Yesterday was REALDAMNGOOD, for a workday...various pieces of the Holy Grail falling into place... A package arrived, after a wasted week chasing the postal official in charge of those little orange message stickers threatening to send it back home... Reverse foreign aid shipment from the Scandinavian hotrod diaspora! A-V8 Rider sent me my long desired metric '32 speedometer, and Klazurfer sent me a Ford of Germany '32 emblem--which has a RED background on the Ford oval instead of blue! Now I face an existential dilemma--should I keep it reading in proper kilometers so I can terrify passengers with a blip up to 70 in school zones and 130 on the highway...OR should I gear it up 40% or whatever it is with a ratio adapter and use it as a 130 MPH speedo?? A-V8 Rider happened to own some of my great wants and I some of his...so soon some more hotrod history will be seeing action in Norway. THEN...my 37th trip to Barnes and Noble this month finally scored...Rodder's Journal 29 was there. I was doing a futile dig through all the Honda and Mustang crap in the car mag section, rolling my eyes in horror and loathing, when my wife, who is nearly blind, decided to hunt...it was a couple of racks over, logically placed as a barrier between "Cosmopolitan" And "Golf World", and I surely would never have found it. AND...my Stromberg stuff is beginning to post on the HAMB, thanks to Flathead Youngin, who knows how to work ELECTRICITY...the HAMB is now getting the first of about a million sheets of arcane Strombergiana I have collected over the last few decades... It's about as good as a day without Hershey in it gets. Bruce
Can't wait for the Stromberg info! Now thats instant techomatic! Thanks flatheadedness! I wish you would break down and buy a digital and show us your stuff! I'm just going to have to make a personnal visit i guess.
My '48 is an original export car with a metric speedo...I can still remember back in college going into a "slow to 25 MPH" offramp at 120 KPH and smoking through without slowing...then looking over at the kid who had asked for a ride to the grocery and seeing him pale as a sheet, with the last reel of his life still passing before his eyes...I bet he know owns a Volvo and never exceeds 54 MPH.
How about a photo of the RED background German Ford emblem. I've heard of them but don't think I have ever seen one. HRP
Ain't got no electronics for that, and it has a stud on the back that prvents it from going in to the fuzzy disc drive... BUT...it's a brilliant clear ruby red, and almost verges on metalflake because of the fish scale background beneat the the enamel. Same size and shape as a regular USA one. Dick Spadaro has one, and it was pictured in an early issue of Streetrod Builder in an article on rare '32 parts he wrote. It is now on the '32 three window he had at Hershey.
Bruce, when us Canucks switched to the metric system all older speedos were still in MPH. It drove me nuts trying to do a mental conversion. (I suffer from a serious case of CRS! ) The main ones to remember are; 50 KPH is about 30 MPH, (31.07 if your being accurate) 80 KPH equals 49.71 MPH and 100 KPH translates to 62.14 MPH. I took the little stick on "dots" and placed them - with the KPH equivelant - next to the MPH's markings. After a while the conversion comes automaticly and you can remove the "dots."
It's not the numbers on the speedo that scaires people. It' how fast that needle swings over to the peg...
Bruce, when us Canucks switched to the metric system all older speedos were still in MPH. Yeah...I spent my youth driving with a metric speedo in the USA and an American speedo in Europe. Always do things the easy wasy... On the red deuce emblem...scrutiny shows the metal backing to have been made in Birmingham, England...it's from a German Ford...it came from Norway...this old car is really getting international... I need to find out if Ford Germany was a real factory by 1932 or if they were still just an assembly operation. Back to the biooks. A better description of its appearance: These things were made by casting the Ford oval with a raised rim and raised letters, then chroming, then flowing the sunken area full of enamel and melting it in an oven, giving clear, completely hard glass or glassy paint. The background under the paint is chromed fish scale texture, the paint is translucent ruby red...the effect is almost like candy red over coarse flake base!
I love happy people. This is true hot rodding to me. I was thinking of posting a pic of the red badge when reading this. But after having read your lively description Bruce, I find it totaly unnecessary. There is a pic in one of our other deuce-fun posts from a couple of weeks back. Can be found. Quote: " should I keep it reading in proper kilometers" You should Bruce. I wouldn't have thought of anything else if I where you. A few rides around the block and you get the hang of it. The majority of old/classic/vintage US cars over here have Miles/h speedos. We have learned to live with it. "....nope officer. Can't be the fact ...I was only going 50 as the sign says. checked your radarequipment lately??" Paul
Wicked! I'd really dig seeing a pic of it if you can find some way of getting one up..(probably won't work in the scanner either, i'm guessing)
The Jalopy Journal
