1927 Ford Model T - Jay Leno's Garage

one thing about these kind of cars are people aren't amazed at how fast you go they're amazing you got there at all i mean you're dealing with a car that's basically a hundred years old i mean if you took any car from the 90s left in the field for 30 years i don't think it would start as quickly as this one did well another episode game garage a car featuring today 1927 model t now this is not my car i got a letter from a young man who thought it might be interesting to have on the program you know we try to work with young people a lot when we can and uh we hear a lot from kids build their own stuff you know when we had our uh concours up at the drain auto museum in newport we had a category 30 under 30 which meant the car had to belong to somebody under the age of 30 and they could spend no more than 30 thousand dollars restoring the car and fixing it up and it's really been a fun category because we meet a lot of young people and they get intimidated you know when you come out on the show field and there's duesenberg and ferraris and stuff nobody can afford but having this category was fun watching the young people interact with some of the older guys and each one learning something from another and that's what i'm doing right here today this car belongs to a young man named brandon fay from new jersey brandon come on in thanks for having me jay yeah yeah so tell us tell us how you got into this where the car came from what the story is so uh you know i was always big into cars i always used to you know especially watch your garage the show and everything online and uh i just always had a fascination for antique cars right on like a lot of 20 year olds you know this isn't the first thing that people would kind of go up on to um but i just fell in love with just just the antique aspect of it and what was put into the effort of designing this vehicle in the 20s and i just always wanted to get my hands on one and you know they tend to be more expensive especially the dues and burgers like you said and things like that and almost untouchable for a 20 year old especially um so i happened to talk to my dad i said can we somehow get a antique car you know but i said i would want to build it myself and do a father-son project right so we looked online and i found this car out of wisconsin it was a wisconsin farm truck and was sitting in a field for 20 30 years without even running car had all the original parts on it had everything like stock and everything but it was just rusty and it didn't run right so we got it and then we brought it over had it shipped out and then put it in my grandmother's backyard then fast forward i went back to college and every time i came home on breaks i would just take time and just take it apart and put different pieces onto it but at that point i just figured instead of making a stock model t let's make it my own so then i stripped everything down it didn't have any interior top so i did all that myself um but i kind of just made it into like a rat rod but like period rat rod right no it's great i love the fact that you kept the original motor a guy called me up one day and he goes i got a model t in my bag i'm never going to store it it's been leaning against my shed for 45 years so we dragged it over here you know and okay across the gas tank was all rusty but right i poured gas in the carburetor pulled the handle twice and it fired no battery right over it with the that's incredible yeah i mean so they you know this was the iphone of the day it was so far superior people always make fun of them but they really built with the finest materials vanadium steel you know when i got my model t i would call a guy back in massachusetts where i'm from to get parts one time i was back home visiting and i thought let me go down and see this guy it's like 30 miles away and i pull in i'm excited i see a big warehouse you know it's just this house yeah so i go where do you keep the parts oh come with me and we go in the backyard he's got a huge pile with a tarp over it and he pulls it out and he takes out his vanadium steel takes some sandpaper some black spray paint it looks brand new cleaned it right up yeah he just left everything outside in the snow i mean all sorts of chassis pieces and frames and they were such high quality metal that they it's amazing it's even even from this in the 50s car this metal would last even longer i mean this was in the field for 30 years and the only rust on here was there on that quarter panel it's incredible and yeah and the cool thing is it's probably the only car a hundred years from now you'll still be able to start you know there's that movie what was that john travolta will be battlefield earth do you ever see that movie i feel like i've seen it it's one of those things where it's like takes place in the future yeah and john drove goes in a cave and he sees a jet plane from like 1980 yeah and he gets in turns the key it starts and they they smile and they don't ever happen but with the model t it could happen it could possibly be there's no battery there's really no electrics it's always self-contained that's something and it's very simple and it's there's nothing really to it now did you take the truck bed off the back and put no so this actually didn't come with a truck bed this uh came with the coupe bed and the uh the trunk lid actually was off when i received the car oh i see so um but they used it as a farm truck and they took the back lower trunk off and there was a little hitch in there that they would tow whatever trailers and everything but that's the only thing piece of metal they actually had to replace metal well you know it's interesting this is one of those rumors maybe people tell me the comments section but the word pickup truck came with the fact that you could buy a basic model t ford and you could buy a pickup bed like from sears or someone you could take the take the trunk out and put this pickup truck bed in so people go down to pick up their truck so pickup truck came from that i don't know whether that's true or not but i've seen that in a few articles back from the 20s and 30s that that's where it came from and this one would have been called a doctor's coop i think it's not i believe so i believe yeah so you know doctor would make their rounds yeah you know not god would be waiting for this guy to show up at 22 miles an hour but yeah but very cool so was it tricky for you to learn how could you drive a standard shift before this yeah so i could drive a standard shift before this um but it was kind of just a whole new experience getting to to know this car because it's kind of like a tractor right you know so you have the three pedals but it's not the normal three pedals that you're used to it's you know you have the reverse the clutch which is not an actual clutch it's low right and then low and high and then neutral exactly and then you have the reverse pedal which was a surprise to me yeah and i was like oh there's a pedal here yeah and it's reversed so there's no actual gear to go on the review yeah i mean the first couple of times you just go through the hedges because yeah yeah yeah yeah but once you learn it really becomes second nature and in snow and stuff it's great because with those pedals you can rock it back and forward definitely you know that's what put it in gear and then you can kind of play with it and kind of get your traction fascinating to drive have you done anything else so you didn't add the overdrive transmission or even the rocky mountain brakes no but i do have a warfare transmission that we'll be going into i just have to rebuild it and then put it in there but um other than that everything is basically stock i actually didn't even touch the motor really the motor is all internally original the only thing that i did was a transmission uh the bands were completely shot um the first time i actually drive the car low gear didn't work so once i figured that out i said oh now i got to replace the bands and then i found the hogs head is probably the worst thing to deal with on this car it is just absolutely oblong heavy and you just have to get over top of it and be inside the car take the whole floor out and take everything out did you put the kevlar bands in it i did it for kevlar oh yeah okay so that'll last so long yeah those last a long time and then also you know you can find everything for these cars online well there's still a million model t's on the road which is almost hard to believe it really is but there's plenty of them out there and you know the price has not changed i'm back in the 70s they were 3 500 to 4 000 yeah a lot of them are not much more than that now now they're not that much it's just there's i mean there's 15 million model t's right so you know who knows where they all are but there's definitely a enough of them for a lot of people i'd say but this one happens to be a model t uh towards the end of 27. actually that was the last year of yeah it was seven so this is would be the top of the line you know it's funny it was the greatest car in the world when it came out in 1909 but henry ford was such a curmudgeonly guy he didn't think no this is all you need and by the 20s people looking for style and comfort and you know flashy cars and the model t just seemed old-fashioned yeah so he kept lowering the price to eventually was 260 dollars i mean it cost less at the end of the run right right then at the beginning which was what other product could you say but he sold so many of them yeah and there's so many accessories you could buy and every other kind of thing so at one point he had 50 percent share of the automobile market which was just one brand yeah what one car this was pretty amazing and of course no front brakes now the watford transmission uh that's a three speed that's just regular or is it how does that i believe it is a three-speed um but i believe that it is it kind of gives you more more three more gears and low and three more gears and higher right yeah yeah that's right so um i don't know exactly what ratio and all but you know it kind of gives you a lot more gears than what you have right yeah the small motor kind of gives you a lot more oomph and something oh you could get water pumps for these oh yeah like in mine i put a balanced crank but like an idiot i didn't put the pressurized lubrication i still use a splash and where i live there's some hills and i'm on the hill one day and gunk you know oh yeah so you pull over you pull a piston out you stick another one in and then and you go and then you're ready to go just drop the fan right i mean well we dragged it back here but i was on the road three hours later you know so it was pretty cool and then of course you got all these little things the windshield opens up and this is interesting this leather piece here yes so um this was a piece that i found online um it already had the visor on there but um i found a piece of leather vinyl that go on the top and it just i think it made the car with the whole top yeah and everything and uh what do they call this it's not leather it's uh i forget what the name of the materials but it's period correct yeah everything on here is period correct even though some parts might be new some parts might be old it's definitely all period um especially for the hot rod culture in the 50s and 40s um that was like the whole goal with the car i'd say and um you know going back to the water pump this car actually came with a water pump oh it didn't have a water pump yes and the other interesting fact is this radiator is a model a radiator okay if you look at the the hoses going down from the water it is much bigger it is yeah that's from the factory oh okay this is like the tail into 27 and i was doing i was looking into it and it happened that a bunch of model ts from 27 at the end received model a parts because they didn't want to make new parts for the model t's at that point now did this this come from the factory with the water pump on that that i'm not sure of okay i'm not sure if it came out i don't think so they always use thermosyphon which actually worked quite well yeah it did and you have a distributor you're still using the original still using the original coils yeah yeah and everything those were interesting yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah oh no this is pretty cool across no front brakes no front brakes no really no rear brakes no i mean they have the brake but that doesn't yeah you can progress exactly but you can't exactly stop but it's nice you can close it up in the winter time and yeah i always like the opening windshield and all of this brings a nice breeze in and uh it just kind of just is like it's a whole experience it's a closed window car but you have the same kind of experience as an open window one yeah you've got roll-up windows that was a big deal for model t so how long have you owned it now so this will probably be i want to say four or five years it's the fifth year i've owned it okay um i got it freshman year of college right and uh it sat for a year until i kind of was able to do stuff with it and what are you studying in college so i studied media management in the communication school okay um but i did that and that has a lot to do with um production and and different yeah i studied that too and yeah and i had my choice of jobs wendy's mcdonald's arby's i could go to any one of them yeah a burger king burger king so like any one of those exactly that's what that's what happened i thought maybe might have taken mechanical engineering or something like that no i i never did i uh i didn't take anything mechanical engineer anything to do with that um did you come from a car family was your dad so my dad was always into cars uh but my stepdad did more with cars uh he he built a couple street rods back in the 80s oh okay uh with my step-grandfather and he um just kind of like taught me a lot of the mechanical things that i need to know with the basic car but um you know like you even said model t is very different from your average car when it comes to certain things but it's intuitive once you learn on this it seems if you were to learn on this first oh it seemed so odd to be bringing a collection because this actually worked quite well it does it it it's very efficient it's kind of difficult to get used to the first into like low to high gear just to make sure you match the rpms correctly and that way you don't grind gears and everything else right but once you get the gist of it it's a really fun car to drive it's a really raw raw experience i'd say because what happened was he wrote me a letter and i invited him on the show and he showed up here in march and then the covet thing hit yes seven months and this has been sitting in my garage now for eight months or whatever it has yeah so finally stuck with me for eight months get a chance yeah exactly exactly i mean i enjoy seeing young people getting into you know everybody wants a mustang or camaros it's just fun this is a great car to learn and have an experience with and have fun with it it really is and it's not every day that uh people see a 23 year old driving a model t so yeah i go to the gas station everyone just is looking at me and saying what yeah yeah who is this why is he driving a tractor well people don't even actually these are getting cheaper now because it's so far removed you know when i was a kid my dad would have driven this or maybe my grandfather but now nobody you've got to go so far back to even get one yeah exactly exactly but there's still plenty of them out there well very cool well let's uh let's can we show them the hood let's open the hood up here new leather straps there's other straps with the springs on there it's kind of straps are really long so you have to put zip ties on nothing like a zip tie right and what did you put a clear coat on here yes so i put a clear coat on there and i i sanded down the whole front of the cow and i uh it's funny the whole reason why i did that was actually because one of your speedsters was was uh oh bare metal and i was like that looks cool but then i realized this is a lot of nickel and it's 100 years old and it's gonna have patina instead of a so you get a lot of really old guys coming up to you i do i i actually had a guy who was born in 1927 that just was infatuated with the car and he wanted to get pictures with it and everything else and it was it was kind of cool to have someone who was born in the the same year and yeah he was just he was really interested by it he was actually older than sliced bread yes sliced bread came out late in 27th in 27 it did yeah sliced bread i used to whenever i'd see hefner i'd tell him you're holding the sliced bread and he left it up and he was older than sliced bread i think hefner was born in 26. look at that i think he said where'd you get the horn i got the horn online actually i saw it you have to give it a little aggressive squeeze yeah you have to really by time you get out the window and then you probably hit whatever you exactly see make sure you got a park in the middle of traffic and then hit the horn you just take the whole thing oh i see there you go yeah because it was um locked up oh oh you stuck there we go now did you paint the firewall white i did i painted it a cream to kind of match the wheels all right right um and that way it kind of just it just brought it out i think it made a little bit more classy because uh they were black and everything was black and i was like i don't have a black model see everyone has a black model t right so i just figured you know why not make it my own and just have the cream this and it's actually a gunmetal gray metallic which was not an option in 1920s no that's it and you have the electric starter yes if electric starter doesn't work too well no um but this one is a little grumpy when it comes to that but if it's nice and warm out then the electronic starter will definitely work why doesn't it work is this going to know it works it just it just it doesn't move fast enough it's six fold to 12 volts it's a six volt okay i still have the six volt battery in there um uh most people would run it on the magneto actually doesn't run on magneto because my magneto doesn't work oh okay but um i do run it on batteries so but you can you can get that made needed to work oh yeah i definitely could yeah are you in the model t club no cnc you've got to join i got to join the model t club yeah they're great and these guys have all the knowledge hilarious in fact they do meets where they show up with a bag of parts and they dump it out and in 90 minutes they build the car from scratch i have seen that yeah i mean it's great it's great i mean it doesn't take much for these cars you ever started on the uh that's how it usually started okay yeah kind of makes people like oh you look how strong he is so you know to do that right yes yeah but that wouldn't end too well yeah some of the guys break the thumb what do we have here so that is a skull from i know it's a scum well i know that but it's so it's it's it's from uh it's a hot rod skull from the 50s i found a new old stock one of those and i just thought it was the coolest thing and um i was not smart enough i uh put it on the generator for power and the bulb just exploded oh yeah yeah yeah that wasn't smart but no that's all right living there and modern fan modern fan that's actually off a 331 hemi okay believe it or not he took the modern do you machine this piece here so i didn't machine this piece i actually bought this piece um so what happened was right before i actually shipped it out here the fan the whole thing the whole bearing went and everything yes and so that tossed it so about 24 hours before the truck came overnight at that part from online and i put it on there took the whole radiator off and then did you buy its sight unseen yes yes yes so was it more or less than what you expected more actually really i was very very pleasantly surprised to find out that this car had everything including a clear title from 1910 and this is a top end lubricator yes topper and lubricator marvel's mystery marvel mystery you know we swear by it here it does a spoonful of that is what got this car started yeah it works good yeah i mean marvel mr oil does what it's supposed to because modern gasoline is so dry that's actually lubricated so it's good what do we have here it's about to fall off that how did that make it stay on there i don't know i don't even know where this is from but you drove it over here and it never fell off of there no that shows you what a smooth running car this is it's a does that fit in the hood somewhere no i don't know how long does this last that that's been there since i've had the car oh sorry yeah yeah is it actually lubricating it is lubricating because it comes through here but just a minimal amount coming yeah just all you need is just i think i actually i filled it up one time it was halfway there a little dab will do you yeah that's all it really takes it's very cool then you cause your water pump yeah here the grease caps yeah and then um i like the whole copper aspect of it right and i kind of just you know put the copper intake um gaskets there and this is actually a model a uh fuel sediment pole right right and uh i kind of just did the copper tubing what do you have in there i put dice in there atlantic city dice right good luck right yeah yeah that's all right very cool well can i take it for a ride you sure can yeah so we can't run together because of cobit we have to keep six feet apart you can't sit in the same car so i'll sit in the trunk then right yeah sit in the truck yeah well let's put the hood back on we'll fire it up just want to grab that side yeah yeah so we'll go back in first oh oh so you don't have the rod there huh the rod's in there but it's it's 100 years of of everything holding it in there taking it on and off there you go okay that's not quite is it in yeah so once we put the uh yeah let's get this strap around here and i took the side cowls off the hood as well to expose the motor how does reaction you go on dates in this thing um i can't say i do no no i wish yeah especially the covet it's kind of hard you know especially i guess that's true yeah well it's kind of open air so you yeah yeah not too many people are fond of smelling like gasoline these days yeah and it's a you don't have a fuel pump right gravity feed gravity feed here yeah so i have a nice grenade over my my lap is it under your seat or is it it's uh up on the up on here from the factory still underneath right right okay so where do you fill it where'd you fill it right here oh okay oh all right of course that's cool yeah with the pewter gas cap yeah yeah very nice start it uh the driver's side door is at what you say like a dukes of hazard door it means it doesn't open does not open i took that door to the face oh okay so um you're neutral so it's in neutral okay probably you might want to pull it back into park yeah okay give it a pull how many guys [Music] i see why most of these were open cars because you gotta asphyxiate it safe to say it's running a little bit rough it's cozy inside i like the closed tee it's kind of fun but you know i love model t doesn't matter how long these things sit they'll always run trying to figure out i think we've got some ignition problem here it's kind of cool we found this thing in a farmer's field and you drag it home and you well you kind of get it running this is the last year for the model t the model a was the revolutionary car that came next not as revolutionary as this though you know this was designed by harold will who built the will of sinclair which we had on my show a couple weeks ago he designed the transmission for this you know david e davis said that everybody should drive a 12-cent of the car at least once in a lifetime i want to amend that everybody should drive a model t at least once in a lifetime because you're really giving your creation an appreciation of driving you know it's still an exciting car to drive even though it's not very fast but there's so much to do to keep you busy that it's an enjoyable experience because everything is the opposite in a car if you work the throttle with a regular car you work the gas with your foot and a model key you work the gas with your hands because in a car you shift with your hand and the model to your ship with your feet so everything's kind of the opposite but people who learn to drive on a model t and never drove a rattle it's really easy to drive the standard stick ship how you doing but people wave at you people love seeing these things i used to drive my model t to to work at nbc and i used to pray for traffic on the freeway because when the traffic was busy i could get out of that model t and go 20 or 30 miles an hour which was the prevailing speed at the time the traffic is light i have to take the back road but it's not a relaxing you just chug along and i said doctors like these especially the doctor scoop because model keys always started they might not have been the fastest they don't stop for anything but they do get you there and that's kind of the cool part i mean people actually went across country of these things back in the day when they built the lincoln highway probably a little bad gas and this hasn't been sitting in my garage since what march 5th or something like that but these always run they always start he used to call henry ford the brilliant ignoramus because he had a lot of crazy ideas but he had one really good idea and it changed the nature i think the first car to ever beat the model t in production was the volkswagen and that took a lot yo i mean henry ford did 15 million of these in like i don't know 15 years 16 years something like that took volkswagen probably 40 years very light steering got an uber horn and once this engine really warms up it runs a lesson actually engine is pretty smooth i think the gas is probably starting to turn a little bit because it wants to go i can feel it that's kind of the fun thing with these cars the engine has smoothed out quite a bit now we're rolling i think the plugs have cleaned themselves up probably doing about 35 miles an hour now spinner means about 44. you press when you fix the clutch halfway and that's neutral and you press it all the way and that's slow gear you put it along here give us some throttle and pump it up in a second there we go here we go see the fun thing about these kind of cars are people aren't amazed at how fast you go they're amazing you got there at all i mean you're dealing with a car that's basically a hundred years old the engineering behind us certainly is but very reliable i mean if you took any car from the 90s left in the field for 30 years i don't think it would start as quickly as this one did the fun thing about these cars you know you get your friends that have corvettes and mustangs and stuff then you're here try my car just watch them go into the hedges trying to figure out how to get it to go anyway i hope you enjoyed this little trip around the block here you know normally we'd have brandon ryden in the car with us but because of kovan you know i'm not allowed to do that it's only one person's vehicle i understand it so we'll take us back and we'll thank him and uh who knows maybe he'll give me the emphasis about trying a model t well brenda's got that look on his face like i'm the high school quarterback taking his daughter out on the first date he smoked out a little bit through that a little bit a little bit yeah yeah i'm very good my friend thank you very much thank you i shake hands but we're not allowed to but thanks a lot we live in quite the world yeah find yourself a model t they're a lot of fun see you guys next week [Music] uh

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 371,022

Rating: 4.921875 out of 5

Keywords: Jay, Lenos, Garage, Model T, tin lizzie, Brandon Fay, TROG, The Race of Gentlemen, father son, restoration, preservation, rat rod, Ford, pre-war, classic cars, car porn, motonerd, 1927 Ford Model T, Jay Leno, Jay Leno's Garage, car reviews, vintage cars, sports cars, super cars, cars, jay leno garage, jay lenos garage, car collection, cnbc, Brandon fay jlg, Ford Model T, model t ford, 1927 ford model t hot rod, 1927 ford model t top speed, ford model t jlg, Ford model, ford car

Id: eUAMS9g_5bI

Length: 29min 50sec (1790 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020