MTFCA Forum

So looking at my Dad's '14, I noticed his front fenders were different. One has the expected three rivets, but one only has two. I can find nothing in the encyclopedia about '14 style fenders with two rivets. Anybody seen these? (the car came with no fenders and these were picked up at separate auctions)

I'd have to go out to the shop to verify but I'm pretty sure our '14 has four rivets on each fender.

That is a 1915 fender. 1914 fenders have four rivets.

The three rivet fender bracket is from 1915 and the two rivet is a after market replacement from after 1916. Because you paint looks very good I wouldn’t worry about the rivets, most people won’t even notice the difference. The 1914 style open cars were made into early 1915 and the three rivet fender could have been used on one of these 1915 built cars.

Enjoy your nice T that you Dad built.

He's actually still building it. He finally got the second fender filled, sanded, and painted and was showing it off to me. He hadn't noticed the rivet thing until I pointed it out. Not he's considering painting a rivet head and sticking it onto the fender with JB Weld so they both look the same.

If the three rivets are important to him and he is still painting things, then he could change out the two rivet fender bracket for a three rivet bracket . You can get new 1915 type three rivet brackets from Rootlieb in Turlock California .

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For reference; April 1914 front and rear fenders.

The front fenders for Fords can be more than a bit confusing during all the brass years. The front "bill" came and went several times. Early 1913s had the bill on front fenders, a carryover from the 1912s, with varying changes in the beads on the inner skirt and back slope of the fender (actually used to stiffen the fender and reduce vibration rattles and cracking). Most 1913s and true 1914s did not have the front bill. For 1915 and 1916, the bill was brought back. However, the transition from the 1914 model cars to the 1915 style cars was hampered by manufacturing issues and production delays caused by the new cowl design. The 1915 style new models center-door sedans and couplets came out about October of 1914. Their mostly hand-built bodies not delayed significantly by the open style's stamping issues. While Ford's engineers worked out the production problems, Ford continued to build the 1914 style open cars, well into calendar 1915.Early production for the open cars began in December of 1914, with only the runabouts, and only less than fifty of them according to some records. For January of 1915, runabout production of the new style was close to two thousand units, along with a small number of touring cars. Meanwhile, the old 1914 style continued to be produced by the thousands! Numbers improved considerably in February, and the last of the 1914 style open cars being assembled in small numbers in April of 1915.
All this confusion lead to a bizarre controversy. The "nonexistent" very common fender used during some of that long transition. The four rivet billed front fender. The anti-vibration beads were in the style of 1914, but the mounting bracket was the 1914 and earlier four rivet style.
A lot of original era records indicate that Ford never used such a fender. Back when I was getting into this hobby, people did not know any of all this. Everyone assumed the 1915 style open cars came out at the usual time in the fall of 1914 (WRONG!). Everyone assumed the 1914 style ended in the fall of 1914(WRONG!). I met dozens of people with 1914 style model Ts that had early 1915 calendar year serial numbers. And most of those owners in those days bought 1914 engines to replace what they perceived as a wrong engine in their car. People believing that their 1915 was an early 1915 were also buying late 1914 engines to make their car more correct. People were so sure of the idea that the model year changed in the "normal" way? That they believed they were doing the right thing. When in fact they were erasing real empirical data points.
I think the best thing to call that 1915 style 1914 bracket front fender is simply the "transitional fender". Sadly, I talked with a lot of people that took beautiful transitional fenders off of late 1914s or early 1915s and scrapped the fenders because they believed them to be incorrect after-market replacement fenders. Sadly, no, they turned out to be very nice correct genuine Ford fenders. It took a bunch of serious researchers aided by Bruce McCalley as editor of the Vintage Ford magazine, and writer/publisher of a few of the best model T history books ever published, to convince people that those transitional fenders are in fact correct for a lot of transitional model T Fords crossing between 1914 and 1915. To this day, there are still people that do not accept that.

I haven't kept up with some of the most recent research. Last I heard is that nobody had yet found actual records of those fenders being used. Part of the reason people so strongly believed they were not Ford fenders? However, photographic evidence shows it enough in spite of the detail actually not showing in most photographs. And some of the photos that show those fenders are Ford factory photos!

If that car were mine? I would consider keeping the fenders on it the way they are. Being able to show the two different fenders would give you an opportunity to tell of the differences and changes over that short time. Technically, neither of those fenders are "correct" for a 1914. Either with or without the bill, a 1914 should have the four rivet front fenders. Could a very late production 1914 style have left the factory with the three rivet fenders? I am not sure when the three rivet front fenders first came out? General consensus is that the three rivet front fenders came out early enough that it could be possible for a late production 1914 style car to have received them. 1915 style touring cars as late as May and June have had the four rivet fenders. I haven't yet seen proof that open 1915 style Ts had three rivet fenders before April, but general consensus again seems to be that they may have been around before February. If so, it would have been possible for a 1914 style car to have gotten them.

People today like everything nice and neat, tied up in a pretty ribbon with a bow. Ford didn't do things that way.

He's decided to just leave the fender as-is.