From Slide Rules to SolidWorks: How Terry Burtz Engineered a New Heart for the Model A

From cutting firewood in Santa Clara’s orchards to designing satellites at Lockheed, Terry Burtz carried a lifetime of engineering grit into his crowning achievement: the Burtz Block.

By the early 1960s, Terry Burtz had already discovered two things that would shape his life: the satisfaction of hard work and the joy of solving problems with his hands. But as the orchards of Santa Clara Valley gave way to housing tracts and shopping centers, a new chapter awaited him.

“Well, I wanted to go to school to get a decent job,” Terry recalls. “And I wanted to not get drafted for Vietnam. So I went into engineering.”

He enrolled at San Jose State College as a civil engineering student. The firewood business became part-time at best, replaced by a string of odd jobs to make ends meet. “I even got a part-time job at Macy’s, eventually making $1.71 per hour.”

It wasn’t glamorous, but it was enough to keep moving forward. And true to form, Terry’s Model AA truck remained both workhorse and classroom. By 1963, its original engine was worn out. Fortunately, an automotive class gave him the tools—and excuse—to rebuild it. “The cost of having the mains poured and line-boring was $59.00,” he says, a figure etched in memory like it was yesterday.

At the same time, Terry found himself in a different kind of business venture: fireworks. “With a friend, I became the operator of a fireworks stand using the Model AA truck,” Terry says. The venture grew quickly. “In 1976, we sold $48,000 worth of fireworks—which was the equivalent of a price of a house at the time.”

That hard-scrabble determination ran in the family. “I lived with my parents but had a reverse allowance,” Terry chuckles. “I paid them. Yeah. My dad came up from kind of a poor family. They lived in motor courts. He had a paper route and helped the family out, so I was under the same obligation.”

Work came in many forms: from selling fireworks to running calculations at Lindstrom Engineering on the Kitt Peak Telescope project. “My job was to calculate the mass properties of the telescope—the weights, center of gravity, moments of inertia—so that they could turn it and everything would be balanced. This is slide rule days. My calculation notebook was like an old phone book. It was that thick.”

Colin Campbell, the Lockheed engineer supervising, was impressed. “Colin said, if you ever need a job, give me a call,” Terry remembers. That call would eventually launch a 33-year career at Lockheed, where Terry worked on everything from deployable antennas for satellites to high-speed commuter trains. His designs were clever, simple, reliable—always aimed at solving problems, not making them more complicated.

Still, the Model A was never far from his mind. By the mid-1970s, Terry’s old truck needed another engine. Experimenting with Model B blocks, crankshafts, cams, and even a homemade radial lip seal of his own design, Terry gained invaluable hands-on knowledge. “To solve the packing seal problem, I designed a radial lip seal made from nitrile,” he says. That seal has been in Model A parts catalogs since 1976.

Trips to Reno swap meets, passing semi-trucks over Donner Summit in overdrive, and troubleshooting blow-by with makeshift tubing only deepened his respect for the Model A’s robust design. “Even when it had problems, it got me home,” Terry says. “That says a lot.”

When retirement from Lockheed came in 2002, it opened new time for old passions. By 2007, Terry’s dream crystallized: to re-engineer the Model A block itself—modern strength hidden in vintage clothing. “It’s just something I’d been thinking about for a long time and decided to do something.”

But the path wasn’t easy. Learning SolidWorks after decades with pencil and paper was painful. And California foundries failed him again and again. “I worked with them for eight years. It seemed like forever. They never could produce. So I gave up on them and the project died.”

That might have been the end—until a phone call from fellow enthusiast Leonard Nettles changed everything. It just so happened that Leonard was a WW2 military vehicle collector and restored a Model A roadster that had been in his wife Kay's family for years.  Leonard saw something on the internet about the new Burtz Block engine.  He called Terry and was disappointed to hear the project was dead.  Leonard then connected Terry with John Lampl, who he knew from producing new Jeep cylinder blocks overseas. 

Terry and John Lampl got together and after reviewing Terry’s patterns and SolidWorks files, Lampl’s confidence rekindled the project.  “I think we can do something,” John told him.

John reflects today: “I was pretty confident about it. I mean, I thought about it, and I was confident it could be done properly. We just had to find the right factory.” Eventually, he did—one of the largest aftermarket engine block manufacturers in China.

The collaboration worked. Out of decades of hard work, failed attempts, and relentless problem-solving came the Burtz Block: a faithful reproduction of the Model A engine with modernized internals. Stronger, more reliable, and built to last.

And Terry? He remains the same humble man he was in 1962, splitting firewood in the orchards. “I was always a drawing board engineer,” he says quietly. “I just wanted to make something better for the Model A community.”

For enthusiasts around the world, his Burtz Block design has done just that—ensuring that Henry Ford’s beloved creation keeps rolling for another hundred years.