Bad Brakes, Crappy Clutch - 1949 Studebaker Champion Drives After 20 Years! (Plus Bonus Studebaker) 

The test drives, requiring unusual operation of the controls, never get old 😂😂

Studebakers !!!!! 💙 I'm so happy !!!! 😭💖

_'Where we're going, we don't need no clutch'_

That Studebaker would make a sweet cruiser.

"DC-101" !?!?!?!? Damn... a big Hello from their neck of the woods!! (If you didn't already know, it's a radio station from the other side of the country.. Washington D.C.)

The Stude was obviously well loved by the PO - deserves to be fully operational.

That Champion is such a sweet little car...modest in nature but stylish at the same time. I'm really digging it!

Jamie when you get that little Studebaker sorted it is going to make a nice cruiser.

Love it! The design of the Studebaker Champion almost looks like the European designs from the period! I really dig this thing! 😁

To me, it's amazing how long old stuff can sit and then like magic, it runs!

What a neat old car!

Andy Granatelli would have loved this! He was still making appearances at car shows large & small before his death. I just missed seeing him at the Perth Ontario, Canada fair that had a big Studebaker show in 2008 (ish). RIP Andy ❤

The Smurphabaker iz so cute...Ahh. the joys of driving without a clutch..Builds character...Yeah the original tires would have been a bit taller..

Simple car from simple times...thanks...🔧🔧🐐👍

What a wonderful car . I hope too see you go through this car and get it road worthy.

Cool! Two Studebakers! Nice to see the other one is running well!

Throw a few bucks at it and you'll have yourself a sweet little ride!

From between 0:21 to 0:25, I was waiting for the Iron Man riff to kick in. Great vid about those fun old Studebakers!

Cool old car! Great to see it hit the road again!👍

What a unique car.

Love me some Studebakers!! I've got a 51 Champion Starlight Coupe.

3:50. The Durango is playing "The floor is lava."

That thing might have a "hill holder"unit in the brake system. It will allow you to sit at a stop sign, on an incline, without having to ride the brake while you try to accelerate forward. A neat option from Studebaker from that period.

My crystal ball shows more Studebaker videos in the future! Excellent!

Pretty neat car, hard to believe it runs on that old gas! I believe this might be another one which is going to keep you busy.

I like it too! I love the Fozzy Bear joke 😂

Diggin Dave's DC 101 t shirt. My hometown fm station!

hello sir. hope you are having a good week. they finally let my ass out of bed. thank you for your show sir.

Ahhhhh the memories, my dad had a Studebaker which had a large curtain rail connected to the back of the front bench seat. Apparently it was used to handcuff suspects securely inside the vehicle. So,dad sold the car and the new owner rolled it over about 2 miles from ours when they hit the railroad crossing which was angled across said road at a crazy angle. But I could be mistaken, it was a long time ago.

Jamie, you should have the hill holder feature on that transmission as well. It keeps the car from rolling backwards when taking off in first on a hill.

Liking the progress

I wonder if the guys on the assembly line making these cars 80yrs ago had bets with each other on whether any of them would be left still running almost a century in the future.

When they are running right that old. Studebaker 6 cylinder will be an extremely smooth running engine and with the overdrive it should get around 30 mpg on the highway

I like both of those Studebakers. And the body styling differences between the post-war '49 and post-jet-age '61- wow!. Modern uograded brakes are a must with modern freeway speeds.

Here's a cool idea: do a "Car and Driver road test" on "the all new 1949 Studebaker, first by far with a postwar car"....oh wow I think you just did that. Anyway, it was nice to see it actually move, and also to see the white supercharged Stude again, I really like that car. That supercharger whine is the best.

I just remembered more about the O/D. The governor will make the solenoid ground out, triggering the O/D unit to drop into O/D. There should be a fuse for the solenoid. Check that. Then ground the solenoid and check for a click. If all that works, take off the governor, attach your multimeter to the tab and to the case, and spin the governor with a drill. At some point when it winds up pretty good, the meter should show zero resistance. If all that checks out, then I don't know what the problem is. But I will say the kickdown switch wiring is a little complex and not entirely intuitive, so maybe check that. Or the switch itself.

*DC 101!* Dude is already on my good guy list, just for that tee shirt.... Ah yes, the good old 70s-80s, when DC101 ruled the Washington DC airwaves with both ROCK (as in the real kind, not the crap recorded these days) plus some real characters with syndicated shows (look up "The Greaseman" sometime, kiddies - that dude had no fear back when Stern was just learning how to "shock"). Oh - still loving that darn Studebaker, too. A car worthy of attention and KEEPING! - Ed on the Ridge

That first Cruise Day is the big target.

The roof reminds me of the Savoy of the 50's! Another awesome video!

If it turns out there is an electric solenoid for the overdrive, you may be able to install two switches to allow activation of the overdrive when ever you want. It allows first gear plus overdrive and second gear plus overdrive as well as the normal third gear plus overdrive. Second gear plus overdrive can help keep your speed up when climbing a steep hill with not much horsepower. My dad did this on a 1953 Plymouth Belvedere. Second gear plus overdrive allowed the car to blaze up a steep road near our house at a blistering 30 mph... Thanks for the interesting video Jamie.

So the overdrive in the Stude is like the OD in my 63 Rambler (wish I still had it) works like a two speed automatic in all 3 gears 1st ad 1st OD great in base traffic stop and go 0 to 25...2nd and 2nd OD great stop and go 15 to 30... and 3rd and 3rd OD Highway cruising 45 to 65 mph now back to the show. and yes you pull the OD handle when stopped or like my Dad said just keep it in OD for a six speed trany

I hate the tapered axles, my 62 Chrysler 300 had them, went to wrecking yard and bought a complete rear end from a B body dodge (I think it was a B body, that about 20 years ago) bolted in 100%, benefits of doing this: modern bendix brakes with slip on drums, this was a HUGE improvement in braking!, one piece axles, and able to delete the driveshaft ebrake and use the drum ebrakes

The industrial tractor sound is Coooool.

The perfect geek car. Get it running. Get some geek sun glasses. Get geek hats. Cruise down the Geek Hiway when it's night time.

Weeeee ! 🎉 Go faster Daddy !!! 🚙

2 of my old friends had a rock in the glove box to bang on the carburetor because the floats would always stick!

Upvote for “almost like following Fozzie The Bear.” Excellent hidden Studebaker reference. Bra-fkn-VO!

I'm sure someone already posted this, but I'll say it anyways. Those were originally 6 volt positive ground cars right up through 1955. In 56 they were 12 volt negative ground. The trans 2nd and 3rd gears are sycromesh. Those little 170 flathead 6 engines were good little engines. They made them from the late 30s early 40s right into 1960. In 61 they adapted that basic engine configuration into an OHV engine. They made those right up to the end of the 64 model year I believe. Be forewarned, these engines had babbitt rod bearings into the late 40s, before switching over to insert bearings. Later insert bearing rods can be swapped into earlier engines. I have 3 of those engines sitting in my garage, along with a 3 spd overdrive trans, collecting dust. Hope I didn't bore you too much and good luck

Studebaker lived on for years as Scientifically Treated Petroleum, in other words Richard Petty's biggest sponsor STP oil products.

Cute car. CHROME!!!

Sweet farmers tan 🤣 And moving up in the world with a chase car........ 😀 loved the boat video and hell just keep making content like the vids!

Jack the rear wheels off the ground. Start it in third, work the clutch in and out, various revs. (Almost always) works! Good luck. Love,,Dubs.

That car looks like the perfect car for a door to door vacuum salesman in the 50s.

Ahhh, Jamie in his unnatural habitat… a Studebaker.

It's about time you got off the water and got back into the garage. 😆

One of my old Ford tractors had a sticking clutch and I used to drive it really slow up against a tree with the clutch down and then hope it broke loose. Eventually it's stuck for good.

Hi, I'm Jamie and this is Skipping Studebaker Garage

There's a Seinfeld for that... it's "The Bizarro Jerry" episode where it's the same people in the script, like both cars are Studebakers, yet they had a notably different niceness, or otherwise.

Having Flashbacks to when I was 13 years old, and several high school kids and their fathers could not say No to $25 non-running Studebakers. Most Sold running within a month for between &100 and $1,000. Naturally by the time I was 18 there were none to be found.

Your buddy has on a DC101 shirt out of DC. Former home of Howie Stern,& The Greaseman. I grew up on DC 101

My grandfather only drove Studebakers. He said, "if it isn't a Studebaker, it's not a car."

Have die cast models of both.👍🏻🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Neat car!

Cool old car.

That is a very interesting looking car, particularly from the rear. If you block the view of the rear window and roof with your hand, it looks like a Vauxhall Victor. When you remove your hand to reveal the window and roof, it looks like the front of a car sporting the wrong lights. Edit: I want that red 63 Impala. Please sir… May I have that

Yeee Yeee

A Stude in Dick Tracy Blue. Awesome!

That rat house was LIT!

Im amazed the castle nuts weren't rusted

if that was the Hotchkiss rear axle design with articulating rear hangers like Chryslers use, that layout offers a small amount of rear steering when cornering. The hanger allows the outside wheel to pull ahead in relation to the other rear wheel. This gives a caster effect and response to the amount of power the engine is being called upon to deliver, ie powering out of a corner. The light weight with good suspension geometry should make these better than the average 1949 car.

Cool 😎

It's for sale on Marketplace in Gloucester Virginia

Man.... I bet on marketplace they would still want 10k for it

I bought an Opel Manta with a stuck clutch, it loosened up the night I got it. It was nice, I thought this will be a nice driver and nope.. seized right back up. The guy who bought it from me months later got it unstuck again infront of my house and I thought.. just wait.

"Contact!" 😅

What a cool Studebaker looks pretty tidy too why not turbo the flat 6 low pressure boost be real cool do more videos on it brother

Utilitarian art! BTW Your check engine light is on :⁠-⁠)

Pretty sure the starter button is under the clutch pedal on purpose. Mash the clutch in and the starter goes to work, you let up juuuuust a bit when it starts. My grandfather had such a car. Might have been a studebaker but I was just a tot. Might have been a Pontiac.

I would have to rewire that crazy starter with a push button start. Such a cool car.

Beautiful car. Could be the mushies talking, but we'll agree with em, ey. 🖖

Nice to see a bear, I mean a Jamie, in his natural habitat. A Studebaker. That's right, a Muppet Movie joke😮

Scary. I had a similar line up of a '62 GT & 2 '50 Champs, 1 light green, the other dark green. I was gone make a million dollars. I did not....

More Stude shows warden!

Old school overdrives are weird little animals. Useful, but strange. So yeah, Control Handle OUT should disengage, Handle IN should allow it to engage. The big pod on the side of the OD unit houses a Governor and that has to be running at a certain speed before it will allow the OD to be engaged. 27mph sound about right. Some had a third gear lockout while others didn't - it really depends on which unit you've got. Some allow OD in 2nd, some don't. There's also an electrical portion of it that actually shuts off the ignition to your engine for a split second while OD engages. These older ones CANNOT engage OD under power like the later Laycock's can. There's a whole electrical sub-harness that handles the OD. There should be two switches on or near the gas pedal/throttle linkage. That all connects to the relay box that handles the ignition shut-off. And that's all controlled by the contacts in the Governor. When the Governor is spinning fast enough, it closes a set of contacts. When you're in third and over 27mph; lift off the accelerator - you should feel a light clunk which is both the engine shutting off for a second and the OD engaging, at which point you get back on the throttle and you'll be in Top Gear with OD engaged. Flooring the accelerator should disengage OD as well. Yes, 2nd and 3rd are synchronized. Synchros date back to the 30's yet. Class Dismissed!

Nice car, keep the hammer away from the 68 charger 😂

that is a neat car.... looks like it should be driven by a bat man villain....

So this is now dead studebaker garage

The car has the 49 style wrap around bumpers, so I am thinking that it is a 1949 model.

I reallly want a studebaker bullet nose

Not tryin to take anything away from that killer Super Hawk, but I'd much rather have that Champion. BTW, are any of the vehicles there on your lot for sale?

Jamie I know where one is on Marketplace down here in Gloucester that's a ex-military

Hitler would have loved the 74 75 Imperials.....lol some call it a waterfall grill, i think of Oliver Hardy, Charlie Chaplin and other comedians.

They could have located the starter switch 3 inches to the left 😂

Cool car,looks like a mushroom.

Two pump brakes?1 less than my Dart anyway.4 lug pattern.InterestingAlso you can't tell if it's coming or going.

What is your go to oil brand?

Give that poor thing so fresh gas.

Please,,,All US 3 speeds from the mid thirtys up have syncros on second and third,,,,, Dubs.

You will get there one wallet full of money at a time.

49??? But I thought all 49 Studebakers had that propeller mount in the front???