They were quite fashionable when new. As others have mentioned they won awards and sold well. Compare them to the new for 1948 Hudson, the 1946 Kaiser, the 1949 Lincoln Cosmopolitan and Mercury, the 1949 Nash. The 'upside down bathtub' look was the in thing for a few years, but did not age well.

I have noticed that since the 1990s when the jelly bean look replaced the boxy look on new cars, the old Packards started to look better.

Now they look too much like the new cars to get recognition as 'classics'. It's the full fendered 30s cars, or chrome and tailfins 50s cars, that grab all the attention. 48 - 50 Packards just look like an old car.

Some of those Opel Admirals were delivered with Chevrolet V8 and Powerglide transmissions. Wonder how they stacked up against the competition from Mercedes and BMW?

There are 2 different kinds of air cleaners. The first is the mesh type. It has a filter medium of metal mesh like kitchen scrubbing pads. You coat it with oil by pouring oil on it, let the excess drip off, and put it back on. As the air flows through the little passages the dust and dirt sticks to the oily mesh.

The other kind is more efficient but more expensive. It is called the oil bath type. If you took the top off and looked inside you would see a reservoir. It is supposed to have about an inch of 50 motor oil in it. There should be a line and the words "Level" or "fill to here" or similar.

In this type, the air first goes down, and strikes the surface of the oil before reversing and flowing up through the filter medium. Most of the dirt gets stuck in the oil bath. The rest gets stuck in the filter which is soaked in oil.

Tim you have the more expensive, and more effective, oil bath filter. They were offered as an extra cost option on the cheaper cars, standard equipment on the expensive models.

Either of these will last the life of the car. The oil bath is more effective. It only requires servicing every 10,000 miles or so. More in dusty service, but today, if you drive on paved roads and don't live in a desert it seldom needs service.

I can tell you very easily how to service either one if you wish.

All 1958s are rare, they only made 2622 cars in total. Of those just 159 were station wagons. I dare say on a list of Packards by value or collector cachet the 58 station wagon would be well down the list.

If there is no vibration from the engine and the crankshaft doesn't break then it is doing its job. Every piece of metal vibrates at a certain frequency. Hang up a crankshaft, tap with a hammer and it will ring like a bell. If the engine speed coincides with the frequency of the vibration the metal can fatigue and crack after a while. The vibration dampener prevents this from happening.

In your engine this speed will be quite high but within the engine's capability probably around 4000 - 5000 RPM. A speed you won't normally drive at today.

I'm not familiar with the Packard dampener but a lot of them used friction discs. There was a hub and an outer ring that was free to move around. Between the hub and outer ring there was a friction disc or discs. The outer part was free to move but with some resistance. This friction dampened out vibration and prevented the crankshaft from cracking as well as dampening out noise and vibration from the engine.

Newer models from the fifties and later mounted the outer ring on rubber, which absorbed vibrations.

I like the Sportster 2 door. Can anyone tell me how a Sportster differs from any club coupe?

You don't have to have an expensive steel mold to make one part, or a few parts. A mold made of wood or plaster will do. You could even take the old part if you can patch it up and cover it with bondo (don't forget mold release agent).

Multi grade oils were introduced in 1951, detergent oils a few years earlier. From the fifties through the eighties 10W30,multigrade, detergent oil was the default choice in every garage and dealership. Chances are, any car made from the early fifties up has never used anything else.

Zinc additives came in also in the early fifties to get over some excess wear problems in the earliest OHV V8s. The high performance, short stroke V8s put more pressure on their cams and lifters than the old flathead and low performance OHV sixes, resulting in excess cam and lifter wear. The ZDDP additive cured this.

Now that OHC engines are the rule they are backing off the ZDDP. This does not matter to a flathead engine like the Packard straight eights and sixes although it might to the OHV V8s.

So the short answer is, use a good name brand 10W30 and don't worry about it. You can use a synthetic if you want to spend the extra money.

Do not listen to knotheads who say all old motors need good ol' non detergent straight 30 oil. They don't know what they are talking about. Taking their advice will do more harm than good.

Any oil filter is better than no oil filter. The partial flow or bypass filter is surprisingly efficient. It does a finer job of filtering out small dirt particles than the modern full flow filter. It takes from 10 minutes to half an hour for all the oil to go through.

It can be messy changing the filters. It helps to wear rubber gloves and have a container lined with a plastic bag. Pull the filter out and drop it in the container. Wipe the filter cannister with rags or waste. Pop in a new filter. This only needs to be done every 5000 miles.

Some filters have a drain plug in the bottom.

Your filter does an important job of keeping the oil clean and preventing wear. You would be better off to keep the filter and extend oil change intervals to 2500 miles.