It was a search for a puppy that saw David Goodman Sr. end up with his 99-year-old Ford Model T.
“I was actually on Kijiji looking for a Labrador pup, I think,” Goodman recalled.
“I happened to come across this ad that caught my attention and it was for just parts and pieces of this truck and it was in Winnipeg.”
The ad had been posted by a man who had recently relocated from British Columbia to Winnipeg and decided that he probably wouldn’t ever be able to bring the Model T back to life.
“So I ended up driving in that night,” Goodman said,
“Mary [Goodman’s wife] and I drove in that night and took along some money and I had a look at it and decided ‘yeah, this is something I can probably tackle,’ and we piled it on the trailer and hauled it home.”
That was 2012. It would end up being another eight years before the Model T was fit to drive.
Goodman says it had been a longtime dream of his to own an early model car.
“I guess for many, many years probably since my teens I’ve been wanting to get an old 1920s or 30s pick-up to restore and nothing had come along,” he said.
“I enjoy that kind of thing as a hobby, being able to put something back on the road that will be 100 years old next year, to be able to do that is part of the satisfaction.”
When Goodman acquired the bones of the Model T pickup, all of the parts needed to put it on the road weren’t even available in the deal.
“There was a lot of missing parts, a lot of missing pieces. Fenders, rear fenders for the box, seats,” he listed.
“The engine came with it but it was very much in need of a complete rebuild. I happened to come across one on eBay that was freshly rebuilt and so I just bought the engine done, rather than having to do it, because they are quite complicated to rebuild because the bearings and the crankshafts are actually molten metal poured into the rods and then fitted to the crankshaft, it’s a very complicated process.”
The truck also didn’t have wheels or a top and the rear differential was in rough shape. Goodman says he was lucky to find a source for parts not too far away in Bemidji.
“I was pretty fortunate in that I found a guy in Bemidji that was parting out Model Ts and selling the parts, so I had a fairly close place to go to get pieces,” Goodman said.
“I remember one time Mary and I went down with the motorcycle and came home with two fenders hanging over the back trunk on the bike.”
Goodman also took the opportunity to attend a Model T meetup in Minneapolis to learn more about what he needed to do to get his own up and running.
“There’s not really a service manual for a 1926 Ford pickup,” he said,
“I wasn’t quite sure how they fit together, so that was for information gathering.”
When he did get around to putting the vehicle together he did notice something interesting.
“I noticed when I started putting it together that left hand headlight had a bullet hole out the back of the headlight,” he said.
“The glass had obviously been replaced, but there was a bullet hole out the back, and two more bullet holes in the cowling up below the windshield on the driver’s side and when you look at them you would definitely take from that that somebody was shooting at that car, basically shooting at the person in the car… and the one hold actually still has a the bullet in the hold and I had a guy who’s familiar with firearms who told me, I think it was a .38 calibre. It was a very common police bullet back in the day.”
Goodman did some further research but was unable to determine who might have owned the truck and gotten shot at.
In his quest to restore the Model T, Goodman says he opted not to have it look like it just rolled off the assembly line, but instead have it look like it rolled out of a barn after having been in storage.
“I tried to restore it to look as close to original as possible and to look as if it just came out of a barn after sitting for 90 years,” he said.
“That includes leaving the bullet holes and the bullet lodged in the panel.”
However, his truck does have a luxury that earlier models did not; rather than needing to be hand cranked, Goodman’s Model T has an electric start.
“I haven’t even tried to start it with a crank start because I’ve read so many stories about people breaking their wrists and getting their arms broken from the crank flipping back around. I leave it in a nice leather holder that hangs on the front.”
Since it has been roadworthy, Goodman has had his Model T in the Emo Fair parade and he can be seen driving it around Emo to various family members’ homes.
If you’re not sure if you’re seeing the right one, the license plate number is 1926 TEE.
