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By the mid-1920s, the Model T was out of date. Sales were slipping, and Chevrolet, whose cars were more expensive but also far more modern and better equipped, began to outsell Ford. In the spring of 1927, Ford therefore announced that it planned to replace the universal car with a new model. For six months engineers wrangled over the design of the new car and struggled to retool the firm’s facilities for its production, a costly transition that revealed fundamental flaws in the company ’s manufacturing strategy. Still, hundreds of thousands of Americans placed deposits at their local dealerships in anticipation of the updated Ford, and others put their purchase plans on hold entirely. In November, the new car finally began to trickle out of the Highland Park plant, and in December, it made its official debut in New York.1 With a stiffer frame, a more powerful engine, a conventional transmission, and many creature comforts never before available from the company, the Model A was a runaway success. By the end of 1930 more than three million of them were on the road, and Ford appeared to have regained its competitive edge.2 So good was the new car, in fact, that the once-bustling Model T accessory industry rapidly declined in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Some have claimed that this was due at least in part to the fact that the generation of automobiles to which the Model A belonged was less amenable to end-user tinkering than the cars of the 1910s and early 1920s; thus, with the passing of the Model T, the age of openended automobility began to come to a close.3 To be sure, the mechanical underpinnings of the new Ford were a marked improvement over those of the Model T, and many of the tricks that aftermarket manufacturers and amateur enthusiasts used to enhance the performance of the WESTWaRD฀HO,฀฀ 1928–1942 c h a p t e r t w o w e s t w a r d h o , 1 9 2 8 – 1 9 4 2 41 universal car were incorporated into the design of its replacement. With more cubic inches, a stronger engine block, a stiffer crankshaft, aluminum pistons, improved carburetion and exhaust manifolding, a more refined L-head, pressure oiling to most of its vital components, and a standard water pump, the Model A developed forty horsepower in stock trim—fully double that of an unmodified Model T. None of these changes discouraged enthusiasts, however. Instead, they welcomed the new and improved Ford because they realized that if a twenty-horsepower Model T could end up as a forty- or fifty-horsepower screamer through the careful application of add-on products, then surely a forty-horsepower Model A could end up far stronger—and faster—with a tweak here and a new part there.4 the model a era Not surprisingly, over-the-counter speed equipment for the new Ford quickly appeared, and by 1930 hundreds of high-performance components were available for it. The transition from the era of the universal car was anything but smooth, however, and many Model T aftermarket companies never made the switch to the Model A. Some went out of business, others continued to produce Model T accessories for a few more years, but many simply turned to other pursuits. In their place, a number of new firms joined the industry during the era of the Model A. It warrants mention that although the period in question here, the era of the Model A, spanned from 1928 through approximately 1937, the Model A itself was only produced until 1932. That year, Ford debuted its flathead V8, an engine that would ultimately come to dominate enthusiast activities for the better part of two decades. However, Ford also introduced a revamped four-cylinder car, the Model B, in 1932, and for a number of years most performance enthusiasts actually preferred it to the all-new V8. Critical in this regard was that most of the high-performance parts designed for the Model A fit the Model B as well as the four-cylinder Model C, introduced in 1933.5 Thus, the “era of the Model A” was actually a period within which the efforts of the high-performance aftermarket and those of the enthusiast focused on three different four-cylinder Fords, the A, the B, and the C. Approximately three dozen companies manufactured high-performance aftermarket parts during...

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