|
|---|
|
Chapter 11 The Body Beautiful, On Wheels Book: The Indomitable Tin Goose Subtitle: The True Story of Preston Tucker and His Car Author: Charles T. Pearson Publisher: Abelard-Schuman Year: 1960 |
11 THE BODY BEAUTIFUL, ON WHEELS
EARLY IN DECEMBER, during the lull in the housing fight, I was complaining one day to one of the top men planning production that I wished to hell we had something better than the lousy art work we were using, because it was getting tougher to sell every day. It was too arty and stylized to start with and, worse still, even a layman could see that it was a long way from the six-passenger sedan Tucker said he was going to build.
The production man said he was just as disgusted as I was, and if he had even an idea as to what the body and chassis were going to look like he could at least start figuring out how to bwild it. That was what started the first actual work on final body design, and the entire job was completed in less than a month.
He built a big plywood board back in the main building, eight feet high and about forty-eight feet long. We covered the board with newsprint and ruled it off in twelve-inch squares. (I learned later that they should have been ten-inch squares.) There was no heat in the building, so we had to work with our coats on. All we had to work with was crayons, a couple of yardsticks and a steel tape, a piece of twine and a nail for a compass, and a long flexible strip of wood that served as a straightedge one way, and bent the other way formed a sort of adjustable French curve to smooth up contours for the roof, front and back decks and fenders. A pocket protracter combined with a makeshift plumb bob helped check angles with reasonable accuracy.
To help decide on various dimensions we had a Cadillac, a Packard and an Oldsmobile to start, and later brought in a Ford and a Chevrolet, and we went over the cars part by part to find which measurements looked the best for the body style we wanted, and would still allow plenty of room inside. The production man was big, over six feet tall, and anything that fit him comfortably should be big enough for anybody, so he climbed in and out of the cars while we checked measurements and, one by one, transferred them to the board.
Helping with the measurements, and holding one end of the wood strip, was Herman Ringling, an old-time body knocker Tucker knew at the Speedway and who later masterminded the job of transferring the body from sketches directly to metal, without any kind of a model. A quiet, unobtrusive, rather mousy little man, Herman could do things with cold sheet metal that few other men could have done with a torch. In his field he was an artist, and a master.
There were plenty of problems to be solved, and if the answers weren't right it would really foul things up later. Decisions which had to be made included the angle of the windshield and the distance between the winshield and the driver's head; height and size of the back window; foot space in front and rear compartments, and the angle of the toe boards.
Front seats were standard height, twelve to thirteen inches, which governed height of the steering wheel from the floor, and the depth and angle of the front seat affected the angle of the wheel. One feature that was determined then was the step-down frame. The production man squawked his head off, but measurements showed it was the only way to stay within sixty inches overall height with standard front seats, and without sacrificing road clearance.
The dimensions set up at this time were, with few exceptons, the ones that were used in the final body design. There was no great attempt at styling, though the side silhouette was nearly identical with the finished design. An extra four inches were allowed on wheelbase, because Tucker was still insisting on fenders that turned with the wheels, and the production man said there would be plenty of time to talk him out of that later.
We did three views—top, front and side—all actual size, and the whole job took less than a week. It was too cold to dawdle and the quickest way to get warm was to finish up and get out.
On Christmas Eve in 1946, Tucker commissioned Alex Tremulis to do a styling job. Tremulis was fresh out of the Air Force and working for a Chicago product design and engineering company, but his first love was automobiles, and in Tucker he saw a chance to get back into automobile design. Slender, of medium height, Tremulis looked like an artist, which he was, with occasionally a temperament to match. Usually, he appeared a bit disheveled, with rumpled hair, as if he just got up from the drawing board after wrestling with some design problem. When he talked about automobiles he suddenly came to life, with a wealth of fascinating experiences and endless ideas for some change in fender or hood lines, or some ultramodern conception that was farther ahead than moon rockets. Friendly and communicative, Tremulis at the same time was excitable, and might flare up at criticism as if it were a personal affront.
Before the war he had been chief stylist for Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg at Connersville, Indiana, and had designed several racing cars including an ultra-streamlined job for Ab Jenkins. A week earlier he had phoned Tucker at the plant asking for an appointment, and Tucker told him he could have fifteen minutes.
“I showed him a three-quarter perspective of what I thought the automobile should look like,” Tremulis said, “and he was tremendously impressed.
“Then I showed him some of my other designs—stuff I had done for Cord and Duesenberg, and sketches I had made while I was in the Air Force, my ideas of what the 'Postwar Car' should be. Before I left we spent three hours talking about design, and he told me what he didn't like about the designs he already had, and explained some of the features he wanted.”
Christmas Eve Tremulis came to Tucker's apartment in the Drake Hotel where a crowd of Tucker people was waiting to see the new sketches. He opened a large folder and held the drawings up, one and two at a time. Tucker asked the rest how they liked them. Nearly everybody hesitated, watching Tucker; when it was clear he liked them there came a roar of applause.
I liked all except the front fenders which I thought stunk, and said so. My popularity couldn't have dropped faster with a sudden attack of smallpox. Tucker scowled at me for a week, though much later he admitted that at least he agreed with my logic.
I thought the front fenders were a jarring note in an otherwise classic design, but Tucker liked them and so, apparently, did the public which after all is the final arbiter of styling, whether it's automobiles or exposed cleavage. One writer described them poetically as “curved like the half-folded wings of a hovering bird” and said the front bumper looked “like the horns of a Texas steer.”
Tucker suggested some changes and then told Tremulis to get going, he was in a hurry. So Tremulis took the drawings home and started work on new sketches that same night. He used most of the measurements on the full-scale layouts we had done in the plant, and from them started new drawings that were scaled accurately. Six days later he called Tucker and said the sketches were ready, and when could he come to look at them?
“It was about seven o'clock New Year's Eve when he got to our office in the Field Building, on his way to a party, Tremulis said. “He looked at the pictures and told me:
“'That's it.”
“Nobody could have been more surprised than I was, because all I intended them for was preliminary sketches. But he said, 'First thoughts are the best,' and I think now he was right. The job was finished in five working days, and I think it was the fastest styling job that was ever done.
“I'm sure it was the fastest job ever done of making a full-size metal prototype of a production car directly from drawings without a clay model. Beginning New Year's Eve, the model was ready for paint in one hundred days.”
Tucker told Tremulis he was chief stylist as of New Year's Eve.
There was still a shortage of modeling clay. We tried other automobile companies, but couldn't pry enough loose from anybody to even start work on a clay mockup.
“We don't need clay,” Tucker said confidently. “Herman Ringling can make anything if you just show him the pictures. Try it and you'll find out.”
So Tremulis went out into the shop where Ringling and another metal man started beating on sheet iron, cutting and welding. Another man on the job was Al McKenzie, former racing mechanic on the Horace Dodge boats.
On clay models a wooden form roughly the shape of the car, called a “buck,” is used for the base, adding clay to fill in the body shape and smooth out the many contours. Going directly to metal they still needed some place to start, so they used an Oldsmobile for a sort of “body buck” starting with comparison measurements to locate the seats, doors, dash and other parts.
As each part of the new Tucker body was finished the original part from the Olds was junked, so when they got through about the only parts that remained from the original body were the roof, which had been completely reshaped, and door handles, window mechanisms, locks and hardware—parts that were the same whether they came from another automobile or from the manufacturer's bins.
The first car was, of course, completely handmade, and nobody connected with the job ever claimed it wasn't. It also had plenty of solder, probably several hundred pounds. Maybe Cellini could have hammered out a body in ten years without using solder, but nobody in his right mind would try it on a one-shot job where one of the most important factors was speed. The one-piece windshield had to be abandoned because they couldn't get curved glass except on special order, with no assurance they could even get it later.
Perhaps another twenty bodies were made with preliminary hardwood forms, but the rest were stamped out with metal dies and the body parts probably were about as good as any in the industry.
Many of the design ideas were Tucker's. While Tremulis persuaded him to forget the turning fenders, Tucker still insisted on doors opening into the roof, over the anguished protests of body men, who said it would raise production cost and weaken the roof. When one car rolled over in tests there was no indication of roof failure, but it unquestionably increased production cost. A typical Tucker touch was a narrow ledge just above the toe board in front, on the passenger side. If a man wanted to lie back and rest he could hook his heels on the ledge, and be comfortable. The center headlight, while not original, was Tucker's idea, as were the six exhausts extending out below the rear bumper.
Always a perfectionist where automobiles were concerned, Tucker wasn't satisfied that the first body was as good as it could be, so he hired a design firm from the east, Lippincott & Margulies, to do a clay model. By the time they started clay was finally available. They scraped, kneaded and patted clay for months with agonizing slowness, while everybody but Tucker fumed.
“They worked on that model several months, and when they got through the only part of their design that was used was the two taillight castings,” Tremulis said. “They were undoubtedly the most expensive taillights in automotive history.”
Tremulis continued as chief stylist, working on changes for future models, and had body No. 57 when the plant closed down.
“We were changing the rear window to a full wrap-around and had already started to cut out openings for the re-styling job,” he said. “We were also planning changes in the front fenders which we were going to experiment with on that body. There were other minor changes such as any automobile company works on continuously to keep their styling up to date."
Tremulis later had the satisfaction of proving, to himself at least, that his design would be recognized instantly as a Tucker and nothing else.
With another Tucker man driving, he was going to Des Moines to show a car at a meeting of the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers). Crossing the Mississippi River at Clinton, Iowa, they didn't see the sign for the toll house on the Illinois side and were stopped by a motorcycle policeman halfway across the bridge.
“I'm sorry,” said the driver. "We didn't see it. Well go on across and turn around."
“No you won't,” said the cop. “You passed the toll house without paying and you'll back up and pay.”
It was a two-lane bridge, and Tremulis said traffic was really getting fouled up, so he asked the cop if it wouldn't be easier just to go across and make a U-turn.
The cop wasn't arguing.
“I've heard all about these Tuckers that can't back up,” he said. “Now you just back right up to the toll house and pay up.” So they backed halfway across the bridge and paid the 25¢ toll.
“Well I'll be damned,” said the cop as he waved them on.
Here was one of the first Tuckers in operation. And it had to meet the lies spread about it by enemies, that it could not back up. It nailed that lie to the floor the first time out.