People get the 'any color you want as long as it's black' thing wrong.
When Ford started the Model T in 1908 it was available in several colors...red, blue, green, black.
These colors were added to until sometime in 1914, when black became the rule.
All these cars were made by hand until mid 1914. Actually until 1914, Ford contracted with other companies to build most of the parts and he just assembled them.
Dodge Brothers supplied most of the chassis, and several companies produced the bodies. My November 1913 car has "B" for Boudin Carriage Works stamped in the body.
I've seen axles and many other parts with [DB] (Dodge Brothers) stamped in them.
Heinz and other electric companies produced the ignition parts.
Henry made very few parts himself.
When Ford had the assembly line introduced in 1914, he started making more and more of the parts himself. It was at that time that he started making the cars all black. They were dipped in large tanks of black paint. It was done quickly as a cost saving method.
In 1914, the Touring car (like mine pictured) cost $450. By 1922 the price had dropped to $290.
Ford said that as long as he could make $1 profit on each car he sold, he was happy. Considering he made over 1 million Model T's car a year at peak production time, this made him VERY wealthy for the time.
In 1925 sales were dropping in favor of other manufacturers, particularly Chevrolet. His car still looked and performed much like it did for the past 15 or so years and other mfgrs were getting innovative, faster and more comfortable. As a last ditch effort to revitalize the Model T, Henry decided paint it in different colors once more. In 1926, reds, blues, greens, grays came back.
It didn't help.
In 1928 Ford remade the company by building the Model A and then the Model B in 1932.
Interestingly, the name Model A and Model B were not the first times Ford used them. The first Model A Henry made was his first production car which he made in 1903, followed by the Model B a year or so later. He went thru most of the alphabet until he got to the Model T in 1908.
I've seen the original Model A's, B's, C's, K's (HUGE expensive cars), N's, R's, and S's. The R and the S were the immediate predecessors to the T and the earliest T's had some of their features.
The earliest T's were not very reliable and though they looked alike, mechanically they were not good. They evolved into dependable machines around 1912-13, at which point not a lot but cosmetics changed until the end of production in 1927.
Here's my early 1914 (Nov 1913) touring car.
I'm wondering just how well those cars held up under those road conditions, even though they seemed to navigate them well.
They held up very well. Henry made the T out of vanadium steel, which was very strong. The design of the chassis, one point suspension, transverse axels and springs, front and rear, made it so the real axle could twist in a completely different direction than the front. Ex LR wheel is lifted up, while the LF wheel is dropped down.
The fact that there are still well over a million Ts on the roads today, is testimony to their toughness.
Here's a few friends who came over to visit.
