Earlier this year we camped and hiked at Joshua Tree National Park in the Mojave Desert of Southern California. Renowned for its famous rock formations, and the namesake trees, it also features some historical sights, including a bit of automotive history.
I’m not great at identifying cars that are much older than me (model year 1957, I like to think, as I was born after the new car launch in the Fall of 1956), so here are a few random but not hugely interesting finds.
This truck (which I can’t identify, any ideas?) was fitted with an inline six which featured the Ferro name cast into the block.
Ferro was a Cleveland, Ohio manufacturer of marine engines, but most of their own designs seemed to be large one to three cylinder 2 stroke engines. There’s some speculation on the web that they also cast parts for other manufacturers, and this might be a Graham Paige.
But this was the star of the show, and I needed a bit of offline help from Paul to confirm that it is indeed a Lincoln Model L with its original V8.
Here it is, in its aluminum block (correction: crankcase. See comments below) glory. Foreshadowing the Chevy Vega in its construction (correction: not really), this engine was a 358 cubic inch 60º V8 introduced just after World War 1, when Lincoln was still owned by the Leland’s, pre-Ford. Ford kept this engine in their lineup until 1930.
This picture matches photo’s I’ve found of the Model L cowl and dashboard, so the engine itself was definitely not transplanted into another vehicle.
Even after the acquisition of Lincoln, bodies were not built by Ford but by coachmakers such as Murphy, LeBaron, and Fleetwood. Presumably this one was cutoff somewhere aft of the front doors and a rear bed, either purpose built, from another truck, or maybe even from a wagon, was grafted on. Most of the non-truck body panels were aluminum.
Fuel pump by Stewart … presumably before Warner came to the party.
The tire cords have held up surprisingly well in the dry desert environment. Most of the rubber is gone.
One last shot of that great engine.
About a month later I made another trip to the Mojave and found some more random Trailside Classics; all but the Ford shown below were on public land. If anyone can identify the others, please comment.
A terrific find. Auto paleontology! Love that aluminum block – amazing. What you are showing us with your photos is revealing auto history. These vehicles are a century old and have reached peak patina. From experience, I know that the metals used to make these vehicles was heavy and impressive.
No wonder these vehicles cost so much 100 years ago. Few corners were cut.
Just remember plastics were not invented back then. There were no shortcuts available.
Fascinating pictures–I’ll surely never see these cars in person. So different from what happens to discarded cars in America’s more humid areas!
FERRO: If the collective internet is only speculating about this, I’ll help set things straight. It was a big concern on Cleveland’s east side, and the marine engines were only part of the story. This is from a 1950 newspaper article when they were still running full-tilt, mentioning they made castings for several Detroit concerns, and were a major supplier to Ford–going back to 1906.
My late father worked for Ferro late 1940s–early 1950s. Ferro was–among other things–casting some of Chrysler’s 331 hemi heads, and he was always proud that Ferro’s scrap rate was no worse than Chrysler’s. Ford had built its first engine assembly plant on Cleveland’s west side a few years before the big Foundry (“Cleveland Casting Plant”) went in alongside it in 1952. My father had lots of contact with the Ford people, but could see the writing on the wall; Ferro closed about 1954, and my father jumped over to Ford. The clipping is from Cleveland’s black newspaper, the Call and Post, and gives a snapshot of Ferro’s doings:
Great newspaper article. Thanks for posting it.
I worked in metals manufacturing back in the early 1970’s and “life in the plant” was pretty much like it is described in that 1950’s article. In today’s times, no one would dare publish an article with that much detail about employees!
Technically, it’s not an “aluminum block” so much as it is the crankcase. The two cast iron cylinder “blocks” are bolted to the large and rigid crankcase. This was an extremely common way to build engines in the early decades of the automobile industry; single unitized crankcase/block assemblies were very complex castings, and that generally came later.
This type of construction was almost universal: motorcycles, cars, trucks, airplane engines. And of course it lived on for a very long time in motorcycle engines and airplane engines, as well as others, like the Hall-Scott truck/bus engines, and the long family of Miller/Offenhauser/Meyer-Drake racing engines. And of course air cooled engines like the VW and others.
Ford’s Model T was one of the early exceptions, and showed the way forward with a single iron block/crankcase. And of course he was the first to master a single iron V8 block, in 1932.
Thanks for the correction. I realized that the cylinders were cast iron at the time but had forgotten and didn’t look closely at the photo’s when wrote this up a few months later. After last month’s Vega discussion, I thought I’d toss in a comment regarding the connection, which was in fact not really relevant. In the “interior” photo one can see that the bell housing and transmission are aluminum, so that material was used where it could save weight but not have to deal with cylinder wear. FYI here is a fascinating SAE paper from 1920 on the use of aluminum which shows the cross-section of an OHV 60° V engine, and talks about the use of cast iron cylinder liners (sleeves). It also mentions experimental cast aluminum wheels, and even cast bodywork parts, which makes me wish I had looked at the door skins more closely.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44717915?seq=19
I was hoping to go out there and shoot some photos and of the cars, any chance you could roughly tell me where these are at? Thanks
I hope you stopped at China Ranch Date Farm for a date (milk) shake. They’re positively sublime. Now I want one. Fortunately, it’s only about a 90 minute drive for me.
I’m jealous you’re so close! Yes, I camped the night before in a stunningly beautiful location north and west of the date ranch, soaked at the nearby hot springs (natural, not the developed ones) and then visited the ranch in the morning. I got there before opening so I got in a 5 mile hike along the Amargosa River first, and enjoyed a coffee-date shake afterwards. It was indeed excellent.
For those not aware… the area dman visited is about a 90 minute drive from Las Vegas, and you traverse some of the pre-automotive westward migration routes. It’s very pretty. I usually go there a few times a year.
I was trying to find a photo of what this Lincoln might have looked like before it was hacked into a truck and left abandoned in the elements.
Maybe something like this?
(1929 Lincoln Model L 2 window town car)
Here is a great video of a complete running Lincoln.
Thanks for posting this. The cowl details, including those gorgeous cast cowl light brackets, look identical. The small diameter steel crossbar connecting the headlights makes sense now; it also serves as a license plate bracket. I didn’t think of taking a profile shot or pacing off the wheelbase, but the truck actually looked shorter, like it may have been based on a roadster frame.
This wasn’t exactly the Lincoln pickup I was expecting!
(blackwood)
I think he found the Ur-Blackwood. Or maybe the Lincoln Petrified Wood.
The dashboard from the unidentified 1930s car looks a lot like a 1938 Plymouth? Photo from Jalopy Journal.
Thanks. Looks like a design that would work for RHD with no effort. Were these Plymouths exported to Australia … or British colonies in Africa or Asia?
Not sure about Australia, but Plymouth seems to have been sold with right-hand drive in England as the “Chrysler Kew Six.” One was tested by “The Motor” in the January 4, 1938 issue. They noted that some adaptations had been made for the British market, such as leather upholstery, a “sunshine roof,” a rear-seat center armrest, and a 12-volt electrical system. They had praise for the headlamps, “which have the word ‘export’ engraved upon the glass and provide a first-class driving light, whether in the main position or when dipped,” and the “direct-acting” (tubular) shock absorbers, which were still something of a novelty.
An acceleration graph with the article indicates a 0-50 time of 15.1 seconds, 0-60 in about 25 seconds, and a top speed of 73 mph. The price was 375 pounds.
They were exported to Australia, as kits. They were assembled here with local bodies, due to strict local content rules. The large operation was later bought out by Chrylser in ’51, which became Chrylser Australia, later a full manufacturer.
Nice post. Very enjoyable to contemplate. They’ve become like part of the landscape, still very much man-made, but coloured and weathered in the way of the surrounds.
Or, better, perhaps, they’re now like abstract sculptures.