In 1897 it rolled out of the shop for the very first time and for four years ran up and down the streets of Sherbrooke.

(music) (speaking French) Every car has a story.

Like the best thing ever.

(car drives by) For some, they end up here.

These are just some of the stories about those who collect and restore vehicles giving them a renewed lease on life so that their stories can be told right here on Radical Restoration (music) Closed captioning provided by Cre-Oil.

On line at Cre-Oil dot com.

Funding for Radical Restoration is provided by (Music) Rakabot sources sustainable materials to create boot racks that organize footwear that allows drippings to go in the bowl.

Models designed for home, work or recreational settings are available on line at Rakabot dot com Joe's Hand Cleaner Manufactured by Clean Products supports Radical Restoration With our without water Joe's Hand Cleaner cleanses to ingredients that are food or cosmetic grade A family business since 1948.

On line at Joe's Hand Cleaner dot com.

Tire tag.

Re Usable labelling to organize tire rotation and re-mounting.

Tire Tag.

(car honk ) Tire dash Tag dot com Additional funding provided by Nutrafarms and Hagerty Insurance In this episode, we showcase Canada's first gas powered automobile, the 1897 Fossmobile as it heads to Sherbrooke, Quebec, to mark the 125th anniversary of its creation.

Hi, I'm Ron Foss.

I'm the grandson of the inventor of the first Canadian gasoline automobile in Canada, George Foote Foss, which was built in Sherbrooke Quebec in 1897.

Today is the 125th anniversary event being hosted by Sherbrooke for the Fossmobile And it's being held at a location called Le Marché de La Gare which is a old train station of Sherbrooke that's been converted into a market.

And on this particular day, every summer they go back into the early 1900s and people dress up in period costume.

Some of the vendors will sell at prices typical to those early 1900 days.

And we thought bringing the Fossmobile to this event was very timely.

And this is quite the process of making sure this is in here in a really secure fashion.

And we actually had a little bit of damage coming down from Montreal, from Ontario to Sherbrooke, which was a bit disappointing yesterday afternoon when we opened it.

And saw however, it's all fairly minor and can be easily repaired.

When we get back to the Legendary motor car company, we'll fix everything up again.

All right.

Ready?

Yeah.

Well, my grandfather was born and raised here in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and started off running up and down the streets of Sherbrooke at about ten or 12 years old, calling for the auction.

His dad was the auctioneer, and he was trying to make sure that people would come to the auction, and for that, he'd get paid a few pennies and he would immediately go to the candy store and buy some maple sugar.

By about 18, he opened up like a bicycle repair shop, and around 19 or 20 he went to Sherbrooke to buy some equipment because he was slowly changing his bicycle repair shop into a complete machine shop.

That's when he rented an automobile, electric powered Broman automobile.

And I think he was promised about a two hour drive and it lasted only about 20 minutes.

So that's where he began to get the idea that there was a better way to build the automobile, probably top speed.

He took the train back from Boston and knew that combustion engines were being used in other purposes, including in the automobile.

The automobile had already been invented in gasoline format in Germany and and the UK and France to some degree in the US as well.

And so he just started looking into how a combustion engine would work and how you go about making one and decided that if others could do it, he could do it too.

the charts in the back there and we put off for a while.

He started in the late fall of 1896 in a little bicycle repair shop and used some bicycle component parts to help build the automobile.

He designed the engine, but he actually had the first one he built, forged a company called Iron Works right here in Sherbrooke.

And it was only after that that he developed it and created his own forge in his shop.

And he later actually made, I think, nine other engines not used for the automobile, but just for for stationary purposes.

But the first one that was made, he mounted on the front of this car that he was building.

And in 1897, it rolled out of the shop for the very first time and for four years ran up and down the streets of Sherbrooke.

He didn't see the business viability in the automobile at that particular point in time, I try to get people to go back in time and think about what it was like at that point.

Everything was horse drawn, the streets were pretty muddy and kind of rutty, and it would have been, you know, a pretty good visionary to think that the automobile was going to overtake the horse and carriage.

And, in fact, a lot of the comments he got from people in the community was that this thing's a menace and a demon.

And, you know, it can't possibly be real.

So it scared the horses and scared the children and got stuck in the mud.

And so he just didn't see the business viability of it.

He had been approached by Henry Ford on a couple of occasions on the concept of building cars together.

But he just turned that down again, didn't have the business sense to go forward with it.

So this is our list of corporate sponsors.

Very proud to have about 25 corporate sponsors who helped fund the project.

And while we haven't actually restored it so the original Fossmobile has never been found, the the project, of course, has been in my head since I was a toddler.

You know, this story has something I've been I grew up with.

I knew my grandfather fairly well.

We saw him every couple of weekends until I was about 13 or 14 when he passed away.

So it was always in the back of my mind.

I mean, I think every generation has done a school project on the Fossmobile and gotten very good marks for it about six years ago, I started sort of poking around on the Internet to see if anybody was saying anything about the Fossmobile, because not much has been said since the early 1960s, and I didn't really find that much was being said.

And I thought that that was a bit of a mistake.

Like Canadians needed to know that that that a Canadian built the first gasoline car in Canada.

Because if you were to ask many people, you know, where did the first car in Canada come from?

A lot of people would just come up with the name Ford brand recognition.

You know, I congratulate him on doing a marvelous job at marketing and commercializing the automobile.

But we do have a Canadian first here, and I thought it was worth making it better known within Canada.

And I figured that if my grandfather could do it 125 years ago, that with all the technology available to me today and eBay and other experts, that we'd be able to build a replica of the car.

So it is a pure replica.

We were very fortunate to find period correct parts.

So much of it is from the period, but there is nothing original from the Fossmobile itself.

(music) After Sherbrooke, we head off back to legendary motor car to try to finish it.

There's still there's still some outstanding items.

We haven't finished all of the tiller linkage and assembly underneath.

We still need to do the chain derailler to allow the chain to move from Sprocket Sprocket because it had to gears 2 forward speeds that still needs to be built.

And then we have a little bit of work to do on the engine timing.

So there's the timing of the engine matches the spark and we have to do all of the fuel delivery.

The gas tank is built.

We just didn't put it in.

And then the line runs to what's called a mixing valve, which is one of the hardest parts to find, was a period correct mixing valve.

There was no carburetors in those days, but we have to modify that mixing valve a little bit and all of that has to get mounted to the car.

So it's one month of work and then on the 18th of September, we go to Cobble Beach Concours d'Elegance which is the most prestigious car show in Canada.

We've been invited there sort of as a guest.

It can't be in the show because it's a tribute replica car.

To be in a show and to be judged, you have to have cars with originality.

But we're there to be able to talk about history and speak of the history of the car.

(music) And I think what's been really helpful with it.

I do, yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Because of the the cover was was colored.

So maybe this is just a really good copy.

So this is what George did.

Yes.

Yeah.

There's nothing written but knowing my grandmother, probably (laughs) Hi.

I'm Dumarseq de Pencier I'm the exhibit and project coordinator and the Canadian Automotive Museum, which means that I develop all of the exhibits and displays and do all the research surrounding new vehicles that we acquire for the collection, including, well, today, the 1897 Fossmobile So the current goal for the future of the Fossmobile is initially to have it on display at the Canadian Automotive Museum for at least a year or two.

We're putting together an exhibit on cars of Canada pre 1910 We've got FossMobile, we've got the 1903 Red Path Messenger, which is Canada's second gasoline car and a few other early vehicles that go along with it.

And once that exhibit is wrapped, the FossMobile will be traveling.

We're aiming to send it out to any Canadian community institutions and museums who are willing to host it in a safe place to share this really interesting and not particularly well known part of Canadian automotive history, but we have photographs that go back to the very, very early times of the car, including some of the being built in the shop.

But that's all we had to go from now.

Having said that, the 1901 Crest Mobil, most experts would say, is a knock off of the original Fossmobile And there's plenty of evidence to point to.

The numerous times that my grandfather spoke to the people who ultimately built the Crestmobile, he didn't want to partner with Ford.

He turned down local financing.

So it's quite possible that he gave these people his own ideas on how the automobile should be built.

There's two factors on this automobile that differs from automobiles that were built before this and many automobile automobiles that came after this.

So the engine mounting in the front was fairly unique and was not really repeated for quite a number of years, although the Crestmobile built in 1901, which as I said earlier, we think follows the Fossmobile It had the engine in the front, but most other automobile designs up until the early 1900s, the engine was under the seat or in the rear.

So this was quite a unique part of the and he felt doing it for two reasons.

There would be less vibration with it not being under the seat and there was easier access for maintenance, which in most vehicles today is, is, is how we do them, our vehicles in the front.

The other fairly unique feature is the Tiller Assembly, which has four component parts to it.

I'll just walk around here.

These are four posts, one inside each other or tubes, and each one has a different controlling factor.

So the largest is your steering and that would move your wheels right and left.

The next largest one is your derailler and your and your shifting.

And the other sort of unique first for my grandfather was putting the shifting on the steering column again, something that wasn't repeated until sometime in the thirties.

Most shifters were some other location within within the vehicle.

The next one here, the smaller of the handles is the throttle control.

And this little brass one should spin independently.

I think they've tightened it down just for the traveling.

But this little one would it would run to the spark advance.

So you could advance and recline the spark when you're starting the engine.

(music) Okay.

Bye bye.

So this is this is the clutch arm.

Yeah.

Great.

Oh, go get that.

And I just don't know.

And there would be a derailler Yeah.

Like a bicycle.

Yeah.

And it would move the chain off and on, you know, and just I wouldn't see that part.

And when you, when you clutch, it would also act like a brake on not metal on metal.

Right.

Okay.

We were able to photograph a Crestmobile in a museum down in Boston and they were very kind to us to allow us to measure and photograph it as long as we didn't touch it, we could get all the information we needed from it.

So we were able to take those photos and align them up with our own old, you know, fairly grainy photos and get fairly accurate perspectives on how how these parts were made I restored the engine and and brought it back to its original state.

It too was in fairly sad state when we received it.

The chassis and all the other mechanical aspects were are being done by Legendary motor car up in Halton Hills, Ontario.

The wood components of the body, the seat and the front wood cowling was all done by the Canadian wood craftsman up in Chatsworth, Ontario.

And he's a fellow who really knew how to do woodworking back in that period.

So all of the component parts that are wood are either reconstructed, or newly constructed using exactly those same techniques.

So the authenticity within the design has been kept fairly, fairly consistent by finding craftsmen who knew what to do.

Okay.

My name is Fred Miller from Canadian Wood Craftsman dot com I run a custom shop here.

I've been working at this for 42 years, building everything from soup to nuts, really.

When Ron Foss came along and asked me about working on the Fossmobile project I looked at various aspects of it and thought, Yeah, I think this is something I can do.

Not only can I do it, it's probably a pretty good fit, him and I, because there were no plans for the Fossmobile It had to be reverse engineered.

In other words, built by photographs that almost everybody, everybody's done any drawing will know what this device is.

It's a drafting scale and one of the ways that you can like with the Fossmobile, we took a dimension that we knew and the piano style, the carriage body that Ron got from Florida was part of an old, old vehicle, very similar to the Fossmobile.

We knew well.

We had that carriage body in the shop here and we knew the height of the sides of it.

I believe that was about seven and a quarter inches the height of that carriage body.

So you go to these old photographs that Ron has and you take this little drafting scale and you start laying it out.

And these are like very you know, that equals a foot between my two fingers is is equal to a foot on that scale.

Maybe over on this scale that equals a foot.

Another would scale it.

So there's a lot of different scales on here.

You find the one that's closest to that fitting that seven and a quarter inches.

And then from that you can deduce pretty closely a lot of the other dimensions that you're looking at.

The next step was to build the seat and it was quite a few hours in that it was probably guess some 40 or 50 hours in in that seat and a lot of head banging, dealing with compound angles like that and all those spindles, setting the drill press up on on multiple angles.

Just actually figuring those angles out is, is a lot of chair math really.

If you can build a chair, you can build that.

To be honest with you, I'd never built a chair before, so I took that on as a great challenge.

I thought, oh, this will be this will be challenging.

And, you know, at stage three was the engine cowl.

Now there's there's really no very little similarity in that engine cowl to anything I've ever seen.

It was a really a big challenge to make it drop over the engine and not interfere.

It had to drop over the engine and hook on to the front of the car and not interfere with all the stuff that was there.

It had those curves and we used a bending ply.

I think I can probably lay my hands on a scrap of that.

This was a plywood product is about 3/8 of an inch thick.

And it's it's actually multi lams of like plywood is done.

But the unique thing about it is that you can do this with it and you can do that with it.

-(crack) And you hear that cracking.

That's that's normal.

It's the it's the layers separating.

They're not going to break.

Took me, you know, when I was when I was standing that on the Fossmobile and hearing that I went Oh No.

So I called up Columbia Forest Products and they said, oh, don't worry, (laughs) you know that.

Of course, all that that opens the grain up a bit and we had to fill that afterwards.

Painted it up inside Of course, you know where all these curves on the inside of the engine cowl, I don't know if you've got to look at the inside of the engine cowl.

There's a little bracing in there that looks like the inside of a guitar that was that was useful to reinforce that glue joint on the inside.

It was probably one of the most difficult clampings I think I had ever done.

It was certainly the most complicated thing I ever clamped in my life.

In 42 years, I've had some fun projects that would be in the top ten for sure (music) and you know, really in the year program.

So, okay, good use, you know, because this isn't like school, right?

Right.

Right.

In Sherbrooke, I'm a mom of four and I'm home schooling, home homeschooling.

Sorry, my 12 years old and it's a boy doesn't really like school.

So you know this year in the history program, the Fossmobile is going to be really great because it's going to be able to create some links between the city he lives in and history.

And that's the best way to like history, to be able to see what happened, where you live right now, what created you, your city and everything.

So the Fossmobile is really going to be a hit.

I think people are realizing more and more as we as we've done a better job at telling the story, that this truly is a pretty integral part of their their history here in Sherbrooke.

And so a lot of people were really embracing that notion.

In fact, I've had a lot of questions and requests to eventually You leave it here or donated to Sherbrooke and not take it back to the museum in Ontario.

So tomorrow is a very similar date to today.

The market I think is still open, but I don't think it has the same period factor to it.

And we will have, I think between six and eight vintage automobiles from the early 1900s up until about 1940 or 1950, so that people could really get a true feel for how the car developed over those years.

So it will start with the Fossmobile and then move through each decade.

Up until around 1950 (music) (speaking in French) (music) (speaking in French) (music) So my name is Serge Lacasse I'm from Sherbrooke and we love cars.

And today we're celebrating the this Fossmobile that was fabricated in Sherbrooke, the first car in Canada with an internal combustion we call And today it's the last days here before going to a museum.

And we invited we are I'm a director of a club.

We ask members to come in for each decades until 1950.

We have a 53 right here.

We got a Ford oh three right here every summer.

And the beautiful town of Magog, Quebec, we do a car show this year.

Within the car show, we had 400 cars on the main street and 10,000 people came in to look at our beautiful cars, beautiful.

(music) All the lights.

All the lights here.

There are all you need.

You need combustion.

And this is the kind of this is the container that pushes all the liquid, to because it's a wick.

That car, it's a 1912 Ford Model T It's called the Commercial Roadster at that time a white commercial roadster.

And there is the Mother-In-Law seat on the back of the car.

So it's possible to remove that part and to convert that like a small pickup.

So many small commercial activity at that time use that type of little car and they put like a small wooden trunk on it.

So to carry merchandise.

So but otherwise it's with the Mother-In-Law that part to the car park, to the team car.

It's a full brass era.

It was the last year of Ford.

So as you can see, the Lamps there is a lot of brass.

But starting in 1913, already there is some brass which converts in regular mid-rise because we had some damage coming down from Ontario.

Oh yes.

Because the bottom part was secured at the top.

Oh, yes, that's right.

You don't have an inside trim.

Yeah, it's inside.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, I see.

Okay, but I'll show you how much the top move is on the spring.

Oh, yeah.

We need to find a way by now.

Spring.

I see.

(music) this way.

No.

My name is Michel Ouellette and the car is a 1938 Cadillac 35 series body by Fleetwood.

And they are built only, 45 of those cars.

And this one is number 40 out of 45.

There's only five left in the world.

We done everything from frame to to the body to the mechanic and electrical components It's completely restored (music) on our next episode, we follow the Fossmobile to Cobble Beach before heading to the Canadian Automotive Museum.

(music) Funding for Radical Restoration is provided by (Music) Rakabot sources sustainable materials to create boot racks that organize footwear that allows drippings to go in the bowl.

Models designed for home, work or recreational settings are available on line at Rakabot dot com Joe's Hand Cleaner Manufactured by Clean Products supports Radical Restoration With our without water Joe's Hand Cleaner cleanses to ingredients that are food or cosmetic grade A family business since 1948.

On line at Joe's Hand Cleaner dot com.

Tire tag.

Re Usable labelling to organize tire rotation and re-mounting.

Tire Tag.

(car honk ) Tire dash Tag dot com Additional funding provided by Nutrafarms and Hagerty Insurance Thank you for joining us.

My name's Gary Nichols.

Until next time, may all your rides be radical.

(car drives by) (tires squealing) (sanding) (music)