. It is very reminiscent of a mid/late ‘30s Huppmobile coupe that was hideous in shape. Ray
There were some Duesenbergs with a Factory built body, most were coach built and , yes there were several different designers. If you want to get detailed, check with the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Club site. But the point is they are the best car ever built so there aren't any design flaws.
John Lee, Right you are! Truthfully, Buehrig's designs for Duesenbergs I believe was for factory bodies. The Clark Gable car was coachbuilt, and designed by them not him I'm pretty sure. I have been to the ACD museum several times. For me it's like going to church!!
Yep, I've had 3 Cords and my Dad had an 35 Auburn 851 Speedster, belonged to the ACD Club for many years. Now I just have hot rods and customs, 29 Ford Roadster with a Nailhead Buick, 51 Merc chopped with a Carson top and a 39 Ford tub with chopped top. Still diggin' cars. JW
I'm still waiting to get my first Cord! I had one chance back in '84. Local car owned here in Kingston since before WW II. My dad tried to buy it after the war. Couldn't afford it. My chance came in '84. Car was in great shape and came with a spare engine. Price was $35,000 I could only raise $25,000. Six months after the sale it sold again for $60,000! I've had a lot of great cars, but I'll probably never get a Cord! H__ll, I'll probably never get a Continental MK II!
Not the same one. The one I saw had stock caps and trim rings and the guy told me he used part of the roof of a 41 coupe and it had a 41 back glass. I would have kept the 40 back glass, but the roof flowed better into the deck lid. This one still has the "hump" in the roof like Hnstray pointed out and is the one part of 40's era coupes that I never cared for and always want to reprofile them to get rid of it.
The Duesenberg factory did not have the facilities to construct bodies. Most Duesenbergs were series customs ordered from the catalog. When a customer ordered a car with a cataloged body, Duesenberg bought a body in white from the coachbuilder and finished it to the customer's specs (paint, top & interior). Ask any designer and they'll tell you how, after the fact, they realize that they could improve their designs. And that doesn't take into account how production expediencies can alter the original design. "Fred Duesenberg used to say one trouble with American cars was that too much engineering was done in the purchasing department!" Gordon Buehrig Buehrig has been credited online with designing several cars for Ford, but he did not design cars there. He was a body engineer at Ford. A terrible waste of talent. Franklin Q. Hershey, another one of the immortals, managed to design the '55 T-Bird but otherwise they wasted his talent too.
I'm constantly amazed at the way enforced changes to designs end up improving them. You'd think the design would be compromised, but if I've improved a design once in the course of belatedly accommodating an unforeseen practicality I've done it a hundred times. Perhaps it's that finding out what a design ought to be takes time and intense engagement with it – you create the standard of perfection against which the design should be measured by grappling with the design. Working instead to a purported universal standard is thus in a sense cheating.
to your point: In my opinion this great looking trucks looks have been improved...without deleting necessary, functional aspects. bumpers, spare, length of bed, horns, mirrors, ground clearance, etc.
@tb33anda3rd .......yep, all it’s practical functionality preserved.....except one. accommodating a driver/passenger ........
looking at the truck, it looks like they lowered the nose more than the cab? stretched the hood? a little compromise of interior room? I would like to get behind the wheel to see how good they did in the redesign.
There is a couple of nice sedans for sale for around 70k right now, in 2020 dollars not such a bad deal that's about 10k in 1980's dollars. JW
Two things bothered me about that: the top of the hood seemed to slope down to the cowl, and the rear axle was too wide. I fixed them here: To solve the lack of room in that chopped and channelled cab, I stretched the cab, both in the cowl and in the doors, to allow for a more horizontal seating position, obviously sacrificing a bit of bed length thereby. Stretching the doors gives a bit of long-low horizontal emphasis, but doing that alone would have made the cab too dominant. It does become a different sort of truck, more of a coupé-utility along Hudson/Studebaker lines and less of a pure work truck, but I'd submit that the chop and channel had already done that. Improvement?
True, but that's stock '34 truck. I also think it sits too far forwards. Mostly it's too complicated to change it in a quick Photoshop
I should have mentioned, I love channelled full-fendered cars of that era. I think the fact that they approach the proportions of a much bigger car, but in miniature, is part of that.
Ned, as someone who is very familiar with Duesenbergs, especially Murphy convertible coupes, that first picture you posted appeared to me as an abomination. I knew it at a glance. The hood was too short, the top was too high, the perfect proportions of the original car had been destroyed! BTW, that is Duesenberg J192, chassis 2212, still in largely unrestored original condition. Upon delivery to its original owner, Caroline May Hoopes, she rejected it because she did not like the canvas top. It was returned to the dealer, and the leather top was installed, which met her approval. That top is still on the car. The Green car is about perfect, an original MCC. The silver/gray car is a replica, and the proportions are messed up. And the swept panel on the door doesn't work with this body style, either.
You'll have noticed that I gave the secret away in Post 49. I didn't list the guys who knew their Duesenbergs intimately, like you. I didn't actually raise the top; I scaled down the wheels and fenders about 10%, which caused everything else to look too tall. I did shorten the wheelbase in the hood area, which exacerbated that.
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