Long-stored Ford isquiteaneifel
In 1925, Ford opened a factory in Berlin where it assembled cars built from imported parts, followed six years later by a plant in Cologne that produced vehicles using German-made componentry. In 1935 it introduced a version of the Ford Model C, with an 1172cc engine and named the Eifel after the German mountain range. Ford claimed that only 4% of the car was sourced outside Germany, which entitled the manufacturer to add ‘Deutsches Erzeugnis’ (German product) on the bonnet badge. The identification plate on the bulkhead showed 1157cc to meet German product certification, and 61,495 examples were produced before the war stopped civilian purchases.
A number of coachbuilders took this chassis and produced different versions, one of the most attractive being a two-seater cabriolet by Glaser of Dresden. The firm had been founded in 1864 as a saddle and harness maker, and its first automotive coachwork was fitted to a Mercedes-benz in 1902.
A 1937 Glaser cabriolet was bought by Terry Bennett of Joplin, Missouri, in 1958 when he was just 16. It is not known when it arrived in the US, but was possibly brought back by a returning serviceman. By 1962 it was parked out in the open, and in 1976 it was submerged by a flood. Two years later the Eifel was put into storage, where it stayed until 2021 when Bennett died and his son Grant inherited the car.
Bennett Jnr remembers playing in the Ford as a child. His brother shot out one of the headlights with a pellet gun, then Grant got a lot of overspray on the Eifel while repainting his bicycle. “My dad always intended to restore the car but never got started,” he says. “I remember there was a fourcylinder Nissan engine in the garage that was supposed to replace the Ford sidevalve.” The car was in a bad way, exacerbated by accident damage that led to the chassis being patched up, and there was a lot of filler in the left-front wing. Never having restored a car before, Bennett enlisted help from friends and work is progressing apace.