Lots of car collectors will go through great efforts to find the only example of something, sometimes even recreating cars that no longer exist (the Bugatti Aerolithe for instance), but few of them are willing (or able) to conjure up something that never existed. Studebaker, a company which got its start building wooden Conestoga wagons, built some wood-bodied wagons in the 1930s, but never offered a wagon in its popular Champion line, or in any postwar car lines until 1954. There were a couple of wagon prototypes for the dramatic new 1947 Studebakers designed by Loewy & Associates (with a lot of input from Loewy staffer Virgil Exner), including one woody pictured below, but management suffered from a case of cold feet (or wooden hearts) at the last minute*. When the Loewy people gave the new Studey its first facelift in 1950, the whimsical, Jet Age Bulletnose still lacked a wagon model. Eventually, there was an all-steel wagon for 1954, and this body became the basis of the first Lark wagon in 1959. But no woodies…
Enter Dennis Varni, who rescued an unfinished project car to produce perhaps the ultimate orphan car: a 1951 Studebaker woody with an Edsel engine using a nearly-extinct prototype fuel injection system. If you're going to build a hot rod out of a famously orphaned car, you might as well use an orphan engine…
The perfect engine for this car, an Edsel (FoMoCo Series FE*) had been sitting in Varni's shop for 2 decades. He'd recognized the injection system at an automotive flea market, and somehow remembered that it had appeared on the cover of Hot Rod Magazine in 1959…fitted to an Edsel engine. He then found Edelbrock aluminum heads to go onto it. Then the engine sat and waited for a suitable project car to power...
The '51 Studebaker, started and nursed along by two other enthusiasts, turned out to be that project. Varni had the car completely rebuilt, starting with a steel roof structure under the graceful arc of wood. Otherwise, he says, the car would have been insufficiently rigid to handle predictably. The steel roof structure and door frames also lend visual continuity from front to rear.
Metalworkers* artfully tooled teardrop-shaped 1940 Ford headlights into the Studey's Flash Gordon front end design. The bullet nose and smiley grilles are original, but the bumpers are completely custom creations.
The real star of the show, even with the hood open, is the woodwork on this car, executed in Birdseye maple. Shown below is the lower hatch frame, with latch detail...
Here we see the tight shut lines on the upper hatch, along with the nautical paneling of the roof. The result is a unicorn of a car, a near-perfect rendering of a beast that never quite existed, an orphan car that can keep up with traffic anywhere, and gather a crowd wherever it parks.
*An excellent account of these and other forgotten prototypes is offered by J.P. Cavanaugh at curbsideclassic.com. A detailed article on the Studebaker Woody build, with notes on the craftsmen involved, is at hotrod.com, dated July 18, 2014. And Ford's FE (for Ford Edsel) family of engines included displacements from 332 to 428 cubic inches. This one's a 427, like the twin FE power plants the U.S. Navy used in their Light SEAL Support Craft.
Photo credits:
Top: Studebaker National Museum
2nd, 3rd & 4th from top: George Havelka
Balance of photos: the author
No comments:
Post a Comment