Tucker Torpedo

[Avenger]

Those Tucker model cars are hard to find. The cheapest one i have found is $65.86. So if you all know where any cheapers ones below 46 dollars please reply and tell me where or what the website is ok

Wow! what a car

[george 53]

Avenger, I'm not sure, BUT I think the Modelhaus casts one in resin. I KNOW theres no plastic version, so resin is your only chance. Maybe R&R has one. But like I said, I'm not certain of it.Oh, come to think of it, I HAVE seen it in 1/18th scale but I'm thinkin your lookin for 25th, yes?

[MrObsessive]

Yes, The Modelhaus does carry one.........it's a full kit meaning there's no kitbashing it with anything else. He's pretty much the only game in town unless you want to go other scales such as the Brooklyn you've got pictured-------and they can go for MUCH higher than your price ceiling.

Don's is a curbside (no engine) but I've seen the kit once in person and it can't be beat. And yes, it's 1/24-1/25 scale. Unless you luck out on the 'Bay, I don't think you'll find one cheaper than what you're asking.

[Avenger]

Last Night I was looking up Tucker's and i found one the cheapest i found in a while was 98.89 wow! Why are they so expensive?

[VW Dave]

Step up to the plate and get the Modelhaus resin one - you won't regret it.....unless you never finish it, that is.

The only 'cheap' Tuckers in scale are the 1/18th-scale diecasts.

[Aaronw]

Last Night I was looking up Tucker's and i found one the cheapest i found in a while was 98.89 wow! Why are they so expensive?

That is not really unusual for a diecast from the better companies. Yatming does a lot of nice diecast cars and trucks and are definately on the cheaper side, but still run around $50. Take a look at some like Danbury Mint and Franklin Mint, nice stuff but $100 is a decent price for many.

The Tucker is very unusual and 1/18 so its not going to be cheap. $98 is only expensive if you are looking at the low end diecast from Motormax, Maisto and such which are questionable in scale (1/22 thorough 1/28 although claiming 1/24) and detail.

Since it sounds like you never heard of the Tucker you might be interested to know they made a movie with Jeff Bridges about 15 years ago, called Tucker, which was about the man and his attempt to build a car to challenge the big 3. I don't know how accurate it really was but it was entertaining and you do get to see several of the real cars in the movie (less than 50 were built as I recall, around 40 still exist).

[Harold]

That is not really unusual for a diecast from the better companies. Yatming does a lot of nice diecast cars and trucks and are definately on the cheaper side, but still run around $50. Take a look at some like Danbury Mint and Franklin Mint, nice stuff but $100 is a decent price for many.

The Tucker is very unusual and 1/18 so its not going to be cheap. $98 is only expensive if you are looking at the low end diecast from Motormax, Maisto and such which are questionable in scale (1/22 thorough 1/28 although claiming 1/24) and detail.

Since it sounds like you never heard of the Tucker you might be interested to know they made a movie with Jeff Bridges about 15 years ago, called Tucker, which was about the man and his attempt to build a car to challenge the big 3. I don't know how accurate it really was but it was entertaining and you do get to see several of the real cars in the movie (less than 50 were built as I recall, around 40 still exist).

Yeah, that movie was about as accurate as a drunken weatherman's forecast of snow during a Mojave summer. Tucker was known (and considered somewhat of a pariah) throughout the prewar auto industry as someone who could charm the veils off a Sultan's wife. He even convinced Henry and Edsel Ford that a few months would be all it would take to create ten Miller-Ford racers for the '35 Indy 500. None of the cars finished the race, and Ford wouldn't return to the Brickyard for almost 30 years. Tucker's stock issues to raise cash for his new concern danced on the edge of legality, causing the SEC to step in. To say that the Big Three mounted a conspiracy to sink him is highly laughable. Young Henry II had his hands full rescuing the family concern from the devastation created by his senile grandfather and Harry Bennett, while planning for future product that would save it. GM and Chrysler (like the rest of the industry) were busy shoving product out the door while preparing new vehicles. Tucker was the last of their worries- when you're selling Chevys or Fords for $1100, its hard to worry about a new competitor whose cars are priced against Senior Chryslers and Junior Packards.

[Aaronw]

Yeah, that movie was about as accurate as a drunken weatherman's forecast of snow during a Mojave summer. Tucker was known (and considered somewhat of a pariah) throughout the prewar auto industry as someone who could charm the veils off a Sultan's wife. He even convinced Henry and Edsel Ford that a few months would be all it would take to create ten Miller-Ford racers for the '35 Indy 500. None of the cars finished the race, and Ford wouldn't return to the Brickyard for almost 30 years. Tucker's stock issues to raise cash for his new concern danced on the edge of legality, causing the SEC to step in. To say that the Big Three mounted a conspiracy to sink him is highly laughable. Young Henry II had his hands full rescuing the family concern from the devastation created by his senile grandfather and Harry Bennett, while planning for future product that would save it. GM and Chrysler (like the rest of the industry) were busy shoving product out the door while preparing new vehicles. Tucker was the last of their worries- when you're selling Chevys or Fords for $1100, its hard to worry about a new competitor whose cars are priced against Senior Chryslers and Junior Packards.

Yeah, kind of figured, I've never really looked into it, but the big 3 get blamed for a lot of failures. If they were so good at crushing technology and stiffling competition the last 30 years would have gone much better for them.

The movie does have some great scenes of Tuckers though and it still makes a good story even if not accurate.

[Art Anderson]

Yeah, that movie was about as accurate as a drunken weatherman's forecast of snow during a Mojave summer. Tucker was known (and considered somewhat of a pariah) throughout the prewar auto industry as someone who could charm the veils off a Sultan's wife. He even convinced Henry and Edsel Ford that a few months would be all it would take to create ten Miller-Ford racers for the '35 Indy 500. None of the cars finished the race, and Ford wouldn't return to the Brickyard for almost 30 years. Tucker's stock issues to raise cash for his new concern danced on the edge of legality, causing the SEC to step in. To say that the Big Three mounted a conspiracy to sink him is highly laughable. Young Henry II had his hands full rescuing the family concern from the devastation created by his senile grandfather and Harry Bennett, while planning for future product that would save it. GM and Chrysler (like the rest of the industry) were busy shoving product out the door while preparing new vehicles. Tucker was the last of their worries- when you're selling Chevys or Fords for $1100, its hard to worry about a new competitor whose cars are priced against Senior Chryslers and Junior Packards.

Preston Tucker's promoting the idea of a racing team of cars by the still-legendary Harry A. Miller, powered by Ford's flathead V8 wasn't all that bad, certainly not on paper. Race car design and development in the 1930's wasn't the long, drawn-out, highly involved process it is today--during the Great Depression years, most new race cars that showed up at Indianapolis were merely pipe-dreams on January 1st of their given year, finding sponsorship money was an even harder scramble than it can be today. In addition, given the depressed state of the small machine shops, including the rather lofty Offenhauser Engineering Company who had taken over building the 255cid Miller 4-cyl, evolving it that year into the even more famous Offenhauser engine, was such that cars as complex and finely engineered as any $15,000 Miller 91 Front Drives of just ten years earlier could be built, and quickly so, for a fraction of that money.

If there was a problem with the Miller-Ford, it was Miller's intransigent obsession with compactness and light weight. The "Achilles Heel" of the Miller Ford was its rather small, and extremely tightly machined steering gearbox, which, due to Miller's insistence on a cleanly built, very artistically styled race car, was mounted in too-close proximity to the left side exhaust manifold of the Ford V8 engine, which itself had already earned a reputation for being a very hot (temperature-wise) engine. The cars ran very well in practice, right out of the box, their flathead V8's hopped up to something like 160hp (bear in mind, the then new 255cid Offenhauser exceeded that output by only about 20hp, and at a much higher cost (something like $1500 a copy, or about the price of the soon-to-be-announced Lincoln Zephyr). But the car's undoing was the steering gear, which in itself would not have failed, had it not been exposed to the red heat of the exhaust manifold, coupled with the high temperatures that were present in the engine bay of nearly every other car in the 1935 500 Mile Race. The extreme heat boiled the heavy oil out of the steering gears, and they seized up on the track about half way through the event. Yes, for Henry Ford, by then a rather crotchety old man of 71, it was a major embarrassment, but those cars had another development barrier.

The Miller-Fords were front drive cars, intended for Indianapolis. By 1935, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was the only hard-surfaced race track available in the US, all the famed board superspeedways, where front-drive cars had once been fierce competitors, had rotted and weathered away, a couple burned to the ground, others torn down to make way for residential or commercial development. The only paved tracks in existence that year, other than Indianapolis were a handful of quarter-mile ovals, built around the "new kids on the block" racecars, the midgets--not nearly enough room for any Indy car to do much more than idle around those tracks, if that. The rear-drive AAA Championship cars could run dirt tracks with the same ease they exhibited on the 2.5 mile Brickyard, then come to Indianapolis, with no changes in setups beyond different camshafts for the longer straightaways and much longer, 1/4 mile turns. Front-drives, still the darlings of many at Indianapolis, simply had to sit idle, from one month of May until the next one, a year later.

Front drive speedway cars always promised much, but delivered very little at Indianapolis--where a rear drive car had 4 straights to run full throttle (two 5/8 mile straights, the front and back stretches) and two 1/8 mile straights (the north and south short chutes), all of which exist to this day, front drive cars had to drive a very smooth line through the turns, and treat the short chutes as an curved extension of the turns at either end of them--drivers also had to set up for the first and third turns much earlier than drivers in rear drives, no sudden backing out of the throttle--any sudden engine deceleration carried a severe risk of throwing a front-drive car into a slide that soon became a spin. As a result, front drive wins at Indianapolis came but very rarely: 1930 and 1932, and 1947-49, which given the sheer number of FWD cars built and entered in the 30 years from 1925 to 1955 (last year that a Novi FWD entered and tried to make the field--it did not), that was a very poor showing for what seemed to be the fast way around an oval track.

Had Ford not gotten his nose so far out of joint, those cars may well have given a very good account of themselves for 1936, in fact several of them did race, and one of the chassis saw the installation of the first of what became known as the Novi V8 (which generated an unheard-of 550hp from just 3-liters in 1941) which ran well enough in the 1941 500 to claim 4th place, slowed only by tire wear, and too many fuel stops. Another, very famous young guy from the south side of Chicago, campaigned a Miller Ford, with a postwar hotrodded flathead V8, sponsored by Grancor, wrenched by the Granitelli Brothers (Andy Granitelli was listed as the car owner).

There's little doubt that Preston Tucker was first and foremost a promoter. In many ways, he was the "black sheep" of the Tucker family (his younger brother, Fred, founded what is still the largest real estate agency in Indiana, FC Tucker), and had the reputation of being a flamboyant, hard-sell salesman. His real entry into industry was an armored car he concieved, and tried to sell to the US Army--an armored car capable of 80mph. But it was too fast to fit the tactics the Army had in mind at the time. However, the electric machine gun turret atop that armored car proved to be just the ticket for the US Army Air Corps--it was capable of tracking any fighter plane in the sky at the time, and became the standard turret used in the top position on the A-20 Havoc and A-26 Invader light bombers, the B-25 and B-26 medium bombers, and the heavies, the B-24 Liberator and B-17 Flying Fortress. Of course, all those turrets had to be made under license from Tucker, his own company not being large enough to supply all the AAC and later USAAF needs.

But, his prewar (and possibly wartime) dealings put him squarely in the sights of Westbrook Pegler, then the leading muckracker newspaper columnist of the postwar years. Pegler, much like his rival Walter Winchell, thrived on the salacious, the scandals. So when Tucker's often unorthodox methods of raising capital brought him under the scrutiny of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Pegler jumped all over the story like flies on manure Tucker was arrested, charged with fraud, tried in the US District Court in Chicago, and found Not Guilty. But, the damage had been done, his company was done, and that was that.

Would Tucker have succeeded, even survived? Many business historians aren't so sure--after all, Tucker managed to raise about 25 million dollars in capital to start his outfit. Lots of money, right? Wrong! GM alone spent over 150,000,000 dollars just to restyle and tool up for 1949. Ford spent nearly that much to develop the 1949 Ford, Mercury and Lincoln. Tucker would have found it pretty tough to even get his car into mass production, let alone carry on into a second model by say, 1950. Shoot, Henry J Kaiser laid out some $80,000,000 to found Kaiser-Frazer, and by 1955, the Kaiser car was history, only their ownership of Jeep carried the famed California construction and ship-building wizard and his offspring forward until they threw in the final towel, selling Jeep to AMC in 1968.

The movie doesn't tell of all the troubles, the scandal, but it does allude to all that throughout the film, while mostly telling the story (highly enhanced by Hollywood screenwriters taking considerable license with the truty) from the Tucker family's point of view.

All in all, an interesting man, and an interesting story.

Art

[nitrojunkie]

Heres Modelmaster/Jimmy Flinstones version.