post war Kaiser-Fraser

[Firedome]

These were around as a kid and a neighbor had the later Kaiser Manhattan with that distinctive "widows peak" windshield, 1952 or 53? Anyway I saw this online today and had never appreciated how clean (sort-of) and modern this car was: straight sides, no fender bulges, a very clean and simple low horizontal grille (Fraser), clean & simple dashboard. This one would be nicer w/o the extra bumper guards though, maybe a NYC car? K-F was definitely ahead of most other makes in '46/47, with perhaps the first and best immediate post-war designs as they started totally from scratch. Much better than Stude and even 49 GMs still had fender bulges. The '49 (shoebox) Ford was even cleaner but 3 years later. Henry Kaiser was quite an innovator in many other ways also, too bad they couldn't maintain it with cars for much longer, the successors to this car were nothing like as daring. But I find this car on CL very appealing!

[electra225]

I had a great aunt who had a '51 Kaiser with Hydra-Matic. Slow as pond water, but quiet and smooth. Kaisers were powered by Continental F-226 engines, popular industrial engines, tough as nails, but not very exciting as automotive powerplants. Kaiser sorely needed a V-8. There was an article, I believe in Popular Mechanics, that said George Mason of Nash-Kelvinator had proposed the merger of Kaiser-Frazer, Nash-Kelvinator, Hudson, Packard and Studebaker to form what eventually became American Motors. Mason died unexpectedly in 1954, so the project never got off the ground. It is interesting to imagine what would have happened if that had actually happened. Kaisers were good cars, advanced features. Lower and better handling than the current GM cars.

[TC Chris]

My parents' first new car was a '51 Dodge. You can see some photos of that year here (not their car):

https://www.flickr.com/photos/myoldpost ... otostream/

In 1951, it still had the bolt-on rear fenders bulging outward. A few years later, Dad bought himself a used '51 Chevy convertible. See one here:

https://www.autobarnclassiccars.com/veh ... onvertible

Again, fender bulges.

Chris Campbell

[walyfd]

While Kaisers were less than flamboyant or even contemporary, Henry was a great audiophile...

https://about.kaiserpermanente.org/who- ... me-pioneer

The Kaiser Dome was the Carnegie Hall of Hawaii and possibly the entire South pacific. Arthur Lyman recorded exclusively there and, quite honestly, I prefer not only his style but recording quality to martin Denney and even les baxter.

[TC Chris]

The article about Kaiser's domes includes this:

"Although five days were allocated, the crew took advantage of low winds (unmoored, the dome could become a giant frisbee) and began ahead of schedule. "

When I was in college I had a summer job for a company owned by a Dow Chemical engineer who was working on applications for their extruded polystyrene foam (Styrofoam). He designed a "spirally generated dome" made of 4"x4" foam logs, heat-welded together. He designed a machine to rotate around a center point to create the thing. You could walk on it. Inside, it had very strange acoustics--a person speaking at one side could sound as though they were right next to you.

It was actually durable (and well insulated), but that frisbee thing was its demise. In a storm, the doors blew open and the whole dome lifted up and crashed.

Chris Campbell

[Ken Doyle]

It was Kaiser that brought us that infamous piece of U.S. automotive styling, the vinyl roof.

kaiser vinyl roof.jpg (49.02 KiB) Viewed 1949 times

[William]

I'm not up on Kaiser, is that a Kaiser Manhattan?

Bill

[Ken Doyle]

The car I with the vinyl roof pictured above is a 1953 Kaiser Dragon.

[William]

Thanks, Ken, I have never heard of a Kaiser Dragon. Was that similar to the Manhattan model? It looks very deluxe.

Bill

[TC Chris]

Seeing these Kaiser notes reminds me of the usual question that comes to mind when somebody starts up a new car company. It would seem like there's a "deleted" of a lot of engineering and toolmaking that goes into creating a car from scratch. Apart from the drivetrain, you've got to design and manufacture al those body panels and components, and they all have to fit together, and the chassis has to function and survive for a reasonable anticipated service life. Somebody has to translate the designer's aesthetic concepts into steel. I can see how an established company can accomplish this, with fairly long lead times and a staff of engineering talent in all the required disciplines. But to start from scratch seems really daunting. That last photo of the late Kaiser shows a fairly sophisticated creation, and it must have taken a lot of work to turn ideas into vehicles.

Chris Campbell

[Firedome]

The 53 Kaiser Dragon was just the top model, Manhattan looked about the same. '54/55 similar but with updated front end styling. They were made in S. America until well into the '60s after Kaiser moved the tooling there in '55. K-F made only 500k cars in 10 years. The Continental engine was a good workhorse, but behind the times by then. Kaiser was innovative, maybe he should have had Lycoming do a smaller 6 cyl version of the dohc Duesenberg 8 for Kaiser, now that would have been modern!! and a leapfrog ahead of an ohv V8.

Didn't know about Kaiser's dome. I love Lyman, Denny, Baxter, and don't forget Robert Drasnin, he's one of the best!
All regulars on retrococktail.org, I have most of their stuff on CD.

As to as start up, the only reason Tesla has made it: 1. being able to buy the NUMMI factory, 2. an electric is in many ways much simpler to design and build w/o major flaws, and a lot is software, their strength and even then they've had issues, even getting on the electric ground floor. 3. almost unlimited investment funds. Musk has been mostly a negative since kicking out the founders, but he's had the bucks. There's one basic reason every start up since Chrysler in 1925 has flopped..$$$. It's an incredibly capital intensive business.

My parent's first car was a beige 1947 Ford. Compare this to the 1946 Fraser... the difference: amazing.