steve

Below are excerpts of postings from our message board about a somewhat mysterious vehicle that began its life as a "SHOEBOXFORD".

Posted Apr 18,2003 10:51 PM scooting Hi,

Shoebox fords and flatheads were king!!! Then Cadillac comes out with this strange overhead valve engine, it's the newest thing, big technology. Couple of years and the guy with the used Ford wants the new stuff. He swaps a Caddy engine in the Ford and a "Fordillac" is born. Not many other cool swaps are done until that strange Hemi engine comes out. Likely it showed first in the 53-56 Ford pickup as a swap for power. Hum, why not in the old Ford Coupe? Then, here we go again.

So, living in the past... flathead likely... swap an old Caddy engine... sure why not. Some have done it and others are doing it.

What about paying tribute to the past instead? Install a Cadallic Northstar? Sweet running engine, good looks, 300hp stock, and the trans match has been made up already. The engines are out there used for $1000 to $1500 easy. Speedway sold a bunch of new ones a couple years ago for $2500 ea. Most had to have gone to hot rodders. So, who in this crowd has done it? I would love to see pictures. If no one has, who is daydreaming about it? I can't be the only one who remembers "Fordillac". Let's see some pictures.

Ray Whitaker New Mexico

Posted Apr 21,2003 6:08 AM toledobill I well remember the Fordillacs. When I started on my non-running '49 Coupe last year, I researched the Northstar and found a few places that offered rear-wheel-drive conversions with GM automatics, plus a west coast firm, CHR Fabrications, that offered a wiring harness for engine swaps. I was seriously considering the swap until I added up the cost of everything my '49 needed, added the cost of the conversion to a Northstar, and compared it to my budget. So I'm staying with the flathead for now, but keeping an eye on the new Cadillacs coming this year that have 400+ hp Northstars already in a north-south configuration rather than the east-west for front-wheel drive. There oughta be some of those babies in the yards in a few more years, and by then my budget may have expanded. For those of you who weren't around when our shoeboxes were new, here's what I remember about the Fordillacs...

I first noticed car magazines around 1950 or 1951.

I was ten or eleven years old, and had a paper route for the Toledo newspaper, The Blade. As luck would have it, there was a drug store situated toward the end of my route. On collection days, with a pocket full of too many dollar bills and too much change, I made a habit of stopping for a root beer and an inspection of the latest comic books. At some point each month, when I had read all the comics, my attention would wander to the magazines. The car magazines eventually became a bigger obsession than the comics.

I became a fan of Tom McCahill's columns in Mechanix Illustrated. "Uncle" Tom never minced words or overlooked flaws in his monthly reviews of the latest cars. One of his much-later road tests, for example, compared the latest Ford Torino to a "land-locked tuna sucking air". Uncle Tom's column became one of the first things I looked for each month. I'm pretty sure that it was his report on the Fordillacs that convinced me there was nothing faster or better on the road. The original (1949-1951) Fordillacs were built by Bill Frick and his partner, Phil Walters. They ran Frick-Tappett Motors in New York, and sold brand-new Fords with equally new Cadillac engines replacing the flatheads. These Cadillacs were the high-tech big-blocks of their day – 331 cubic inches of throbbing overhead-valve V8. After selling a Fordillac to Briggs Cunningham, Frick and Walters were also hired to run the legendary Cunningham Car Company that campaigned so successfully in sports car racing.

Uncle Tom wrote a glowing report on the Fordillacs, with no mention of tunas or air sucking. The Fordillacs, as I remember, were held up as what the Big 3 in Detroit should be aiming for. After the McCahill article, I began noticing articles in other magazines about these magnificent machines, and the picture of a shoebox with the "Fordillac" chrome script on its flank soon became imprinted on my psyche as the ultimate automotive statement.

It wasn't too long before other car books – ones from the West Coast – began showing up at the drug store. Titles like Hot Rod, Hop Up, Honk! and Rod & Custom introduced me to a host of other hybrids. There were homemade Fordillacs as well as Fordmobiles and Fordslers (with Oldsmobile and Chrysler engines), Studillacs and Chevmobiles as well. The beauty of these machines was that you didn't have to buy a new car to have them – you could assemble them yourself in your own garage. To a wide-eyed newsboy of twelve or thirteen, who believed it was as easy as the magazines said, this opened the door to a wonderful world of possibilities.

Little did that newsboy realize he was stepping onto the slippery slope of a fifty-year addiction to cars of all kinds – stock or modified, hot rods, customs, sports cars, muscle cars, pony cars, -- anything with four wheels that looked like fun. And through it all, the image of those original Shoeboxes from Bill Frick remained imprinted somewhere on his mind as the first example of the ultimate road machine.