Fisher Body Manuals

By creating a Fisher Body manual collection and adding products to our vintageplanet.ca website, I'm bringing back memories from before my adulthood. I did some research on the Fisher brothers, Albert, Fred, and Charles Fisher, whose family had built horse-drawn carriages in Ohio in the late 1800s. They opened Fisher Body in 1908 in Detroit. They produced car bodies for Cadillac, Buick, Ford, and Studebaker before General Motors purchased 60 percent of the company in 1919. They (the Fisher brothers) must have had the same teenage years we, car guys, all do. Growing up in a small town in the Netherlands called Kapelle, there were plenty of opportunities to enjoy outdoor activities. Scraping my knees, bruising my knuckles, and turning wrenches, as some teenage boys do growing up.

An old pedal bike was my first set of wheels, and I got my first taste of making body changes (hotrod) to the frame and wheels. Through friendly competition, racing these old bikes was what inspired me to go faster than the other kids in the neighborhood. Early in my teens, around the age of 11, I hopped from pedal bikes to mopeds, and again, we made the necessary changes to make the mopeds look better and go faster. I applied my knowledge, inspiration, and the need for speed into dirt bike racing. At the age of 16, we were allowed to drive our mopeds legally on the highways and provincial roads, so I traded my dirt bike for a legal, roadworthy moped. These mopeds arrived from the manufacturer with standard features that looked awful to us. With aftermarket parts and a lot of mechanical and fabrication skills, we made them look better and go faster for ourselves and to impress the girls. In nowadays terms, we call this a Restomod. If we had the ability and knowledge we have now, we could have walked the same path as the Fisher Boys. The story about the Fisher Boys can be an inspiration for all of us who build our own Hotrod, Restomod, or whatever ride, big or small. Look into our collection of Fisher Body manuals and get resources on how to find and install the right parts and manufacturing to the existing body of your ride. Check out the manuals.