| Established in 1860, G.A. Schnabel & Sons entered the professional car field in 1914 offering
bodies on their own assembled chassis notable for its Renault-style coal scuttle hood with its radiator placed
behind the engine. Schnablel started a trend later popular in England of creating new bodies for existing used
chassis. [In Britain many Rolls-Royces started out life as passenger cars in the 1930s and ended up as hearses in
the 1940s & 1950s.]
Schnable built on White, Packard, and any other high quality chassis the customer might supply. Their
distinctive wide-bodied barrel-bottomed funeral coaches and ambulances offered substantially more interior space
than the competition and were good sellers in Ohio, Western New York and Pennsylvania. One disadvantage of building
on existing chassis was that quite a few older chassis were too short for the coachwork, looking like they were
about to fall off the back of the chassis.
By 1916, the budget-minded Schnable was producing a few brand-new coaches on their own assembled chassis, but
most of their simply-styled bodies ended up on either used or low-cost chassis such as Ford's Model T.
Mainly a commercial body builder, Schnabel built few if any professional
cars beyond the early twenties.
As with many regional commercial body builders, Schnabel built the
occasional fire apparatus and rescue body. An open-topped fire brigade (crew) bus on a late thirties Diamond T
chassis was built for the John A. Irwin Fire Company of Evans City, PA.
Schnabel included an awning
could be erected over the open body if needed during inclement weather or
hot sun.
Schnabel built a few woody wagons in the late 30s and early 40s and also
built a one-off woody dog trailer to match a customer's 1942 Chrysler Town &
Country wagon.
Early 1940s literature shows a line of stand-up delivery vehicles for Ford
chassis. 1950s Silver Books include several ads for Schnabel beverage truck
bodies.
(Not to be confused with the German Schnabel Company that manufactured
specialist material handling rail cars used for transporting molten metal.
The Schnabel rail car was equipped with a large container, lined with
refractory (special fire brick), so that the molten metal remains molten for
a period of time. Schnabel was the leading manufacturer of these cars
which are now commonly known as
"Schnabel cars" by railroad buffs.)
© 2004 Mark Theobald - Coachbuilt.com
|
