Vintage Snapshot: 1962 Pontiac Tempest – Want To See My Rope Drive?
– Posted on May 27, 2023
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Were tires whitewalled on both sides back then, or are these special for this strip show? The unibody was a big deal for GM.
Ralph,
These were a special deal from the tire manufacturer, probably because it was so easy to see the back side of the tire from the opposite side of the car, and Pontiac probably wanted the sidewall appearances to match.
Prior to WW2, many luxury cars equipped with wide whitewall tires from the factory, came with white walls on both sides. I had a very low mileage 1940 Packard 180 Custom Super Eight limousine, and the original unused tire in the trunk had the wide white on both sides. I’ve seen quite a few factory photos of luxury cars where the inner sidewall could be seen and it was white.
The historical part of this situation is that early pneumatic tires were all white, even the tread, as Latex rubber is naturally white. As they were hard to keep clean, tire manufacturers began making the tread area black, by adding carbon powder to the rubber mix, and that’s how the white side wall tire came about.
But by 1962 I suspect you had to be a major buyer of tires [like GM] to ask the tire maker to build tires with double sided whitewall tires. It’s actually easy to do, because back then all tires were built by hand on special machines, and all the worker had to do was use the white band on both sides instead of one.
I would even suggest that the manufacturer went ahead and made a fairly large batch of double sided whitewall tires in each size, making them available to bulk buyers who wanted them for auto shows or advertising purposes.
About 40 to 50 years ago I know the Lester Tire Company advertised in the back cover of Hemmings, the ads noting the availability of their larger tire sizes with whitewalls on both sides.
Bill : Interesting story about double-sided WWs. Never knew that.
Interesting, I never heard that before. So, on more recent whitewalls (including the few currently available) is it still the case that the white portion is just the natural rubber without any black added? Or is it a white application over the black?
There’s another telling of the carbon black story in which it is pointed out that carbon black replaced whatever zinc oxide had to offer in turning rubber into car tires. With the rapid expansion of petroleum refining in the U.S. in the second decade of the 20th century carbon black, as a byproduct of that refining, became cheaper and cheaper while zinc oxide retained a pretty uniform price. By 1920 or so zinc oxide was long gone as a major part of tire manufacture, apart from its use in tire decoration as white sidewalls.
Zinc Oxide and You.
A Tempest funny car?
This is more or less just illustrating how the Tempest was assembled. The body shell was unitized, but because the torque tube linked the front and rear crossmembers, the body and running gear could be joined much like a body-on-frame car, on the same lines.
Say “Ahhhhhh”
Reading a Collectible Auto article about Pontiac’s specialized NASCAR Tempests. They went to the trouble and expense of designing and building a whole new transaxle to take the torque of the biggest V8, and made new aluminum body panels for lightness. But they DIDN’T need to make a special driveshaft. Contrary to intuition, the rope was the strongest link, not the weakest link.
Nice ;
I was in a military electronics store for a car gathering a few years back and stumbled across some BIG crates, they were Mercury engines for car shows, when I showed interest they opened one crate, it was a cutaway V8 engine with a placard in Chinese .
Many years ago a vintage car sales place got in a cut away Chevrolet inline 6 cylinder engine, they had no idea what it was, I knew it was a 1954 (one year only) 325 CID engine with an electric motor instead of a generator so it would rotate and make the pistons go up and down, the valves open and so on .
-Nate
Nate,
I used to collect automotive cut away models. Smaller examples were cylinder heads, pistons, carbs, water & oil pumps, even a valve showing the internal location of the “sodium”. I used to write to various automotive parts suppliers asking for obsolete cut-aways, offering to buy them instead of the part being scrapped. The smallest cut-away I had was a thermostat!
My biggest “haul” was a large selection of flat sheet metal panels, each 6″ square. They were all 3-D stamped with the Ford oval and an ID number. Each had been painted with a layer of primer and then finish color coat on the upper half. I got them from a guy who worked for a paint supplier to Ford Motor Co. They were from the 1946-50 time frame.
One of the biggest cut-aways was a complete drive line for a 1950s DKW; The engine, gearbox, clutch and differential were all cut-away, and a crank on the front allowed the entire assembly to rotate so one can see how it all works.
That DKW drive line is now on display at the Lane Motor Museum in Tennessee.
Nice ;
As a child I loved those cut away things and often wondered where they went as the factory / dealer folks I met always told me they were time and space wasters .
-Nate
A cutaway Ford Falcon was the at the 1964 Brisbane Show, It must have impressed 4 year me, as I still remember it nearly 50 years later.
I tell people it was the last Ford that impressed me.
The last cutaway thing I saw was a diesel injector pump at a diesel service ans parts store hand too it was a Bosch and I had a Toyota clone pump I was repairing, I found out Toyota licensed the Bosch pump then made enough changes to call it their own.