The great thing about America is no matter how bad things deteriorate everybody denies it.

I think you could serve dog food at the Waldorf and if it cost fifty bucks a plate people would buy it.

When I lived in Dayton they had a fantastic engineering library in storage. It was last used when the city was an engineering and manufacturing metropolis. Nobody ever realized just what that meant. They just said storing it was a waste of money.

Dear JeffM:

Best try calling West Systems and present your case. The stuff I've used was the boat hull manufacturing product. That is - they use it rather than steel to make boats. They also have various binders that can be added for panel building.

Welding new panels is great but piecing together welded metal to recreate a stamping is not so great. I knew people who could run a line of weld five feet long on OEM rocker and quarter panels to recreate the original build. However, in the modern car the rigidity comes from a combination of spot welds, stampings, and seam sealers. It is all engineered. So glue is an integral part of body rigidity.

If your metal is so bad that it won't weld then patching it up with glue isn't going to hurt anything because it all has to be cut out and refabricated.

Now the case I used G-Flex for was a fender that was rusted and falling apart but still had paint on it. So I just threw the glue behind it and let it soak into all the rust. The alternative would be to knock everything onto the ground and tell the poor chap he needed a new fender (among other things). But instead he got his car back in one piece. I thought that was a pretty good result.

What I would do in your case is buy some of the product and test it. It takes 24 hours to cure. If you don't like it, you will find dozens of other uses for it. I glued a hammer together with the stuff and just today was swinging that thing hard enough to drive out ball joints.

I've used it to plug holes in oil rusted oil pans on vehicles that required removing the motor to replace the pan. Who wants to pull the motor in some clunker to put a new oil pan on? Not me, I have better cars to work on.

I recall the initial objective here was to patch up the car so it could be driven around. If your goal has changed then take every rust spot and tape a perimeter six inches from the spot. That is what you will be cutting out to refabricate with metal. On 55-56 Packards it can take your breath away because that is a lot of work.

The motor really needs the heat control valve.

It goes a long way toward reducing sludging (a significant problem in the V-8).

It also gives more horsepower and gas mileage. Not having it inhibits proper caburetion significantly.

On cars where the valve is stuck open or missing, stuffing a rag in one tailpipe during warm up will help.

Of course if it is stuck closed it should be repaired or removed.

I will buy this "FreeAll" product and test it. If it can free stuck Packard 12 water pump bolts then it is pretty darn good. Ditto anything stuck in aluminum.

All of these products work much better when left to soak for a week.

I have tried Kroil with results somewhat better than liquid wrench, except that Kroil is fantastic for lubricating cables, and any other fine lubrication. As a lubricant for sticky throttle and heater cables Kroil is the best product I have ever used.

I also think Kroil would be great for rust prevention. I would soak any post war rust bucket in the stuff.

PB blaster contains silicone and so don't tell anybody you are using it because they will blame you for their shoddy paintwork. Silicone will clean off with good prepsols like PPG DX440. However most body shop painters are slobs.

I worked in a place where they didn't have any silicone, but the paint department were a bunch of jerks. They blamed me for all their shoddy prep work. They said I was sabotaging everything with WD-40. I told them I didn't need to do anything besides leave them alone. Then the management started making trouble for me because they didn't want to look bad about hiring people I would have thrown out in five seconds. In the end they spent tens of thousands of dollars making trouble for me. It was stupid.

So don't tell anybody from a body shop that you use PB Blaster, Armour All, or anything because they will make noise. Just clean it off real good before you send anything to a paint shop.

I have seen bone stock original motors with the plumbing backwards.

It is absurd to have the inlet on the bottom because there are no settlement properties that way. Incidental dirt just falls back toward the lifters. The only reason to do so is to reduced bypass filtering for the sake of the lifters. However, the lack of a drain plug creates the need to plumb it backwards so that only clean oil sits inside the thing when the element is changed.

The filter itself is a joke. About the only thing it does is create headaches for people who don't know the secret to keep it from leaking.

It might be better to just plug the lines and send full bypass to the lifters.

Proper bypass filter systems pass oil through a triple stage system to super clean oil. This was the concept behind the original PureOilator. That is what is used on modern diesel bypass which supplements the full flow system.

The Packard bypass filter is pretty much useless.

Given the car is a sixth series replica of the Jesse Vincent prototype, the motor configuration is correct.

The V block was introduced in the 7th series.

I wont pick over the little things that can be seen in the photo because it is, after all, a replica anyway.

Internally the 6th series Speedster had a more aggressive camshaft and a higher compression head for 130 horsepower versus 106 for the Custom Eight.

Also, the Speedsters I have worked on always seemed to go easier on rod bearings and I suspect that there was something deeper going on with the crankshaft in those motors.

My plan is to have everything in cash and then have little of that left so that there is nothing to fight over.

I have been through a number of estate wars and they are so disgusting that I just finally told them to take their precious money and stuff it. The lawyers are complete sleazebags and degenerate scum. I can't even sit in the same room with that riff raff. At one time some sleazebag lawyer was trying to get my facsimile signature for a pile of bearer bonds. As far as I know they matured worrthless because I didn't let them have it.

Most people think they are going to take everything with them especially if it has been gotten through selfish means. It's as if having wills and trusts is a form of eternal life. The nation itself is becoming a dollar graveyard with all these foundations that live off of dead cash. Perhaps the most nauseating are the Gates and Buffet mausoleums of cash that operate for the benefit of lawyers and return nothing to the USA. If that is the best they can do with their money then getting it was the biggest waste of time I can imagine.

The primary beneficiaries of these plans always seems to be the lawyers so I would get rid of the stuff before I was too old to maintain it.

Dear Walt:

I agree with Randy about the lower control arm bushings.

What I have used is a piece of 3/4 inch threaded bar stock through the shock tower to unload the upper control arm. It's a safe method.

Don't forget too that when you install rubber bushings they should be torqued with the car at ride level height. You do this with the nose off by havings a few big guys sit on a long board to level the suspension.

Dear JeffM:

West System's G-Flex only requires a surface clean of oil and dirt. Thus you can paint rusted areas with a sealer then use the product or you can use the product first and paint over it. I would prefer the later because the bonding superior that way. G-Flex is very tenacious. You can also treat the metal first with something like the Hirsch product.

There have been all sorts of de-rusting methods over the years and some have done more harm than good. I guess the popular method today is soda blasting.

What you can do with G-Flex as well is patch in pieces of metal. Remember I'm saying patch not remanufacture. On my modern car I spray oil into the uni-body so that I don't have to buy a new car. But if I ever tried to paint it that would be a disaster. I don't care because I use it for transportation.

I don't know what your plans are for the car, but the metal in today's cars is much better than 1955 so you will always be fighting rust issues. As far as structural integrity goes, a modern car will win against a Packard and most of the load in the Packard is taken by the frame. The body pretty much tears away from the frame in a serious wreck.

Wow! That sounds like a lot of trouble.

Anyway, when I run into this kind of situation I usually start with the vital statistics. I check all the wires and make sure they are going where they should. I have had reproduction harnesses with mistakes in them.

One thing I don't see in your story is whether these new regulators were being polarized. Usually there is a piece of paper in the box that says "Warning this unit must be polarized prior to initial start up" Since I always do this I don't know what happens if it is not done except that the Delco manual has all kinds of wild declarations of disaster.

The only way a generator can "burn up" is if the field wire is shorted to ground, or if there is an internal short either in the generator or in the regulator. So these parts must have some kind of problem. If disconnecting the field wire doesn't stop charging then there is a short in the components.

Now theoretically speaking I believe if you hook the battery up backwards and repolarize the regulator, the only problems will be with gauges. Maybe these regulators are wound in a different direction for ground polarity, but I really don't know. I only know there are people out there who hook batteries up backwards (they don't know any better) and the cars don't explode.

There are ways to isolate your kind of problem using power resistors to lock out the regulator, and an oscilloscope would really zero in on what exactly is going on. The whole system itself can be locked out and tested using an out of car battery. However, in many situations if the wiring is good, and the battery is good, and if the generator doesn't have visual damage a set of brushes and a new regulator gets the thing working again. However, this swinging ammeter indicates a voltage spike probably caused by a short or open in the armature or in the regulator. I think if the field coil in the regulator wears out it can make and break causing a voltage spike.

I handled a case of repetitive battery failure once and the problem turned out to be a defective harness causing overcharging. So I lean toward voltage spikes burning up your batteries.

Armatures do wear out, and fields wear out, and regulators are electro-mechanical devices so they also wear out.