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Board index » All Posts (MrPushbutton)




Re: Treadle-vac replacement, ABS Power Brake kit
#1
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Mr.Pushbutton
Do the two brass nipples on the top of each MC chamber go to a reservoir? Where is that located in your installation?

Posted on: 1/27 11:48
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Re: electrical wiring [again]
#2
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Mr.Pushbutton
I second this heartily. I buy some of the components I use to make the pushbutton logic harness from YnZ's and I have seen cars with their reproduction wiring harnesses. After a car has been hacked on electrically for so long it's better to just start over and put it all back to factory, with a new harness. It's a huge job, and one that few local shops are going to want to take on.


Quote:

Packard Don wrote:
If you decide you need them, you can buy brand new harnesses in excellent quality from YnZ's Yesterdays Parts. They are not the cheapest by far but have great quality and excellent pre and post purchase support.

Posted on: 1/6 13:00
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Re: Packard Plant
#3
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Mr.Pushbutton
Thank you for that bit of clarity. If you read various internet forums you see over and over again the ubiquitous, undefined "they" that "should save that building". I've been involved with saving a few buildings. I'm involved with two right now. I can tell you this. The world, the US business community and Mr. and Mrs. Joe Lunch Bucket American don't care about old. The above parties really, really like *NEW*. Everything is stacked in favor of *NEW*. Financing for a *NEW* project? no problem, come right in. Zoning change to convert a potato field into a cookie-cutter plastic-covered home development of *NEW* homes? No problem, come right in.
Want to preserve and restore a historic building? Whoa-There's asbestos in there. They don't make that material any more. We can get that wood, but it's $85 a board foot. You touched the building, so now it has to conform to modern ADA specifications.
The historic buildings that remain and are in good health are that way because they have friends. Friends in high places, that can round up the usual suspects and get some money coming for projects, run interference with the city, and in general make things happen. I was the person who connected the Packard Proving Grounds team with my former boss, Dick Kughn. I went to the annual banquet for Motor City Packards in 1999. John McArthur was the speaker, and his report was grave. Ford Motor Company had started to parcel out the PPG property and had obtained a demolition permit for the water tower. Once the water tower was gone there would be no fire protection for the historic buildings and they would come down soon afterwards. John and Neil Porter were trying to get though to someone high up in Ford Land Development. They were stalled at the secretary to the third man from the top.
These secretaries are the gatekeepers, and they weren't sympathetic. I sat there saying "I know how to fix this". I approached John after his speech and said "John, you need to talk to Dick about this, he and Wayne Dorian (head of Ford Land Development) go back to the mid 60's" John was astounded that I knew the name. i told him that I had met Wayne on a few occasions.
I gave John Dick's home phone # and told him to call at 10:00 AM on Monday. 9:00 AM I got to Dick's house, briefed him and Dick was onboard. John Called at 10:00, Dick had me sit in on the call.
Dick talked to John for a moment, then put him on hold, had his admin call Wayne's office. After a moment of pleasantries with Wayne's admin we had Wayne on the phone. Dick said "Wayne, I have John McArthur here from the Packard Foundation, we have to talk about the proving grounds" A couple of button strokes and we had Wayne, John McArthur and Dick together. In five minutes of talking we had the demolition permit cancelled, an understanding forged about the donation of the 5 acres the historic buildings were on, and the sale of 8 additional acres, all of which came to pass.

Quote:

ScottG wrote:
Quote:
From what I have been told, the neighborhood around the former plant is such a high crime area that it is literally like a war zone.


No neighborhood, in any city, could survive the level of financial and social disinvestment that the former Packard plant represents. The factory didn't fall apart because the neighborhood became dangerous. Indeed, the neighborhood suffered because of the deterioration allowed to beset the plant.

Certainly, historic preservation is an absolutely critical part of creating thriving communities and maintaining our shared cultural heritage. But when we allow our cities to become museums...little more than destinations for tourists seeking the ruins of America's industrial past...we fail in creating a livable future and succeed only in crafting an eloquent epitaph that locks future generations into a perpetual state of social and economic stagnation.

It's beyond time to tear down what remains and give the residents a chance (and a lot of real estate) to create something positive in their community.

Posted on: 12/8 11:38
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Re: Packard Plant
#4
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Mr.Pushbutton
Longer than I've been alive. I'm almost 65. I can't name a major American city without a history of corruption.

Quote:

bkazmer wrote:
Detroit’s government shenanigans ( not just talking Packard plant) go back a lot longer than Archer.

Posted on: 12/8 11:13
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Re: Packard Plant
#5
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Mr.Pushbutton
I guess the fact that General Motors couldn't handle having 51% of the world's largest and richest auto market in the world, and handed their market segment to Asian competition on a silver platter while the Roger Smiths of the world worried about top possible profits while making absolute garbage doesn't count. But yeah, that 10 year period where the Big three still had the market and the union got lazy and had corrupt leadership must have been it.
The dudes bolt cars together, that's all they do. It's hard, repetitive work that uses human bodies as an expendable commodity. So we've had a generation where the company had the upper hand over labor, and we saw how that turned out. Union laborers bolt cars that engineers deign to the budgets the suits set. No one mentions the overpaid managers/executives that made a generation of bad decisions and gave their customer base ample reason to look elsewhere.
Behind every bad decision handed down from management was an engineer saying "I wouldn't do that, it's going to fail"

Quote:

tom abel wrote:
didnt hear anybody say union corruption? theres a reason the big 3 and foreign car companys moved to the south the right to work states ie bmw in south carolina and ford in kentucky and others.

Posted on: 12/8 11:09
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Re: Packard Plant
#6
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Mr.Pushbutton
Quote:

bkazmer wrote:
Thanks for the great summary! The city’s corruption over a long period has had consequences

I lived near Detroit for a while until very recently
There are some revitalized areas and some sad ones. Indian Village always strikes me as a clearly once nice area fallen on hard times. And I’ve been to the Packard factory. I agree with MrPB - the entrance, the emblem off the body bridge, and some of the office materials have been salvaged. The rest needs to go


The corruption took place while “the good mayor” Dennis Archer was in office.
I work in Indian Village. It hasn’t gone downhill one bit. It’s every bit as nice as it has ever been at any point in my six decades in the city.

Posted on: 12/8 0:51
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Re: Packard Plant
#7
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Mr.Pushbutton
Lifetime Detroit area resident here, weighing in. Detroit has made some amazing strides forward in the past 10 years. Buildings throughout the city are being renovated that I never thought I'd live to see reused and restored, I fully expected to see a demolition fence around them one day and some yellow demolition equipment. Here's the thing: we were abandoned, left for dead when manufacturing died. Shoot, the abandonment started long before manufacturing died. Detroit's industrial might was one of the main reasons the allies won WWII, and won it as quickly as decisively as we did. Us, and Russia's ability to keep sending soldiers to the Eastern front. 15 years later it was a completely different story here in Detroit. Packard and Hudson plants were gone, Ford moved Lincoln production out of the city to the far, far town of Wixom. With the death of Packard and the consolidation of Hudson into AMC with their production being centered in Kenosha WI several supplier firms died.
The GI Bill provided financing for returned GIs to buy nice homes in the suburbs, have a little room between you and your neighbor for the first time. The city was just left for dead after a while. The easy money in development was over inside the 142 square mile city, and most everyone still making a good to decent living moved outside the borders. Every house that was built in Detroit from 1900 until 1950 represented (at least) one job. Consider this: in 1937 the Ford Rouge Plant employed 100,000mmen and women every day. That plant is still in use, give or take a new building for an old, and today employs just under 6,000 workers every day. THAT'S what happened to Detroit.
We have a saying her "Detroit vs Everybody" and we've adapted the attitude that we really don't care what people outside the region think of us.
We don't. Leave us for dead, go take all the jobs away and do nothing to replace them, then label any efforts to combat this as "Socialism" and we're out.
The Packard Plant was quietly there for about 40 years as a mixed use facility, housing light manufacturing, warehousing and distribution. I was a tenant for about 15 years. Then in 1999 a very crooked effort began by a speculator in Detroit real estate began efforts to have the city seize the property for back taxes (which were owed) using confederates in city hall, and the state of Michigan offices in Lansing to seize the property, have the developer's son's demolition company get the job of demolishing the complex using EPA Superfund $$$$$$$ connected by their Lansing operatives. The city evicted all of us tenants in the winter of 1999. They stationed officers from the Detroit Police Department gang squad at the main entrance to the plant 24/7/365 for a year and a half to prevent the owner's manager re-entry should he leave. He didn't leave. Meanwhile, the police-despite their constant presence there turned a blind eye to vandalism and scrapping. The demolition company began pulling down part of the plant and then it was discovered that they did not receive permission from the lienholder of the building. Oops. All laws in place on the books since the late 1800s insuring that property owners have their day in court before taking their land are bypassed, fast tracked. The vandals and scrappers had a field day. A judge ruled in 2006 that the building was seized illegally, but it was too late.
The 2008-2009 housing loan crisis hit Detroit especially bad. No one was buying cars, the big three could have gone under. It was game on for the scrappers and the city didn't care. The scrappers were setting fire to the building every day, to expose structural steel and the fire department said "we're not risking our men for that building-let it burn". In 2014 Fernando the smooth talking businessman came to town, announced that he was going to save it, restore parts, re-use the buildings in innovative ways. Those of us who live here were highly skeptical, and it turns out we were right.
It just needs to go away now. Nothing positive is going to happen in that neighborhood, which in light of the above IS the worst part of town. People live there. They've stared at that abandoned hulk for a generation now. Taking it down will be the first step in a long, long road to somewhere better for that part of town.
I invite any remote Detroit haters to come to town and I'll take you on a very real, non-chamber of commerce tour, warts and all.

Quote:

packardsix1939 wrote:
I agree that it would have been nice for the Packard plant to have been largely saved and repurposed, perhaps with a portion of it set aside for a Packard museum. But it was not to be. There were just too many obstacles in the way for a project like this to be successful, the main one being that Detroit has been a dying city for decades. From what I have been told, the neighborhood around the former plant is such a high crime area that it is literally like a war zone. You would not be able to attract tourists to come here let alone viable businesses which could have occupied the renovated spaces. Sure, I have heard about the so-called "Detroit Renaissance", but from what I have heard, the impact has been greatly exaggerated as it has really only impacted a relatively small area in the Downtown district. It is a shame, but many formerly great industrial centers in our country are in the same boat. Industry has closed down or fled, jobs have relocated overseas, and the tax base has eroded. People with the means to leave moved out of the city long ago. Buildings and infrastructure are allowed to crumble, so all that is eventually left is an impoverished, crime ridden wasteland which used to be a great city. I don't have an answer for this and I don't think anyone does.

Posted on: 12/7 17:49
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Re: 1956 Pushbutton Instruction Decal
#8
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Mr.Pushbutton
I don't think this is a "factory" thing. A dealer may have cooked this up.

Posted on: 2023/11/24 13:36
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Re: AACA Eastern Fall Meet – Hershey Region 2023 (AKA Hershey)
#9
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Mr.Pushbutton
That’s my Manhattan on the cooler!

Posted on: 2023/10/10 8:27
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Re: AACA Eastern Fall Meet – Hershey Region 2023 (AKA Hershey)
#10
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Mr.Pushbutton
A good time was had by all!

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Posted on: 2023/10/10 8:26
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