I’ve written articles about 3109 junkyard vehicles, more or less, since I began working for automotive publications in 2007, and some of my favorites are the seemingly ordinary machines that turn out to have represented important milestones in automotive history. Just in the past two weeks, we’ve seen an example of the engine that made Americans mistrust diesels for decades and a first-year example of one of the trucks that turned our roads into one big SUV parade. Today, we’ve got one of the very first Fords to get an overhead-valve engine, found in a High Plains Colorado car graveyard last week.
The 1946-1948 Fords had been slightly restyled prewar models, which sold well to Americans with newly thick wallets and a desperate hunger for new cars. Henry Ford II, Edsel’s son, had become the president of Ford Motor Company when his grandfather (finally) retired in 1945 and it was under his watch that the legendary “shoebox” 1949 Ford was designed.
The original shoebox Ford ditched the old-timey transverse springs of Henry I’s antiquated predecessors and it looked very modern. Sales for 1949 topped a million units and stayed at that level for 1950 and 1951. This car made GM sweat and gave Chrysler a sales beating that got more painful with each passing year.
My grandfather, who had suffered with some miserably unsuitable work cars during the immediate postwar period, bought a new Ford as soon as he could get one and stayed a Ford man for the rest of his life (and since that life was lived in rust-prone Minnesota, he went through quite a few Fords). Here he is with his shoebox Fordor in the middle 1950s.
For the 1952 model, the shoebox Ford got its first major refresh. The two-piece windshield was replaced by up-to-the-minute curved one-piece glass and the body got a bit more decoration.
The most momentous change took place under the hood, where a brand-new overhead-valve straight-six engine became available as base equipment in 1952 Ford passenger cars and F-Series trucks. Named the “Mileage Maker Six” (for cars) and “Clipper Six” (for trucks), it replaced the flathead design that had been in use since the 1941 model year.
Henry Ford the First had never been enthusiastic about six-cylinder engines, to put it mildly. He had sold the six-banger-equipped Model K, with 40 horses generated by 405 cubic inches of displacement, from 1906 through 1908, then spent the next few decades bolting only inline-four and V-8 flatheads into his production cars.
This 215-cubic-inch (3.5-liter) pushrod straight six wasn’t the very first OHV engine to go into a Ford production car; it was tied for that honor with the Lincoln Y-Block V-8. Both debuted in the 1952 model year and shared some valvetrain design features. Mickey Thompson raced a Ford with Mileage Maker Six power in the 1953 Carrera Panamericana race (which DNF’d due to a horrific crash that killed three officials and three spectators), then returned the following year with a Y-Block-powered Ford (which Thompson felt was slower than the I-6 car and also DNF’d due to a crash).
The elderly Ford flathead V8 was still available in the 1952 Fords (the Y-Block engine family was Lincoln-only until 1954). For the 1952 model year, it was called the “Strato-Star,” displacing 239 cubic inches (3.9 liters) and rated at 110 horsepower. The Mileage Maker made a nearly-as-good 101 horses and didn’t suffer from the exhaust-through-the-block overheating problems of the Strato-Star (though it did prove to be afflicted by some of the same valvetrain lubrication woes as the Y-Block).
The OHV straight-six wasn’t the only big technological leap forward for Ford during the early 1950s. Partway through the 1951 model year, Ford finally introduced its first true automatic transmission, a Borg-Warner-derived three-speed design that arrived more than a decade after GM’s spectacularly successful Hydramatic four-speed automatic. It was called the Fordomatic in Fords and the Merc-O-Matic in Mercuries (Lincolns used Hydramatics bought from GM until getting genuine Ford Turbo-Drives for 1955).
While the Fordomatic had three forward gears, it started out in second gear when the gear selector was placed in the D setting. In order to start out in first gear, the driver needed to choose the L selector position. This confusing state of affairs continued until well into the 1960s.
It took quite a while for most of Detroit’s automatic transmission designs and controls to settle into configurations that 21st century drivers would recognize. The Fordomatic cost $170 extra in this car, which comes to about $2058 in 2024 dollars; most Ford buyers still took the familiar three-on-the-tree column-shift manual when this car was sold, but that would change in a hurry as the 1950s went on.
The build tag tells us that this car was assembled at the old Winchester Avenue Kansas City plant (not to be confused with Kansas City Assembly in Claycomo, which was opened in 1951 but was used only for military contracts through 1957).
The Customline was the mid-priced trim level for the 1952-1956 Fords, falling between the entry-level Mainline and the higher-zoot Crestline. The base MSRP for this one (before the Fordomatic and other options) was $1615, or about $19,550 after inflation. If you wanted your ’52 Customline four-door sedan with flathead V-8 power, the price tag started at $1685 ($20,398 in today’s money).
Another interesting bit of automotive history visible in this car may be seen in the factory radio face. Note that there are no CONELRAD nuclear-attack frequency markers at 640 and 1240 kHz; those became mandatory for the 1953 model year (not at all coincidentally, the year of the first Soviet test of a thermonuclear weapon design) and were discontinued after 1963 (when it became clear that intercontinental ballistic missiles and megaton warheads would render “duck-and-cover” warnings over radio broadcasts pointless). There’s a lot of history in the junkyard, if you know where to look.
This car isn’t terribly rusty, but many decades of outdoor storage have ruined the interior. Ordinary Detroit four-door sedans of this era aren’t worth anywhere near as much as their coupe and convertible counterparts, particularly when they have the base engine, so this one never stood much chance of getting a restoration. Plenty of good parts remain for restorers of other 1952-1954 Fords, though.
I like the body style. Car looks like it is rough on the inside.