Clay or No Clay?

[streamliner]

There seemed to be conflicting stories over whether or not Tucker Corporation was able to obtain any clay for modelling the Tin Goose": http://www.tuckerclub.org/bbs3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1117&st=0&sk=t&sd=a.

The following excerp may help to clarify the clay issue, and also raises other questions.

In 1987, Phil Egan was not only working on Design and Destiny, but he was preparing a biography for Automobile Quarterly on his friend Alex Tremulis. In a December 1987 reply on the draft, Tremulis corrected Egan on the sequence of events as he remembered them in relation to the Tin Goose, the clay models, and the Lippincott team.



So it seems entirely plausible that the Tin Goose, at least in part (maybe not 95%), predates the clay models, and that's why Tremulis' story of going straight to metal without the benefit of clay may, in part, be accurate.

As far as I could gather, Preston Tucker told Tremulis to take a "vacation" in March of 1947 at which point the Lippincott team came in on March 4, 1947. However, I thought he was only out for 1 month (not 3 months) during which time he was kept apprised of the goings-on by insiders at the plant.

Trying to find the facts is a bit like trying to determine the truth in Rashomon. Somewhere in the middle is most likely...

I just found this reference last night, so I thought I'd put this one up for the experts (you all).

Does anyone have any records for the dates on which the Tin Goose was started and the stages of development?

Any photos or dates of the Tin Goose in the process of being built?

How about records/memos for the purchase date of the clay?

There must be records for the million dollar rear end tooling. Anyone have some?

Anything related in the Dan Leabu memos that turn up on eBay?

[Larry Clark]

I have copies of several different letters written by Alex Tremulis that are all consistent to say that there was not a clay model for the Tin Goose because clay was too expensive. I am not clear of the dates that Alex was away from the company.

I once had thought that Tremulis was working at the plant for some of the time that the Lippencott group was at the plant- I no longer think this is the case. In a letter from Alex to John Cermak in 1985, Alex said that he had not provided support to the Lippencott team, contrary to what Phil Egan had said. He said, "To my knowledge we only built one full clay model. There was no way I could have given the Lippencott team any support as I wasn't even aware of their presence for a period of two months."

In the same letter to Cermak, Alex had said he had been on vacation for two weeks prior to coming back to the plant to be locked out. During this time away is when the Lippencott group undoubtedly began. Alex was so angry about his firing that he wanted nothing to do with Preston Tucker or the car project. While Alex has said there were five full-time draftmen working for him when he left, if he is correct in what he said then he apparently did not initially keep in touch with them or anyone else in the plant to know of the Lippencott group working in the plant. I personally find this a little hard to believe that he would not have known but perhaps so as there are a number of once important persons with Tucker who abruptly left who did not look back.

In Alex Tremulis's most cited speech about the Tucker car, "The 1946-48 Tucker: A Great Promise Unfulfilled," a S.A.E. Technical Paper Series speech in Dearborn, MI in October, 1987 he does not mention his time away from the company. I have a letter from Alex's late wife, Chrissie, wherein she says she cannot remember how long he was away from the plant (she has them gone four days, not two weeks). Chrissie puts the dates for Lippencott at the plant as being March 19 to May 4, 1947. (While Chrissie could not remember how long Alex was away in the spring of 1947, she had very vivid recollections on dates surrounding when Alex first met Preston Tucker when she called me years ago.)

Sorry I can not be of more help.

Larry