Wednesday, February 20, 2013

It's a Ford.....Woody.


During my photographic practice session I took some shots of my replicas of old cars.   The 1949 Ford shown here is a woody.



As you can see this replica has some doors and a hood that do open.  The wood panels were always a fascination to me when I  would see them as I was growing up.  They put the wood panels on mostly station wagons and I would see them parked on main street of Osceola when we would go into town to shop.  The memories that I had of them is that the wood coverings didn't wear very well.



I do remember them being shown in ads in magazines and everyone who owned them was going on vacation to the mountains or to the beach. A friend of mine had a Jeep with wood panels on it.

A write up from a site that was selling a 1941 Woody describes the manufacturing of the car.

Ford was entering a challenging time in its history when it produced its new line of Super Deluxe cars beginning in 1941. The company was branching into wartime production, especially after Pearl Harbor. Automotive innovation was not on the immediate engineering horizon, but there is no doubt that their styling department led the industry into the forties. One of the early highlights of that era was the 1941 Super Deluxe Woody Wagon that proved to be both an esthetic and utilitarian success. 

The war gave the car companies business as they created cars for the military.  It was a hard time to justify using up the metal for automobiles for pleasure when it was needed to build aircraft. The wood panels seemed to be a good solution in order to use less metal. 

Thanks for stopping by my post today. 

1 comment:

Far Side of Fifty said...

I think of California and beach songs:)