AMT 1/25 1925 Ford Tall T Build Review

By Ken Kitchen, Front Range Auto Modelers (FRAM)

Review

Henry Ford had a vision, “I will build a car for the great multitude.  It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for.  It will be constructed of the best of materials, but eh best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise.  But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”

The car that fulfilled Ford’s vision was the Model T Ford.  First produced in 1908 and continued through 1927, the Model T was the car that put America (and arguably the world) on wheels.  The first Model Ts were virtually hand assembled—just 12,000 were built its first two years.  Then production moved to the Highland Park complex where production went into high gear.  Whereas it took 12.5 hours each to assemble those first 12,000 Model Ts, by 1914 that time had been reduced to  a mere 93 minutes and over 2,000,000 rolled off the assembly line.

The Model T was a simple car, powered by a 4 cylinder engine that produced 20 hp, but didn’t even have a water pump.  Initially, all Model Ts were started via a hand crank.  This changed over the years and by 1919 most were equipped with self starters and batteries.  It had a three-speed transmission:  two speeds forward and one in reverse.  Motion was controlled by three floor pedals and a floor lever—none of them a throttle (it was on the steering wheel).  Braking was done via a transmission brake, which was part of the three pedal configuration.  The suspension had transversely mounted semi-elliptic springs, coupled with a solid beam front axle forged from a single piece of vanadium steel.  Power reached the rear differential through a single universal joint attached to a torque tube.

There were scores of available Model T bodies—roadster, coupe, sedan, turtleback, pickup, sedan delivery, and others.  This re-release kit by AMT/Round 2 brings us the “Tall T” body and a roadster.  The roadster body can be mated with a turtle deck, stock pickup bed or a shortened pickup bed and comes with the top up or down.  This is not quite as many options as the factory made, but is more than most models and enough that I really didn’t know where to start. In the end I built a stock coupe to match the roadster pickup that I built from an earlier version.  I saw one small glitch in the roadster body—there was a lump of plastic on the cowl that had to be ground down for the interior to fit.  I had no other problems with the build--everything else fits the way it’s supposed to.

This kit is very simple but does accurately represent a mid-20s Ford Model T.  It goes together easily and you have the option of building a coupe, roadster or pickup like it would have come from the factory or as a hot rod, complete with a late 50s/early 60s style V8 and wide white slicks.  In fact, there are enough parts in this one that you can build two complete kits, though one of them will have to be stock and the other will have to be a hot rod.

Highly recommended.

My sincere thanks to Round2 Models for this review sample!