Kaiser Frazer Owners Club Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: checker on December 08, 2013, 11:50:08 AM
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Hi guys, i saw today at a magazine stand, the febuary 2014 no. of COLLECTIBLE AUTOMOBILES magazine and they present Kaiser-Fraser automobiles. Nice... ;)
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Checker If you are referring to the Collectible Automobile Feb. 2014 issue The featured car on the cover is an astounding shot of the 1951 " HENRY J" in maroon dress.
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Yes i am referring to that magazine and inside there's an article about KF more specifically on the 51 year models, lots of nice pictures too, all of that on about 6 pages total. There's a reference to this club on the last page as well.
Cool !
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A friend subscribes to magazine and gave me his issue yesterday to keep. Great article.
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That looks like Alan thomas' old HJ on the cover before he loaded it wih fog lights, backup lights and every other imaginable option.
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Few more.
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Wow! I got my CA mag the other day, and I guess was so out of it, I didn't even notice the Henry J on the cover! I will pull this out of its plastic and read it.
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Big Dave showed me the article yesterday and there is a nice picture of my '51 Kaiser coupe in it. I don't know how they got the picture but it was taken at a Hoffman's Hurrah many years ago by Rick Lenz for an article in Automobile Quarterly that never happened. Anyway it was a nice surprise and now I will try to get one of the magazines.
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I'll go buy it at Barnes & Noble. Some thoughts though, you may answer before I get to it - Was Langworth the author?
He has done most of the KF stuff in the past for CA.
Also, I am surprised that CA did not reach out to KFOCI for member cars in excellent condition, for photos. Seems odd Gordie that they used a photo of one of your cars, made years ago.
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CA shot a LOT of film back in 1983 when we had a Midwest Meet in the Chicago Area. They followed this up with another session a few years later. They draw from this file for K-F material. The 1951 Kaiser Special Business Coupe I had at the time was one of the cars photographed. The pictures are also drawn from for the various books under the Consumer's Guide program (cars of the 1940's, cars of 1he 1950's etc).
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The 1954 Kaiser on the cover of one of the first CA's back in the 80's was what made me like the cars. I have most of the issues except for some in the early to mid-2000's.
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There is a photo of a car which competed with the Henry J for the small car program. It looks great in my opinion. Yet, I have never liked the Henry J. Why didn't KF choose the car that had better proportions and was based loosely on the more conventional looking car?
Why did KF lose $12 million dollars a year in 1950-51 when production was equal to the hottest months in 1948?
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Kaiser-Frazer actually lost 20 million dollars in 1950 and around 12 million in 1951. When the American military let substantial defense contracts in 1950 because of the Korean War, the government also "reserved" stocks of steel, aluminum and copper (among other raw materials) with the military stuff getting priority over needs of car companies. The government also implemented price controls on automobiles; if you needed a price hike because your production costs (materials and parts) went up you had to apply to the government for it and document the reason for same. The company also borrowed around 20 million dollars from the RFC (who made the big loan to K-F in 1949) to finance factory inventories of finished cars. The need to build inventory stemmed from the belief that sometime in early 1951, the government would order reductions in car production or even suspend building civilian cars "for the duration". Neither the curtailment or frenzied demand for new cars took place. Kaiser-Frazer's financial people put the entire amount of the loan (which was actually a line of credit so Kaiser-Frazer Sales Corporation could buy finished cars from Kaiser-Frazer Corporation & re-sell them to the dealer/distributor system) as part of the expenses/losses for the year. 1951 was a "transition year" as it was setting up Willow Run for production of the C-119 cargo plane & aircraft engines at Detroit Engine Division. Set up of the production operations was financed by another loan from the RFC, the last one Kaiser-Frazer would get.
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Thank you. Interesting. I also went back and noted that about 35% (I am going on memory of reading the article) of "1951" production was the Henry J and profit margins and warranty work on those probably didn't help the profit / loss aspect of 1951.