Ford/Marmon-Herrington Umbau-Wagen

[Bill Murray]

Hi All:

The photo below has been sitting on AHF for a while now, begging a positive Id.

It is thought to be a Ford Marmon-Herrington and basically, I agree. But, it seems to be a real "bitser".

1. If we start at the front, the front bumper appears to be a normal one for the 1939 Ford 1 1/2 ton truck.

2. If we then look at the grille/headlamp guard, it gets interesting. the guard looks to be "series production" as opposed to home made. However, it does not match any of the French Contract guards, not the Romanian ones, just nothing but the 1939 style used on prewar US MH trucks and that just does not seem reasonable to be in use by the LW.

3. Looking at the wheels/tyres, after looking at hundreds of combinations, it looks to me like the front wheel/tyre combination is 10:50x16 with a tread pattern seen mostly on the British Fordson Sussex 6x4 series in that size.

4. Moving to the body itself, it looks to me like a vehicle that was either cut down from a chassis/cab unit or perhaps even a New Zealand chassis/open cab variant. The doors are intact up to the point where you can see a "cutoff".
The windscreen is obviously specially constructed.

5. The rear body escapes me for the moment. It looks to be a "series production" body but I cannot place it.

6. The rear wheels are another mystery. Some feel that they are dual rear wheels, others that it is a very narrow replacement rear body that is much narrower than a normal body on this chassis and it has single rear wheels. As dual rear wheels were an option on the 1 1/2 ton MH Ford chassis, I lean in that direction.

So, can any of you MH experts ID this one??

Edit: Sorry, the 3d photo is a Canadian MH but the NZ vehicle looked almost identical.



Bill