MTFCA Forum

Hi Guys,

I am new here and am looking for help in identifying something I found while digging around in my attic. I bought the house several years ago from the friend of the previous owner of the house, he had suddenly passed and she was left in charge of his estate. He was a machinist as well and ran a full machine shop out of the shop/outbuilding on our property. As I understand it he was very active in the Model T community and had several that he restored himself and would have car shows on the property as well. Drove them in all the local parades and local community events. He sounded like a very cool old guy!

Well long story short, most everything in the house was auctioned off before I bought it so aside from a few newspaper articles and photos we found of him and his cars, we thought everything from his times here were gone. Until a few weeks ago, while digging through all the old lumber in the attic, I happened upon what I thought were blocks of walnut and after I took a closer look they had markings, in increments of 5 inches on the side. They were actually very dense laminated wood blocks, very heavy.

My best guess is they are part of some gage assembly possibly for either building or testing body panels and associated parts fitment or alignment but I would love to have some factual backstory. I know the 16094 portion of the markings reference RH Fender Bracket for quite a few ford vehicles.

I would love to see if anyone here may have some info on these, here are some pictures of one of the blocks.

Thanks,

Todd

Destiny Todd and welcome aboard.
I do not know what year but it looks early to me.

You may be able to search the gentleman's name here and possibly find one of his posts. His profile may clue you in to what car(s) he had and then go from there (if the tool is for his car).

Laminated mahogany, not walnut.

The pattern/mold or model of the part to be made would have been mounted to that and then the parts would be checked and fit to the pattern/model/mold before any tooling or dies were made to actually produce the part. Once everything passed muster it was mounted into a copy machine and the corresponding dies were made, A Keller or Hydro-Tel machine. At the Engineering Building for Cadillac we had a Hydro-Tel (that replaced an earlier Keller) but we still had the smaller Keller machines. I have one of the copy heads from the big Keller machine in the garage, although I don't really remember why or how I got it.

I worked with tons of that material when I worked for Cadillac, I still have a bunch of it in the garage (still being used into the late '90s). Your idea of it being for the testing and fitment of parts and pieces is pretty darn close. This was the early stages of building a car, doing all the prototype work and all of the full-scale mock-ups and all of the pre-production work. The larger the die was, wood patterns and molds were often replaced with plaster molds and patterns (fenders, hoods, deck lids, etc.) that would then be mounted to the machine to be copied. After a time, the bases would be "recycled" and used again, cut to a new size and re-numbered. Your piece looks to have had an I.D. plate at one time.

What you do with it at this point is up to you, the original patterns/models/molds are gone and all that remains is the base. It is great, stable material to work with, but at this point, just slabs of wood. You can see a couple of chunks of the same material that I used to raise the axle holding fixture on the table in the photo below.

ok I was thinking it was possibly mahogany! that's awesome! thanks so much for sharing all that, good to know I wasn't far off! Its definitely an interesting piece to find.

varmint wrote: ↑

Fri Feb 25, 2022 3:57 pm

Destiny Todd and welcome aboard.
I do not know what year but it looks early to me.

You may be able to search the gentleman's name here and possibly find one of his posts. His profile may clue you in to what car(s) he had and then go from there (if the tool is for his car).

Thanks! I did try this, unfortunately nothing came up in my search. His name was Bill Sawyer by the way.

I would think the T museum would like to have those to put on display as that is a item alot of us have never saw before.