Click on the picture to Z O O M in.
According to the rules of my site, I don’t photograph cars at car shows or even casual car club meetings. It’s all about “seeing the cars in the wild”, meaning on the street. I saw this car in the parking lot of a garage in Layton New Jersey as we drove by. The garage is even pictured on Google Maps. Look up 118 County Road 560, Layton, NJ. Wow, a 1929 car out in the country.
The Franklin Automobile Company was founded around 1902 in Syracuse New York. It was headed by Herbert H. Franklin who had founded the Franklin Manufacturing Company in 1883, also in Syracuse. The company was very innovative and manufactured cars until 1934, when the company declared bankruptcy. Here’s a story I picked up from the Web.
A big fan of Franklins was famous airplane pilot Charles Lindbergh. With the banks now in control of the company and calling it quits in 1934, legend has it that Herbert Franklin got up from his desk, grabbed his hat off of the coat hook, and walked out.
This came from a car sales site called Valenti Classics, here is a link to a Franklin they sold. Click Here for for a link to the site
This car, a 1929 was one of about 14,000 cars manufactured that year. That was about 5,000 more cars than Franklin had ever sold in one year.
The Franklin cars were different. They were quite fast for the day and stressed fuel efficiency. In fact, the 1929 model shown here could get up 28 miles per gallon, a great deal better than its competitors. This was due, in large part to the engineering that went into the air cooled engine and the chassis design.
Click on the picture to Z O O M in.
Click on the picture to Z O O M in.
The left hand picture shows what looks like a radiator grill, but the car was air cooled. This is explained in an article on Wkipedia.
Franklin’s were often rather odd-looking cars, although some were distinctly handsome with Renault-style hoods. Starting in 1925, at the demand of dealers, Franklin’s were redesigned to look like conventional cars sporting a massive nickel-plated “dummy radiator” which served as an air intake and was called a “hoodfront”. This design by J. Frank DeCausse enabled the Franklin to employ classic styling.
Click Here for more information from Wikipeadia
© Fred Winograd copyright 2009, 2011