Cool Cars: The 1928 Franklin Roadster

During a recent visit to Manchester, Vermont, I took some photos of this 1928 Franklin roadster at Hildene, the summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln, the only child of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln to survive into adulthood. Although I plan to blog about the technology of Hildene in a future installment of TechnoTourist's Engineering Expeditions, I wanted to share these images of the 1928 Franklin separately. There's a place for architecture and a place for automobiles. So let's talk cars.

Here's a head-on view.

Here's a look under the hood.

According to a plaque at Hildene, Robert Todd Lincoln's daughter and her husband, John Randolph, traveled from Virginia to Vermont in the Franklin during the 1930s. This was years before the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, of course, and roadways weren't what they are today. Some time after 1941, the Franklin roadster was abandoned in a field at the Randolph plantation in Virginia. After a purchase and partial restoration by Frank Brill, another buyer snapped up the vehicle and began a 10-year restoration project.

Ultimately, Elwood L. Hansen disassembled the entire exterior of the vehicle and stripped it down to the bare metal. He then etched the metal and primed it with six coats of red filler primer. Seventeen coats of acrylic lacquer later, Hansen re-assembled the 1928 Franklin part-by-part. In 1973, the restoration specialist won the esteemed Best of Show award by the Sports Car Club of America. Today, the Franklin is home at Hildene.

So what's under hood? According to conceptcarz.com, Franklin cars were cooled by direct air flow. A fan was attached to the crankshaft, and the air was directed by metal housings to the tops of the cylinders and through copper fins. This design was superior to contemporary liquid-cooled engines, especially on long journeys at high speeds (such as from Virginia to Vermont).

Because the Franklin didn't have a radiator, the roadster looked different from other automobiles of the era. By 1923, the company conformed to the market's demands by positioning a fake radiator at the front of the vehicle. This upset John Wilkinson, the chief engineer and designer for Franklin, so much that he left the company in protest. Fortunately, Elwood L. Hansen – and the friends of Hildene – never gave up.