by waaytoomuchintothis » Sun Jun 22, 2014 1:23 pm
The only picture of my only rod/custom is in a box in the storage shed. It was a '41 Ford Deluxe Tudor Sedan, with the old 85 horse flathead still running with hundreds of thousands of miles on it. I found an Offenhauser manifold that would take three of the one-barrel Holley carbs that were stock, and just for fun, I got two more carbs from Standard Parts (later NAPA), still in the box with Ford script on them (I also got coils, fuel pumps, elbow shocks and a bunch of other stuff from them, all in Ford script boxes-- I made a deal and cleared a shelf of old Ford stuff). That particular Standard Parts depot bought all the parts from the old Ford plant in Memphis decades before. It was wonderland in there. I sold it to a guy who worked at the American LaFrance fire engine factory in Wisconsin, and I saw it in a magazine a year later. Prettiest red you ever saw. He put the flathead in something else and stuffed something huge under the hood. I don't remember what it was, but he stuffed it in there.
The reason that red looked so good to me was that I messed up the paint. I dug around all over Memphis to find an original 1941 Ford-Mercury paint chip chart. I wanted the creamy beige that was on Lincolns that year. I found it and had the painter order it by the original number. When I went to pick it up, the paint job was flawless- a really fine job. YELLOW. The paint chips had discolored over time, and it was a shade of light yellow. In those days, paint chip charts for shops didn't have names for the colors, just numbers. The chip charts at dealers had the names.