More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Tuckers

[Nunavut_Boy]

Very interesting.

[Tuckerfan]

@Mr. Slant

Tuckerfan:

Have you considered publishing?
If you’re going to do this much research, I would certainly consider picking up your book.

If I had the cash to travel to the National Archives and the Truman Presidential Library to be able to dig through material which hasn’t made it to the net and a few other places, I would. However, I doubt that I could convince a publisher to pony up a large enough advance for me to be able to do it.

[Tuckerfan]

It seems I have a couple of significant updates to report. The first is that I’ve found out a bit more about the “convertable”.

If my fading memory serves me correctly, I seem to remember reading about a homemade Tucker convertible in “Old Cars Weekly” newspaper which coincidentally is published in Wisconsin. (I think the article with photo’s and sketches was probably published during the very late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.)

The car was assembled using a left-over Tucker frame and various spare parts gathered from many different sources over many years, and all done many years after the marques’ untimely demise.

Such a car today would probably be most accurately described as a “compilation” car or an “assembled” car because calling it a “mule” or “prototype” implies that it was a legitimately built Tucker which most probably it wasn’t. Perhaps we can call it a would-of, could-of, should-of car.

Tucker’s plans were looking to the automotive future and 4-door convertible sedans were fading in popularity all through the late 1930’s and were definitely being fazed out by most post-war manufacturers.

As I kind of remember, the article said it was built by a man on the SW side of Chicago in a suburb not far from the Tucker factory. (Perhaps in Summit Illinois???)

I also seem to remember the article referring to the car by the builders name which may have began with an ‘S’. I think he may have had a sort of Polish/German sounding last name like “Shumanski” or “Shumaker” or “Schwimmer” or something with a similar ring. They called it the “S… Tucker Convertible”.

There’s a bit more info on the page that I’ve linked to, and it seems possible that more will show up in the near future.

The really big news, however, is that it looks like someone’s going to be building the Tucker Carioca!

Based on the few drawings available, we will now begin making this dream car a reality… Keep an eye on the site, as we begin with a 1:6 scaled model (to help us fill in some design gaps), and work out the final proportions. From there, we will scale it up to full size, and fabricate the body from aluminum, and fabricate a chassis and suspension, also from aluminum. We will make it look exactly like the drawings, and work in some modern technology.

[KP]

You, sir, have made ME a Tucker fan, too.

[Tuckerfan]

Some interesting tidbits have surfaced since I wrote this. One of which is that there might be a second Tucker in Brazil! Thanks to the help of a couple of Portugese speaking Dopers I managed to contact someone in Brazil who’d seen 1035, which is slowly rotting away and when I mentioned that there was a rumor that the car had been sold and shipped to Spain, his response was, “Was it the green one or the black one?” The black one, is the one that was/is sitting in the Roberto Lee Museum, the green one is one I’d never heard of. It also turns out to be against Brazillian law to transport a classic/antique car out of the country, so it seems unlikely that the car is actually gone (have to get down there to find out). The green one also supposedly has zero miles on the clock. Naturally, I was damned curious about this, so I contacted a member of the club who knows waaay more about Tuckers than I do, to see what he might know about this.

He certainly thought that it was possible, and in digging around in his correspondance with the late Roberto Lee found a letter in which Mr. Lee discussed the car, and said that it never made it to Brazil, but that it was purchased by the Brazillian gentleman who originally owned 1035. The club expert said that the Brazillian gentleman only bought one Tucker, number 1035 and that car was never painted green. So, we’re left wondering how the story got started.

There is another possibility as to what the car could be. As mentioned above, Tucker had travelled to Brazil several times to see about building cars there, but died before the deal was completely ironed out. Unfortunately, none of the paperwork survives, so we don’t know very many of the details. It’s entirely possible that the car could be a mock up/prototype of the Carioca that Tucker wanted to build. (Wouldn’t that be something if it turned out to be that car?)

Next, photographs of the convertable have surfaced! Not pretty IMHO and it seems obvious to me that the car’s cobbled together from parts and was not something the company produced.

Also, in 1950 a Tucker was entered into a NASCAR race. Apparently, the driver didn’t know what he was doing, and broke the rear axle before the car completed a lap. Sadly, the car wasn’t repaired and was destroyed in a fire some decades later.