Pulled from the Avalanche - 1928 Ford Model A

In mid-December of 2010, the upper Midwest got an early holiday delivery: wind-lashed, whiteout hell. The blizzard unloaded more than two feet of thick-weight snow across Minnesota, and ripped open the Teflon roof of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, where the Minnesota Vikings play. It was a long way from the Lake Wobegon fables of placid ice fishing, as intoned by Garrison Keillor.

That same horizontal, frozen crust that tore the Metrodome roof also squashed an inflatable garage owned by Tom Wesenberg of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, near Minneapolis--on the very same morning, no less. Absolutely flattened it under the snow's weight, he told us a couple of days later. Ordinarily, the big bubble housed his 1928 Ford, a Model A with phaeton bodywork and originality that approaches totality. Only just before the storm hit, he decided to move the Ford into a metal garage that he'd erected on his property. No premonition or anything, just prudence.

Indeed.

"I came outside during the storm and saw that the bubble garage had collapsed," Tom told us. "It was already on the news here that the Metrodome roof had been damaged."

The Model A, an authentically tossed-off-looking example of the species if one ever existed, thus endured unmolested to spend the winter inside frigid, galvanized walls, hibernating through the dark months before it emerges to putter among the skeeters and fireflies of the mythical Minnesota lake country. That's pretty much what this Model A does anymore, rumble along post-thaw in a countryside that's been green and enveloping and, as Mr. Keillor puts it, above average about so many things. The just-right nature of this Ford follows the pattern quite nicely, not that it hasn't taken its own bumps and elbows over the years. That brings us to another Minnesota thing.

During the middle 1950s, the Ford's owner was a student--or maybe a couple of students--who attended the University of Minnesota at its main campus, which spans the upper Mississippi River in Minneapolis. According to Tom, the rah-rah boys used the Model A as a "party car," a phrase unknown to our ears. He explained, "These college kids would just jump into it and go riding around and having fun or, I suppose, drinking. There's a lot of little dents and dings all over the car in places where you wouldn't expect to find them."

The one that Ford installed is still around, awaiting a few procedures relative to crankshaft vibrations and bearing life.

We'll take his supposition a step further and guess it was also a tailgating conveyance before that term was coined, hauling the revelers to Golden Gophers grid clashes at Memorial Stadium, the U's glorious Brick House. This was just after Gino Cappelletti graduated and went on to become the American Football League's all-time scorer--grim years for Gophers fans, although Minnesota collegiate legend Bernie Bierman became a Hall of Famer in 1955. If you remember Life magazine, it once published a memorable photo of kids from this generation in a beater Model A "tub," stripped of its fenders, grabbing for the steering wheel in a game of chicken as the car rolled along on a city street, under nobody's control.

Perhaps the Gophers' near-weekly burying on the field led the kids to repaint the Model A from its original factory shade, a gunmetal blue, to basic black. Tom reckons there may have been another motivation, the Minnesota Centennial, which took place in 1958 and, based on a windshield sticker, the car took part in at least peripherally. "Maybe they just wanted to spiff it up for it," he reasoned.

As with pretty much any automobile that's more than 80 years old, some gaps exist in the phaeton's overall history. We can assess that this Model A was built late in the 1928 production year. Numbers stamped in the lower-left corner of the fuel tank indicate that its date of manufacture was September 27, 1928, at Ford's Twin Cities plant in Minnesota. Ford had adopted the fuel-tank numbering system partway through the 1928 model year. It's the foolproof way of dating a car with a date-coded tank, as the Model A's engine numbers only proclaim the date of the engine's production.

If you've just acquired a Model A and plan to restore it, regardless of whether your own car is a Type 35-A phaeton like this one, here's the way it's supposed to look--less the bang-up marks, of course. Ford built 47,255 of them in 1928, the Model A's first full year of existence, most of them as basic and bereft of dealer accessories as Tom's car. It has the standard Ford open-end front bumper and closed, split rear bumpers. The key bright pieces are the nickel-plated radiator shell--it's dented in some unexpected places--and the headlamp bezels. A single horn sounds the way. There are no running-board kick plates, perhaps the most popular Model A add-on, installed on this phaeton. We can deduce that the single-rear mounted tire was probably used at some point: Per Ford assembly procedure, the spare was always factory-installed with the hubcap script perfectly horizontal and the valve stem straight down. Neither is the case here anymore.

The interior sings a chorus as to how right this phaeton really is. The nickel-plated instrument panel includes the stock speedometer, ammeter and fuel gauge, plus a pair of seldom-noticed clues to the Model A's age. The first is the face of the ammeter. Only the earliest, which were carried over directly from Model T parts stockpiles, are lettered with Ford scripting. The second is the ignition on-off switch. In November of 1928, Ford began removing the inscriptions ON and OFF from the keyed switches, and they were gone entirely by the 1929 model year. Based on the phaeton's build date, as ascertained through the fuel-tank stamping, this may have been one of the earliest Model A phaetons so outfitted. If both those characteristics are present and original to a Model A, it's an exceptionally rare Ford.

Tom doesn't know where his phaeton went immediately after its construction and sale, but there was at least one hint that unearthed itself. Literally. "When I got it, there were three inches of dirt underneath the back seat when I pulled it out. I'm guessing that whoever owned it first must have been a farmer, or otherwise lived off a dirt road, because of the dirt that had collected there. There was a little bit of rust there, too, underneath the dirt, but that's pretty much it as far as rust goes anywhere on the car."

The phaeton's been Tom's since 1990, a foray back into the world of automotive history that involved a false start centered around a 1931 Chevrolet coupe, which, as he tells it, "I bought in 1965 and owned three weeks before the transmission let go and I sold it." The Model A came from another gentleman in the Twin Cities region who apparently used only water in the radiator, not a coolant blend, a choice which presumably led to its cracked cylinder head. Since then, the phaeton's been operating with a 1928-serialized Model A engine that's correct, if not original to the car. The as-built engine is in Tom's basement, awaiting a cylinder head repair and the fitment of counterweights to its crankshaft, an important consideration if you're going to drive a Model A at any substantial speed.

"I'm in the Twin Cities Model A Club, and we go on quite a few runs around here together. In fact, just before the snow started to hit here, we went on one to an apple orchard in White Bear, maybe 15 miles outside of Minneapolis," Tom said. "But back in June, I found a wonderful back road that went from Minneapolis all the way into Webster, South Dakota, and then on to Bradley, South Dakota, where, from 1928 through 1943, my father operated a small dairy. My father was born in Bradley, and I went there for its 125th birthday celebration. I attached milk cans to the running boards and glued a little glass milk bottle to the radiator cap."

The trip to northeastern South Dakota, along smooth two-lanes, takes about seven hours: unexpectedly, only about two hours more in a Model A than in a modern car. Tom readily concedes to making a conscious effort to hold his speed down. "No matter where I go, I really don't like going over 45 in it. Henry used to advertise that the Model A would do 65 MPH. One day, I was out on the freeway, looked down at the speedometer and saw that I was doing 57 MPH, and there was still a little bit left. I backed off. When you're getting over 45, you're starting to put pressure on the babbitt bearings, since the crankshaft doesn't have counterweights. That's not good."

The Model A's odometer now reads about 56,000, though the number of laps it's spun can't be calculated. Tom now adds 1,000 to 1,500 additional miles per year. The phaeton is fully roadworthy, following some unpleasant experiences early in his stewardship when the car was extremely difficult to stop. One rear brake turned out to be worn to total uselessness, and the other had a shoe hanging by a single loose bolt. It's all fixed now.

Tom concedes that he's got a new phaeton top and an upholstery kit that may not get used for a while. The current tan top, of unclear vintage, is the wrong color; its replacement is black. The seat facings aren't particularly ratty, so the upholstery is on hold for now. His original plan to take the Model A back to its original color is on indefinite hold, now, too.

"Since the collapse, I just don't have the space to do any sort of restoration work anymore," he admitted. "Plus, that might take away from what it is."