From Hemmings...
A while back, Paul Bellefeuille let us borrow a few of his copies of Ford Times, Ford’s in-house monthly magazine that ran from 1908 to 1996, and after some perusing, we came across somebody who should be familiar to faithful Hemmings Blog readers, Ray Russell, he of the Gadabout and the hydraulic-drive and plastic-bodied cars. In the January 1954 issue, Russell received a few paragraphs about his latest creation, a sectioned 1953 Ford. They wrote:
Ray Russell, Detroit industrial designer, is shown below with one of the cars he has restyled. The principal change in this new 1953 Ford convertible is that it has been midsectioned seven inches, which means that a horizontal slice seven inches thick was cut out of the center of the car.
The job involved placing a chalk line around the car at a carefully determined distance above its floor level. Then the second line of the section was scribed around the car with a pair of dividers. Vertical lines were marked both before and behind the openings of the front fenders, and dropped below the headlights to preserve the fender flange. The same procedure was followed at the rear fenders and below the rear decklid.
The doors and the hood were worked on separately, and remaining body members were hand cut or torched off. When all the center section had been removed, the top of the body was lowered onto the bottom half. Then, with welding, finishing, and painting completed, Russell’s car with a different look took to the streets.
