Powell Manufacturing

The Powell Manufacturing Company (PMC) was an American motorcycle and automobile manufacturer based in Compton ( California was located). The company was best known in the late 1940s for the manufacture of scooters . From September 1954 to March 1957 Powell built the Sport Wagon as a pickup truck and station wagon. In the 1960s and 1970s, they built the Powell Challenger trial motorcycle .

description

Powell Sport Wagon (pick-up)

The Powell brothers - Hayward and Channing Powell - began making radios in the mid-1920s, immediately after graduating from Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles . They started building scooters in the mid-1930s. From 1942 the factory had to produce goods that were important to the war effort. After World War II , Powell returned to scooter manufacturing and produced the C-47 , P-48 and P-49 models . The Powell Streamliner model used by US airborne troops in World War II was copied and served as the basis for the first Fuji Rabbit scooter in June 1946 , six months before the first Vespa appeared.

In 1949 Powell entered the small motorcycle market with the P-81 model , with Mustang in Glendale being its direct competitor. All four Powell post-war two-wheeled models had the same 393 cc single-cylinder four-stroke engine that the company had developed itself. In the early 1950s, Powell returned to war production on the occasion of the Korean War and never again built civilian scooters.

PMC was also an early maker of pick-ups and SUVs , making a number of models on Plymouth chassis with 2972mm wheelbase in the 1950s . About 300 station wagons and 1000 flatbed trucks were built. Six-cylinder in-line engines from Plymouth with a displacement of 3294 cm³ - 3569 cm³ were used. The engine outputs were 87–97 bhp (64–71 kW). Powell's designs were also found several years later on the Ford Ranchero and the Chevrolet El Camino .

In the 1960s the company was renamed Powell Brothers, Inc. and manufactured the Challenger , a trial motorcycle. The company moved to larger premises in South Gate during this time . Hayward Powell died in March 1978, and when Channing Powell retired in April 1979, the company closed its doors. Channing Powell died in 1988. In their lifetime, the two brothers had produced thousands of radios, around 1,200 pickups, around 300 station wagons, 3 motor caravans and tens of thousands of scooters and trial motorcycles.

literature

• Harald H. Linz, Halwart Schrader : The International Automobile Encyclopedia . United Soft Media Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-8032-9876-8 , chapter Powell.
• George Nick Georgano (Editor-in-Chief): The Beaulieu Encyclopedia of the Automobile. Volume 3: P – Z. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, Chicago 2001, ISBN 1-57958-293-1 , p. 1260. (English)

Web links

Commons : Powell Manufacturing  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

Individual evidence

1. ^ Justin Lukach: Pickup Trucks: a History of the Great American Vehicle . Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers (1998). ISBN 1579120113
2. ↑ John Matras: Name is Familiar, Truck is not. New York Times, February 16, 2004
3. ^ Motor Life, October 1955, Quinn / Peterson Publications
4. ↑ History of the Fuji Rabbit Scooters (English) ( Memento of the original from December 11, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ Photo and story of a Fuji Rabbit (1968) (English)
6. ^ John Gunnell: Standard Catalog of American Cars 1946-1975 . Krause Publications, Inc. Iola, Wisconsin (2002). ISBN 0-87349-461-X
7. ^ Roger B. White: The Motor Home in America , Smithsonian Institution Press (2000). ISBN 1560988924