13-02-2020, 12:38 PM (This post was last modified: 13-02-2020, 12:44 PM by Tony Griffiths.)
Cover page of the Light Car Magazine, October 1935
For a very high-resolution scan, download this image (on a slow connection it might take several minutes), take it to your local graphics shop and have a 6-foot hight print made.
Drawings like this are of little help when it comes to studying originality. I've only ever seen a black surround to the side windows, and if you follow the line of the door opening you'd take away most of the trafficator assembly when you open it! Nice advert, though.
13-02-2020, 01:50 PM (This post was last modified: 13-02-2020, 03:47 PM by Tony Griffiths.)
Indeed. The idea of showing these images is purely for the enjoyment of the asthetics.
Heavily art-worked pictures such as these are of no help whatsoever vis a via originality (the colour of the rear window surround and the coachlining was covered in a previous post). In many cases, when a model was updated, the publicity department didn't even bother to photograph the differences - they allowed the studio to paint them in - leading, of course, to lots of wonderful confusion for those who took the new pictures as gospel.
For something on the window surrounds, see the bottom of this page: https://www.austinsevenfriends.co.uk/for...9#pid39959
50 years ago we thought that there was nothing new to be discovered about the Austin Seven; how wrong we were. Even during the rebuild of an early Ruby this year, a restorer with decades of experience found, to his astonishment, a number of previously undiscovered features and fittings.
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8 Location: Port Elizabeth, Sunny South Africa
Car type: '26 Chummy, '28 Top Hat, '33 Type "65", single seaters
Lovely poster. It's a bit confusing re the name 'Ruby'. Looking at the bottom right of the poster it looks like 'Ruby' was a name to include the 2 seater, and maybe the open road tourer as well. Or you could read it the other way and think 'Ruby' did not apply to the fixed head saloon.
13-02-2020, 07:17 PM (This post was last modified: 13-02-2020, 11:56 PM by Tony Griffiths.)
(13-02-2020, 02:29 PM)andrew34ruby Wrote: Lovely poster. It's a bit confusing re the name 'Ruby'. Looking at the bottom right of the poster it looks like 'Ruby' was a name to include the 2 seater, and maybe the open road tourer as well. Or you could read it the other way and think 'Ruby' did not apply to the fixed head saloon.
In the whole-range range brochure for 1934 that included the Ruby, the less-expensive two-seater with chrome radiator continued in production and was renamed the "Opal" - though oddly, other contemporary publicity literature still referred to it as the "Two-seater".
Now, for the pedant-of-the month award:
The description in the advertisement does raise an interesting question: do we call the standard version of the Ruby without bumpers and sunshine roof the "Fixed Head Saloon"? Probably not, for the previous Box saloon could also be had in that form. So, while in contemporary times it might (just possibly) not have been referred to with a "Ruby" prefix, today we'd be better off calling it the "Ruby Fixed Head Saloon" (in the whole-range brochure for 1934, under the heading "Ruby", it's not classed separately but described as a "Fixed Head" model).
As far as I can discover, the term "Open Road Tourer" in the advertisement had not been used previously; previously, any open Seven with four seats had been listed as both the "Tourer" and in some (but not all) catalogues from the 1933 to 1934 era, as the "4-Seat Tourer". It was only upon the introduction of the Ruby that it became the more glamourous, wind-in-your-hair-seduce-the-girls "Open Road Tourer".
No doubt Mr Costigan will now start digging and find something to the contrary - he usually can!
13-02-2020, 08:48 PM (This post was last modified: 13-02-2020, 09:10 PM by Mike Costigan.)
The name 'Open Road' was first given to a more luxurious version (it had full doors and more effective side-screens) of the Twelve Clifton in 1927, and featured in Austin's range from then until the war. I believe the Seven tourer was first given the name in 1934 with the introduction of the Ruby-style radiator cowl; all previous tourers were just called 'four-seat tourer'.
Edit: In fact the first use of the Open Road name was on the Twenty chassis in late 1925.
Trafficators are always a problem unless you have a car with suicide doors.
In the early 1960's my other had a Morris Traveller with them and she regularly forgot to cancel the near-side one when she pulled in to allow my sister or me to get out. The local garage must have made a fortune out of replacing the broken arms...
