History How reliable were T model fords

The owner’s manuals had instructions for removing the pan to adjust the rods, and remove the head to scrape carbon from the pistons, among many other things that 99% of drivers today would not imagine doing.

 

Back when the Model T came out, most everyone lived on farms, something like 95%. When you live on a farm/ranch, you learn real quickly to be a Jack of all trades! Most everyone in the model T days could do everything, almost!










Bones

 

Not as early as the Model T, but my grandfather used to make a round trip Southern New Jersey to South Texas every year starting in 1927. I think he drove Packards in those days. Later Chryslers up until he retired in 1950. He owned a pretty successful business, so the cars were always new.

My father tells stories of him and his dad using whatever parts they could get to keep a 1937 Plymouth sedan, and a 41 Dodge pickup running through the war. Few new parts were available, so it was either find the correct part in a junk yard, or make whatever brand new part you could get work in your application. By the time they junked the sedan in 1948 he said it had parts from many brands of car / truck / tractor and hardware store parts cobbled together.

Even when my Dad was in college a lack of money made him creative. He sold his year old 49' Ford to pay tuition, and bought a $40 40' Studebaker coupe. After a year of the sixty mile weekly each way to college (he went home to work as a painter Friday-Sunday) the motor came apart. It got a four cylinder Ford motor and trans out of a neighbors rusted away 40' (?) Pickup. I kid him about being a closet Hot Rodder, but it was just about getting the car back on the road cheap.

We forget how even into the sixties they didn't last. Dad was a factory rep in the carpet business from the late fifties to the late sixties. His company replaced his station wagons every 50k or two model years. He drove about 30k a year. Even then they would ususally have had a valve job along the way. Granted they were loaded down with samples, and he ran the snot out of them, but he says when they were traded they were wrung out. Mostly Fords, but some Chevy's too, and the results were the same.

Now my OT daily driver just rolled 200k, and I've barely touched it beyond regular maintenance.

 

Unlike today’s cars that will shut off if there’s a minor problem, the old cars will run even if worn out and well below 100% performance.

There’s a story that my wife’s grandfather’s first car was a 30’s Pontiac coupe that he bought sometime after coming to Canada from Holland.
The car burnt a piston so he removed the piston and rod and whittled a block of wood to seal the hole and drove it for years on 5 cylinders. He was a butcher and supposedly hauled pigs in the rumble seat.
I like to joke that only a man who wore wooden shoes would drive a car with a wooden piston.


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My father-in-law was born in 1914, and I remember him telling about driving a Model T with carbide headlights, which he said "gave you just enough light to see how dark it was."

 

Thanks for all of the replies. It sounds like they were more reliable than I assumed. I see there are a few different opinions of reliability, but the one I am working with is not sitting on the side of the road needing a tow. It would appear that they required a lot of maintenance, but so did a horse. If there was a service center near by, and you had the cash it would be easy to drop the car in every few months for a going over. The full service probably took less time than it takes to find the sparkplugs in some modern cars.

It also appears that that had a life of 5 to 10 years before requiring a major rebuild. I was reading on a different forum a discussion on new off topic Mercedes and BMW's. The consensus was that they are uneconomical to own after ten years, unlike the Mercedes of the 70's and 80's. When you compare that to the T model, which could easily be rebuilt, they don't stack up to bad.

Steve from down under

 

1st, lets hear about the T you are working on, and 2nd, with out pictures we dont believe you. and, lets not for get that due to they're popularity, we can assume that before about 1920 or so, everybody that could drive most likely learned to drive in a model T

 

New cars have default modes that will allow them to continue to run with lots of issues.

 

Only because they don’t have to.
I don’t know how to shoe a horse but could learn if I had to

 

Things change so fast now is the reason something 10 years old is hard to find parts for, yet you can still find NOS stuff for ModelT’s every once in a while. They were basically unchanged from start to end, parts interchanged and were everywhere since so many were built. They were designed to be rugged, but simple enough the average owner could work on them, and cheap enough anybody could afford one. If Henry could have kept building them and selling them, he would have, but the other car makers were updating all the time and Ford’s sales were falling. From the T onward, everything has gotten more complex and less and less people do their own work. Can you imagine having to get out and break down one of today’s tires on the side of the road and patch the tube? Back then, people didn’t mind getting their hands dirty, it was just part of life. So the T was the perfect car at the perfect time. It may seem crude by today’s standards, but times back then were more crude than they are now.

 

I recall my old man saying a lot of the cars even from the 50's & early 60's were worn out by 40/50k. Some even earlier. I have to wonder sometimes when people try to sell older, original cars and mention "only 80k miles on it". I'm thinking, it's been worn out twice.

 

Remember that when the T came out it replaced horses and most people lived within walking distance of work, or lived on a farm. No one commuted 2 hours at 65mph to work,
So if the T wouldn’t start you could just walk, and it would take a lot longer to get to the service interval if you only drove a few miles a week on average.

Also the T was a lot of maintenance compared to modern cars but not compared to the horses it replaced.
You did the have to feed the T when you weren’t using it and you didn’t have to shovel it’s shit. I’d much rather change oil once a month than clean out stalls every day!


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The model T was designed to replace the horse, as has been mentioned. Ole Henry designed the T very well to do it’s job. One of the things was a flexible frame to meet the demands of the roads at the time and a very easy to shift transmission and a tuff little engine. But nobody remembers these things. They only remember the T heating as it had no water pump.Somthing that was added later. The other down fall of the T was no air cleaner and a carb that hung down in the dust. This single factor contributed to the short life of the rings, more than any other factor. But all in all, for it’s time,it was a great ,very reliable car, if maintained!

Most of the problems the T had was due to what people did to them that caused the problems, like pouring meal in the radiator to seal leaks! Then complain about it overheating. Things like that!




Bones

 

My granddad had a couple of big bars of Babbitt around the homestead. Having survived the depression he never threw anything away and he rarely hired anything done...if he couldn't do a job he preferred to trade some goods or services to get the job done.
I used those bars of Babbitt as winter weight in the back of my cars for years.. I am sure they are still around somewhere.
My dad used to tell a story of granddad pouring a "bearing" in a piece of farm equipment out in the field using a campfire, and some basic tools...shaped the "bearing" with a hand file...or so the story goes....

I guess those were the kind of people that got lots of miles out of their model T's
Chappy

 

So, this is what the NEW HAMB has been reduced to. A three page discussion on the reliability of a Model T Ford. What's next? Luggage trunks? Cowl lights? Flower vases? Impressive hotrodding right there.

 

LOL...I know, right.
Probably should just turn off the lights, lock the door, and hang a sign in the window that reads "Use The Search Function"
What does a history of wrenching on your own car have to do with hot rodding any way?
Chappy.

 

I’m going to get a lot of pushback for this, but cars really didn’t progress much until emissions regulations kicked in during the late sixties and early seventies. Engines would smoke at sixty thousand miles even in the late fifties.

It was a rough start, at first, but to meet the emissions warranty requirements, the manufacturers finally had to innovate, ie develop and adopt new technologies like electronics and fuel injection, which eliminated twice a year tuneups. Even simple things like exhaust systems would last only two years before they became covered warranty items to meet emissions requirements.

Overdrive transmissions came into general widespread use because of Cafe requirements, which in turn dropped total piston travel per mile.

 

With 77 posts, somebody must be interested in discussing the Model T.






Bones

 

Well, you don’t know where you’re at unless you know where you started from.
History is cool.

 

as always true, if not interested then dont click on it

 

I grew up around Ts . My father restored them as long as I can remember , I learned to drive in a field in a 27 touring car 42 yrs ago!!!
There is nothing comparable to driving a T !!
I still own a 1919 touring all original , and is one of my favorite's to cruise around in .
Dad would drag engines home he found in fields ect ,put 4 coils on them ,a carb and half a dozen cranks later they were running .Tear them down and find binder twine in place of Babbitt LOL.
They truly are a wonderful car and until you have driven one don't knock it ...
I still have the 27 touring I learned to drive on as well , although I have put a v8 60 in it .Missed having an original so I bought the 19 touring .

 

That’s kinda what I thought Rusty! I scan through the HAMB and only click on about every tenth thread. Some things just don’t interest me! So I just pass them by with out comment.
It does seem odd to me for a guy to complain about a popular thread! If someone doesn’t like the way it’s going...... move on and don’t click on it anymore! Simple.






Bones

 

Gonna stop going to car markets , tired of having to walk by guys selling dodge stuff , be much easier if they just banned them, the gm tables too now that I think about it , have bought a hat for the sun , and gloves for the greasy and warmth ,so the clothing guy's can stay !!! LOL

 

Considering this is a site devoted to traditional hotrods, and in my opinion the T model can be made into a traditional hotrod, I am finding it very interesting what the original was like. Sure you can get a repo chassis, stick a fuel injected Chev V8 in it add disk brakes and an independent Jaguar rear end and call it a hotrod.

But as a few have mentioned it is good to know where the car started from. I am sure there is at least one person here who has considered taking the original T model engine and seeing just how far they can take it as far as power.

Steve

 

here's one of my wrecks. i can show this because it has a 4 degree advanced cam gear, so its a hotrod. also have a 19 touring, a 23 unfinished roadster, and an un started 14 roadster expensive pile of parts.

 

You have to consider the fact that anywhere out of a major city the "roads" were likely only ruts and tracks. Tires with cotton plies and no bead reinforcement were not well suited for this kind of torture.
When you realize that a good many folks had never traveled more than 20 miles from home or however far their horse could go in a day, the Model T was, to them, like a miracle machine. Oiling of all moving parts was a must and needed to be done every couple hundred miles. Transmission bands needed replacing or relining every few thousand miles or more often depending on how they were used. There is a right way and a wrong way to apply them. Ford produced 15 million of these flivers and people swore by them until more powerful and modern low cost cars were available. The number of cylinders became the big selling point and Chevrolet was an especially big thorn in old Henry's side. Very popular at inception. That killed the market for the Model T. In '27 you could buy a new one for 200 bucks. No one wanted them any more. Henry hated Chevrolet and 6 cylinder engines. But then, Henry hated everything.

 

I for one like these kinds of threads.......people sharing stories of these cars 'back in the day' are really interesting to me.

 

Speaking of horses...
There was a time, if you saw someone broke down along the road, you might likely say to them...
Get a horse!

 

Naw, you got old Henry wrong! He was just a man of his convictions! He was right, way more than he was wrong!








Bones

 

Anyone who's not familiar with the process of pouring and fitting babbitt bearings might find this article interesting. . .

http://www.nwo-modelt.org/blocks.html

Be sure to click on the pictures to see all the gory details!