To John Regan:

This is the front spring on my 1916 Touring. I believe the car has roller bearing spindles and the spring shackles are backwards, so it might not be the original front spring.



Tom (Detroit, Piquette Ts / Casual Ts)

Tom:

No your front spring is the more typical tapered leaf spring. As I understand it, the idea of the tapered ends is to spread the spring surface over a wider contact area by weakening the ends to thus spread out the pressure spot. These springs were NOT easy to make and the "typical" 1916 spring seems to have been an attempt to accoomplish the same objective by tapering the spring end in the other plane. Thus at about 2" back from the ends, the spring leaves start coming to a point while remaining full thickness. At the pointed end they in fact have about a 1/2" radius rather than an actual point. Someone must have tried NOT tapering them at all and discovered it made no real difference and that was so much easier to make that it became the standard. The pointy leaf spring only was used on the front. For 1916 the rear spring remained the regular tapered leaf.

I will see if I can find the picture of my son's front spring and post it. I have it somewhere here. My computer area looks like a small thermonuclear device was detonated nearby.

Let me see if I can upload the picture of my son's car front spring or at least a portion of it so you can get the idea.

John,

Do you know if the springs were produced by Ford or if they were produced by outside suppliers and shipped to Ford or a combination of both? I wonder if there several styles used simultaneously during that 1916 period or if all or at least most of them would have been the style shown in the photo? As always thank you for sharing your research with us and more importantly for putting it to use support the hobby.

Hap 1915 Ford Model T Touring cut off and made into a pickup truck (with a latter model front spring) and 1907 Ford Model S Runabout (which by the way uses the same front tapered leaf spring as the 1909-1915 Ts – ok the earliest 1906 N had a slightly different version but they interchange functionally just fine)

John,

When you look at leaf springs in the Mechanical Engineer's Handbooks, they show how the leaf spring, in theory, is actually a long skinny diamond. You then cut the diamond into strips the width of a spring leaf (actually half-width after the center piece). The main leaf comes out directly, and the other leaves are formed by joining the half-width strips on either side of center to form a narrow leaf with pointed ends.

It will be intersting to find out why Ford made the change, and then why they stopped.

Tom (Detroit, Piquette Ts / Casual Ts)

Hap:

I don't know who produced the springs but the drawing for the spring was revised to show the pointy leaf spring and then later revised to show the clipped leaf spring. What I am saying is that unlike things like coil boxes in which we KNOW they were using 2 different ones, the spring drawing simply evolved from taper leaf to pointy leaf to clipped leaf. One can then only assume that ALL 1916 cars had these from the time they first showed up on production cars by perhaps about Feb or so of 1916 until they were phased out starting sometime after the September of 1916 change to the clipped leaf. I know of a fairly early 1917 T (about Jan as I recall) that has this spring on it.

The top leaf clearly has Ford script on it.

Tom:

The answer to both questions is clearly $$$$. The pointy leaf spring would be much cheaper to make since it could be stamped or sheared to that shape while the taper leaf would most definitely need to be ground. The change from pointy leaf to the simple clipped leaf was next for the same reason - cheaper. I think all that would be necessary was for someone to have noticed or experimented with the wear and tear issue and they quickly discovered that the spring works about the same whether tapered, pointy, or clipped so why not do it cheaper. I could just see a spring maker bringing a sample to Ford and saying "...these are way cheaper to make and we don't see any difference - do you?" and Ford only needed to hear the first 6 words of that!! ha ha.

Here is a photo of another set of front springs that I have.