Monthly Newsletter of the Early Ford V8 Club of AmericaEast Tennessee Regional Group

March 10, 2014

Known as Bobby Darin’s dream car, the 1960 DiDia 150 was a luxu-ry, custom-designed, handmade car designed by Andrew Di Dia, a cloth-

ing designer Darin met while on tour in Detroit in 1957.

Darin told Di Dia that he would buy the car if he ever “hit it big”. Only one example was ever built.

The V8 engine is lo-cated at the front. (The original engine, a Cadil-

lac V8, was later replaced by a 427 high-performance by Ford when Di Dia took it on the show circuit.)

It is rear wheel drive with a 125-inch wheelbase on an aluminum al-loy tube frame.The body was hand-formed by Ron Clark and constructed by Bob Kaiser from Clark Kaiser Customs where four craftsmen working from 1953 to 1960 hand-built the car at a cost of $93,647.29. Di Dia sold it to Darin in 1961 for more than $150,000 (1.5 million today).

The Guinness Book of Records listed it as the most expensive ‘cus-tom-made’ car in the world.

Its metallic red paint was made with 30 coats of ground diamonds for sparkle. The interior is rust colored in contrast to the ruby paintwork.

The cockpit has a thermostatically controlled air conditioning sys-tem. The design included the first backseat-mounted radio speakers and hidden windshield wipers, that started themselves when it rained. Oth-er features include retractable headlamps, rear indicators that swivel as the car turns, ‘floating’ bumpers and a trunk that was hinged from the driver’s side.

Each of the four bucket seats has its own thermostatically controlled air conditioning, individual cigarette lighters and ashtrays, as well as a radio speaker. Because the fins created a huge blind spot, the rear roof was all glass.

When Bobby drove his wife, Sandra Dee, to the 34th Academy Awards in 1961 Andrew Di Dia and Steve Blauner followed in a limou-sine. The car had two fans controlled by a switch that had to be turned on. Bobby didn’t realize this, so it heated up. All the magazines said the car had caught fire but it hadn’t.

Di Dia toured the car around the country, when Darin wasn’t using it for public appearances. After publicity and film use, Darin do-nated his “Dream Car” to the St Louis Museum of Transportation in 1970 where it remains.

Bobby Darin’s dream car was hand built

The Regional Group approved plans for the summer season of Cruise-ins at the meeting on Thursday, March 6.

Plans calll for cruise-ins to be held every Friday night from April 4 until October 30 in Lowe’s park-ing lot on Volunteer Parkway, from 6;00 to 9:00 p.m.

The cruise-ins will be a show and shine event. Although there will be no judging, there will be door priz-es donated by area businesses

There will be no entry fee. An-tique, modified, special interest cars, trucks and motorcycles will be welcome.

There will be music and enter-tainment. Spectators are invited to drop by and chat with owners who are exhibiting vehicles.

The club has secured liability in-surance for the cruise-ins under a policy carried by the national Ear-ly Ford V8 Club.

Ron Harkleroad is chairman of the cruise-in committee.

The Regional Group began the 2014 year with 44 members paid up and in good standing. An up to date roster has been prepared and will be made available to any member who requests it,

Club approves cruise-in plans for summer

New directory lists 44

Meals for Wheels Meals for Wheels for the

meeting on Thursday, March 13, will be served by Jim Bro-yles, Jim Gose, and Ken Bouck.

Three volunteers are needed to fill out the Meals for Wheels schedule for the coming year.

Member volunteers are ex-pected to serve only one month during the year.

Ten aluminum flathead V8 engines were produced. One showed up on the street in 1952.

Henry Ford is often quoted as saying, “customers can have a car any color they want as long as it’s black.” That was true from 1914 to 1926.

Earlier cars were painted in many colors, blue, green, red, but problems arose as mass production developed and the factories

began to turn out greater num-bers of cars. The problem was the amount of time it took to paint cars and for the paint to dry. Great skill was required to apply multiple coats of pigment colored paint and one or more coats of clear varnish to produce a lasting shiny surface.

Not only was there a union of skilled painters to deal with, but it could take as long as two weeks for the applied coatings to cure and dry.

With the factory turning out more than 1,000 cars a day, paint-ing and drying sheds had to hold sometimes as many as 20,000 cars requiring as much as 3000,000 square feet.

Black absorbed more heat than lighter colors and therefore dried faster. That’s partly why from 1914 through 1925 Ford offered the Model T in “any color as long as it’s black.” Black varnish, which used a carbon base, also resisted ultra-violet sunlight, so it lasted longer. Finishing a Model T body in black varnish took about a week. This was still too long for Henry Ford, so he kept looking for faster paint-ing methods.

One alternative to hand-applied varnish was baked enamel. Bicy-cle manufacturers had used baked enamel for years, and automak-ers started experimenting with it

one heavy one, with each coat fired at 165 degrees and each body pass-ing through the oven six times. Body finishing now took about three days.

The answer was black Japan, a rapid drying product consisting of a pigment base dissolved in nap-tha or turpentine, sometimes with other varnish ingredients, such as linseed oil It was applied direct-ly to metal parts, and then baked at about 400°F for up to an hour.

The popularity of Japan black was due in part to its durability as an automotive finish. However, it was its ability to dry quickly that made it a favorite of early mass-produced automobiles.

Ford used two formulations of Japan black. The “First Coat Black Elastic Japan”, was applied direct-ly to the metal, while, “Finish Coat Elastic Black Japan”, was applied over the first layer. Both were 25-35% asphalt and 10% linseed oil with lead and iron based dry-ers, dissolved in thinners -- min-eral spirits turpetine, or naptha.

The basic coat had an additional small amount of carbon black as pigment. The asphalt was speci-fied to be Gilsonite, which had long been used in paint for use on ironware because it increased the elasticity of the paint, allowing it to adhere to steel that was subject-ed to vibration, deformation and thermal expansion without crack-ing or peeling. It was also cheap, yielded a glossy surface, and acted as a curing agent.

around 1908. Baked enamel could be flowed or sprayed onto metal and oven-dried in less than a day. It was tough, had good luster, and needed very little handwork.

But baked enamel had its own set of drawbacks. At first it came just in black, because only Gilsonite, a black pigment derived from coal, could withstand the heat needed to bake it. That re-striction was no problem for Ford, of course, but another difficulty was the heat itself. Many car bod-ies still used wooden framing, and a body painted with baked enamel had to spend four and a half hours

at 450 degrees Fahrenheit, a tem-perature that would burn or split wooden members, so only bodies or parts with no wood in them could be finished in baked enamel. Fend-ers, hoods, splash aprons, and ra-diator shells were so often black on early cars.

Cars with all-steel bodies like the Dodges of 1915 and later, were painted entirely in black enamel. Each Dodge took as little as one day to finish.

By 1923 Henry Ford had re-moved much of the wood from his open body styles and ordered his body suppliers to use black baked enamel as well. But since Model T bodies still had wooden tacking strips, Ford avoided the 450-de-gree ovens by specifying six thin coats of baked enamel instead of

Why Fords were painted black from 1914 to 1925

1910 Model T was bright red.

IThis 1927 was painted red

They were black from ‘14 to ‘25

(Continued on page 4, Column 2.)

Ford Words, March 10,, 2014Page 2

Treasury was unable to get.In May of 1933 Harry LeBreque

purchased an armored green Ca-dillac from Patrick Moore of 37 Grove Street in Rockville, Con-necticut. Moore had acquired it a year earlier, apparently from a Ca-pone agent.

After the LeBreque ownership, the car was shipped to England for exhibit in an amusement park. It was returned from England sometime in the mid-1960s and restored by a Canadian enthusiast in Ontario before it was sold to the Niagara Falls Antique Auto Mu-seum. In 1971 it went to the Cars of the Greats museum, and in 1979 to B. H. Atchley’s Smokey Moun-tain Car Museum in Tennessee. Atchley freshened the restoration and offered it at auction in 2006 when it was acquired by the late John O’Quinn for $621,500. After Quinn’s death, it was again put up for auction in 2010 by RM auction at St. John’s where it was bid to $355,000. O’Quinn’s heirs refused to sell at that price at the auc-tion, although they later sold it for $341,000.

What happened to the Capone car that carried FDR during the days after Pearl Harbor is un-known, but last year, after an In-ternet account of the government’s use of the car, a someone identify-ing himself as “racerjones” wrote: “My father had passed on a story to me that Al Capone’s car had been hidden in his father’s barn on their farm in Mississippi until the treasury dept found out about it and seized it. My dad says he got in trouble for driving it out of the barn one day.”

The V8 Times for January/Feb-ruary 2014 carried a story about President Franklin D. Roosevelt being driven from the White House to the Capitol building in an armored 1928 Cadillac confiscated from Chicago gangster Al Capone, where he was to deliver his famous “infamy speech.” It was the day af-ter Pearl Harbor.

During the previous night, wor-ried that German or Japanese agents might try to assassinate him, the Secret Service, had decid-ed the president should be driven in armored cars from then on. Ob-viously finding one overnight was impossible. Also government pro-curement rules didn’t allow spend-ing more than $750 (about $10,800 in today’s dollars) on any automo-bile. Armored cars were out of the government’s price range.

Mike Reilly, who was in charge of the White House detail, remem-bered that the Treasury Depart-ment had seized one of Chicago gang lord Al Capone’s bulletproof cars after his 1931 tax evasion con-viction, and decided to borrow it.

A team of government employ-ees and mechanics worked well into the night of December 7 clean-ing and preparing the car, check-

ing everything to make certain it would run and perform as intend-ed to be ready for use by FDR the following day.

Capone’s Cadillac had been painted green with black fenders to look like the cars used by Chi-cago police and city officials and it had 3,000 pounds of bulletproof armor beneath the standard body. Its windshield and windows were made of recently developed inch-thick bulletproof glass. It was outfitted with flashing red lights behind the grille and a real police siren.

FDR had a snappy response when someone told him where his new car came from: “I hope Mr. Ca-pone won’t mind.”

FDR used Capone’s car until 1942, when the Ford Motor Co. armored a 1939 Lincoln convert-ible limousine which the president nicknamed the “Sunshine Special.” To get around the spending lim-its, the government leased the car from Ford for $500 per year.

Although Treasury officials con-fiscated everything of Capone’s they could get their hands on af-ter he had been sentenced for tax evasion in 1934, it appears that he had other similar cars that the

FOR SALE: 1949 Mercury block, modified for speed, polished intake ports, relieved, bored to 3 3/8, in. stroked to 4 1/8 in. completely bal-anced, chrome journals on crank, 1 7/8 in. intake valves, 1 5/8 in. ex-haust valves, Potvin Eliminator billet cam, Schaffer aluminum flywheel. Contact Norman Litchfield (423) 534-1505.

Capone car at auction not the one FDR rode in Ford Words, March 10,, 2014 Page 3

The breakthrough in automotive finishes arrived in 1923, when Duco lacquer, based on volatile nitro-cellulose in an acetate solvent, became available. It had been developed by Du Pont for painting fabric airplane wings during World War I. By adding more pigment, using primers and pretreating steel, it was made to adhere to steel and prevented from soften-ing and peeling, General Motors made it suitable for automobile finishes.

It cut painting time from weeks to days. It could be sprayed on with a gun, came in bright colors, didn’t fade or yellow, and was more flexible than varnish, and didn’t need high-heat ovens. Painting became another unskilled task, and the painters’ union col-lapsed. As a result of savings on labor and storage, Duco cost less than baked enamel.

Oakland used Duco in 1924. Chevrolet offered it in several colors in 1925, and in 1926 Du Pont made Duco available to the entire auto industry in 1926.

Model Ts for that year and 1927 could be obtained in dark green, gray and blue as well as black.

EARLY FORD VI CLUB OF AMERICA -- East Tennes-see Regional Group

The meeting was convened by President Phil Vinson at 7:00 p.m.

Minutes were dispensed with because the meeting for February 13 was cancelled because of weather and road conditions and the secre-tary did not have a copy of the meeting of Feb-ruary 6.

Treasurer’s report, delivered by John Senek-er, was accepted on motion by Fred Lord, sec-onded by Ron Harkleroad.

President Vinson reported the club had re-ceived a thank you note from the Girls Club for the donation at Christmas.

It was announced that Meals for Wheels will be provided by Jim Broyles, Jim Gose and Ken Bouck next week.

Phil indicated there was still a need for vol-unteers to take responsibility for the meals at one month.

A motion to approve plans for the cruise-ins next summer by Ron Harkleroad, was seconded by Dave Shmidt and approved on voice vote. Plans call for cruise-ins to be held each Friday from 6:00 to 9:00 p.p. at Lowe’s parking lot on Volunteer Parkway from the First Friday in April until the last Friday in October. The club has received a certificate of insurance for the events.

Earl Blankenbeckler’ number was drawn for the Ford Fund. Since he was not present, $19 was deposited in the Building Maintenance Fund.

The meeting was adjourned at 7:18 p.m.Minutes submitted by Murv Perry

Ford Words, March 10,, 2014Page 4

Why Fords were painted black Continued from Page 2.

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Early Ford V8 Club Ford historian Henry Dominguez was commissioned to produce an historical chronicle of the club’s first 50 years. He produced a 340 page coffee table book with more than 300 black and white and color pictures and interviews with the club’s founders, charter members, and regional group histories.

Only 2,000 copies were printed and the club has no plans for reprints.

Priced at $29.95 plus $5.00 for shipping, the book is available from the Dave Rasmussen at 1116 Austin Way, Napa, CA 94558. Make checks payable to the Early Ford V8 Club of America. It may also be or-dered on line at www. elv8.org.

Early Ford V8 Clubpublishes book to celebrate 50th anniversary

Noting that the Early Ford V8 Club Directory for 2013 lists 125 1936 Ford Roadsters, Grant Fleming and John Swanberg have begun organizing a 1936 roadster registry.

They are asking owners of ‘36 roadsters who are interested to contact either Fleming or Swanberg at these addresses:

Grant Fleming 13225 Ten Mile Road RR1 Idlerton, Ontario NOM 2A0, Canada. John Swanberg1416 Woodberry Avenue San Mateo, CA 94403-3713

They would like to list Identification number, body number (if available,) condition, drivability, stock, modified, disassembled.

The 1936 roadster was the last to be equipped with a separate windshield and wrap around cowl. Al-though the body style was continued in 1937, the con-vertible body had the widshield frame integral with the cowl like the cabriolet and station wagon. The only difference between the roadster and cabriolet was that instead of roll up windows, the roadster had snap on side curtains.

Only 3,862 roadsters were produced in 1936.

Couple proposescreation of ‘36roadster registry