Fun and Freckless Friday

I'm totally copping out today and posting an article from Hemmings Auto Blog,not from laziness,but because it's just so well written there is nothing I could add to what has always been a fascinating story to me,but not well known,and is more evidence of what a forward thinker Henry was in manufacturing and his imagination.

That's Henry Ford swinging the axe.No dent,but the axe broke after the second swing!

Henry Ford was many things to many people, but the thing I most admire about him (besides his great baseball swing, apparently) was his straightforwardness. Would you see anything like the picture above today? Would you ever see Tom LaSorda or Rick Wagoner taking an axe to their products to demonstrate the product’s resiliency?

Sixty-five years ago today, Ford received a patent for a method of constructing automobile bodies out of plastic. Reading that led me to think of this fairly famous picture of Ford swinging an axe into the plastic decklid of a 1941 Ford. According to accounts, the decklid never broke, not even on the second swing, but the axe itself broke, preventing further swings.

Back in 1972, Michael W.R. Davis, a PR man for Ford at the time, wrote an account of Ford’s venture into plastic bodies in the early 1940s for Special Interest Autos (#11). According to Davis’s article, the whole venture started when Ford entered his Greenfield Village Trade School, spotted a book about soybeans, read it cover to cover and then demanded his young Trade School students – hard at work on developing other farm products into industrial uses – to drop everything and start working on soybeans.

At the time, soybeans were little heard of, but thanks to Ford’s interest in the crop, they became the second-largest cash crop in America in 1970. The Trade School students did consider soybean-derived plastics, but those didn’t pan out. Instead, their research led them into other forms of plastics, which ultimately resulted in the plastic decklid in the above picture and the 1941 Ford prototype car bodied entirely in plastic, designed by Lowell Overly.

While the media of the day predicted $400 automobiles before the end of the decade, plastic-bodied cars never became a reality because the cost and curing time of plastic proved impractical.
Interestingly, Davis’s research for the story also turned up another plastic-bodied car built in 1941, though by a backyard mechanic, Ray Russell of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. As profiled in a page of the December 1941 issue of Popular Mechanics (oh, please, Modern Mechanix guy, hook us up), Russell created a steel tubing and wire mesh frame for his car’s body, then laid down coats of ethyl cellulose plastic with a modified caulking gun.
Of course, Ford wasn’t the last to try to build a body out of plastic. His former right-hand man, Charlie Sorensen, teamed with Brooks Stevens in 1963 to design a plastic-bodied Studebaker that would sell for less than $1,100 (SIA #30), though that effort never left the drawing board. Other U.S. patents were issued in 1961 and 1971, but so far only niche American vehicles like the Corvette and Avanti have used anything remotely similar in their body construction. Though, the use of plastic in other automotive components has sorely frustrated many a restorer since.
Gotta wonder if any of those plastic decklids survive today?

Ther is one thing I can add.Ford's Hemp Car was designed to run on Ethanol !gb

http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2007/01/13/plastic-bodied-1941-ford/