The Henry Ford

During the Summer of 2025 I did an internship in Dearborn Michigan at The Henry Ford Museum. I was a part of the Antique Vehicle Department, which is responsible for maintaining a working fleet of roughly 30 ford Model T's and Model A's along with Model AA and TT trucks.

With all those nearly century old vehicles running around there are a lot of instances where something breaks. This is why it is important that they have this dedicated tow truck which is based on a Ford Model TT.

These vehicles take a lot of abuse. Here we had a broken leaf spring off of the Model AA bus. To fix this we replaced the leaf spring and the shackles.

This is an example of the beating that the Model T's take. This is the parts of a disassembled transmission. As you can see the clutch disks are very worn and some broken.

This is the low gear drum from that same transmission as you can see this car was driven so hard that all 8 rivets sheared off.

I was able to help rebuild a model T transmission. This picture shows the all new triple gears which had to have new pins installed along with new brass bushings. The new bushings had to be honed to size to hold tolerance.

This is the transmission after installing the new drums. These drums had to have their brass bushings honed to size as well.

Here is the fully assembled transmission. We installed all new clutch disks along with a new clutch spring.

To keep the fleet looking good it is important that key cosmetic pieces be redone. This new firewall is a good example of that. I did the final assembly on this firewall and helped with other firewalls throughout the summer.

This is on of the brass cars after getting a new fire wall. When we replace the fire wall we have to drill new holes and then stain and seal the wood. We then make sure to paint all the other parts including every nut and bolt.

Here is a Model T rear axle which I helped to rebuild. We replaced the pinion and ring gear and set the lash to around .0011. The model T's came factory with a lash of .0035 due to the rapid rate of production.

This is the bottom end of a Model T motor. On this motor we replaced the transmission. On another Model T motor I had to measure the tolerances and remove some shims on the rod bearings to bring them back to spec.

Above you see the rear brake drum on one of the Model AA trucks. We removed the drum and found that a cotter pin had fallen off which caused a squeak. I also had to clean out brake dust to elevate squeaking.

Another thing that we did to make sure that the cars look good was replace the interiors. Here is an interiors that I helped with replacing. We even replaced the seat springs due the the old ones being broken.

Here is an interior that I did essentially by myself. It was important that I did my best to keep wrinkles out and also make sure that the buttons where level and straight.

This is the car that had that broken transmission. We took the car apart to replace the transmission. Since it was apart we decided to replace the fire wall and the interior.

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