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Thank you, Howard! I was very surprised the last time I was here to discover that there is a vintage car restoration shop here in this tiny rural town and this is something I'll have them do. So yes, it will look like a factory installation. They are already working on the front clip for my 1965 Imperial LeBaron as it needs a replacement fender re-spot welded and leaded per original and they even came out and picked it up.

Looking at photo on this site of someone restoring the firewall on a factory A/C car, it shows a very similar irregular hole as mine.

Looking at all the A/C parts in the trunk, I took out the firewall piece to see if it made sense as I want to get it installed one of these days. It looks fine but I was surprised to see how chopped-out the irregularly shaped hole looks! This was from a factory system, yet the hope looks to have been cut with an ax, Surely they all could be this bad, could they?

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Cleaning up and tossing out the rock-hard pieces of carpet today, I think I found the remnants of the cover for the hole. When it was last removed, it likely slid under the carpet and got lost so someone used a rag to stuff into the hole.

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The nut is tight but not reverse-theaded but may have a cotter key too so look for that. Once the cotter key has been removed, it will take a socket and long breaker bar to get it loose. You can't do it with a regular ratchet.

You'll need a brake drum puller to remove the drum itself.

I wrote to the seller this morning to as if they knew anything about the upholstery being 1956 and their answer was "No I don't". I wrote again and suggested that perhaps is was a very late 1955 production and if they could send the VIN I would look it up but no response.

For the ambulance, the rear stabilizer and shackle grommets are on the way along with a pair of NOS Henney shocks. They are huge, as everything else is, when compared to Packard passenger car parts. (Photo credit: Max Merritt)

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Incidentally, these are the two cars for which this ambulance was a parts car and the original rear end from it is on the blue 1951 Henney-Packard combination in the background. On the way home from this particular NorCal Packard Club outing, one of the front brake shoes of the blue one became partially disconnected from the web to which it attaches and was dragging causing lots of smoke so the ambulance's front brakes were donated to replace them and it also later got the transmission too.

The 1952 Henney-Packard Nu-3-Way in the foreground was still all-original in this photo but was eventually repainted a dark metallic gray and won First in Class at a PAC national meet. While still original, it also won the Long Distance award after driving from Santa Clara, CA to Freeport, IL for a Professional Car Society meet. Freeport is where the Henneys were built and the meet coincided with a Henney employee reunion. Barreling down Interstate 80 on the way back, we were greeted by the Charlie Daniels Band in the other direction hanging out their bus windows and waving!

I have a piece of a very old, brittle pad from my parts car and it is definitely like the thinner oval one EXCEPT that is has a slot for holding it in the fender. Remnants of the rubber are even stuck to the flange on top of the antenna tube. Both Steele and Max Merritt say they've sold a lot of the two-piece type and if so, I would love to know how people used them!

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In your dreams! Of course, that's how Fred sees you.

Paste or type 999-31762 into the Packard Decoder in the left navigation and it will tell you more.