Henry J Prototype??

[pjkaiser]

I just returned from driving around the country yesterday.  I visited many museums.  I found this gem at the Auburn, Cord, Duesenburg museum in Auburn, IN.

Some club members have seen it since it was at the 48th KFOCI Nationals.   This was news to me and maybe will to you as well.  The Volunteer, at the museum, and I had a great discussion about this car and the fire that nearly destroyed this car.  I will include more photos in another post.  It has a tubular frame.

[pjkaiser]

Here are some more photos of the tubular frame, original to the 1948 AMP along with pictures next to a production Henry J.

I also took a picture of the car after the fire that nearly destroyed this 1948 AMP.

I've read a lot about Henry J. Kaiser and did not find anything about this particular car.  Thoughts?

[Fid]

The car got a lot of attention on the old "Chat Board" that we used to use in the early 2000s.  Tom Wilson of KFOC did the restoration and had  Fotki photo site which showed the progress. Unfortunately, it's no longer available to view.
I took pictures of it when he had it at the KFOC National in Auburn back in '04.  It was still a work in progress.

[Corsairdeluxe]

Bess and Henry J in something.

[kaiserfrazerlibrary]

In 1948, Kaiser-Frazer Corporation took on a project paid for by American Metal Products (AMP) to showcase the various small parts AMP made for the motor vehicle industry.  The blueprints for the car were the creation of a Detroit engineering company who had no indication the car would be used for anything else but show rather than production. 

Henry J. Kaiser saw the finished AMP car and had the appropriate K-F departments work out how the car could be re-designed as a  viable production vehicle and asked cost accounting to work out build price and project a sell price for such a vehicle.  This work led to creation of the actual HJ prototype using components from supplier cataloges rather than the bits from this car or that car that the Detroit engineering company's people built into their design.

As for the little car that Henry & Bess were in a bit of speculation.  The background suggests the photo was taken at one of the subdivisions that Kaiser and Fritz Burns put up in California right after the war.  The front end suggests pre-war Crosley; perhaps it was a construction company work truck.

Attached are a  few photos of the actual prototype.  Note the car has no front door vent windows; neither opening or fixed.

[Fid]

Here's some more info including some pics that Tom shared on Fotki.

http://clubs.hemmings.com/kfmich/gallery.html

The Fotki link is in the article but it no longer works.

[pjkaiser]

What great pictures!!   Thanks for sharing.

[Fid]

I see in the latest bulletin Tom Wilson passed away last month.  He was a wealth of knowledge and did outstanding work on that car.

[Cortes121]

When was the above Henry J prototype built?

[joefrazer]

When Tom completed the restoration of the AMP car, he had a box of bits and pieces that came off the car that were too damaged to reuse. He had them at a meet and rather unceremoniously dumped them in a trash can. Realizing their value, I retrieved the box and have its contents to this day. In the box were prototype inside door handles and window cranks, etched with the Doehler Jarvis mark - the company that made die cast items for various manufacturers.

[kaiserfrazerlibrary]

Kaiser-Frazer took on construction of the AMP car in 1948 based on the blueprint and specifications pachage supplied by Americal Metal Products.  Henry J. Kaiser liked the finished product a lot; it was bigger than any of the Hobby Lobby cars but was never intended to be a producton car; it was a display item only for the company at trade shows and at the company offices.  The only reasun the museum got it was that a fire in the dead storage warehouse where the car was kept damaged.   There is an issue of MOTOR TREND from around 1962 that showed a small photo taken from an upper level of the building looking down showing surplus machinery and the car in the midst of the stuff. 

[MikeHJC]

The Henry J next to the AMP car is my Henry J, its been on loan to them for a couple years now. Tom did pass recently, it was always fun to visit him and talk car stuff. I worked a little on the AMP car with him, very little, but he did work on that car for a long time, because it was so badly burned. I remember the front grille being rusted really bad and riddled with holes. The place that redid it must have used 20 pounds of chrome to repair it. It was running and drivable again, here is a picture of Tom and I testing it out after setting the timing right before it went off to the museum. The picture Fid took is 2004 and this one is I think 2008.