Re: 1940 Manual shift

Posted by Tim Cole On 2010/11/27 20:29:36

Years ago an old timer was telling me about how the Packard 160 was a hot car at the post war drag strip because it could beat a Rocket 88. However, this didn't last long because the transmissions would blow up.

The trans cover is just not up to severe service and the detents are too easy to override. I've seen them bent, cracked, warped and what not. One thing I never checked was putting a floor shifter from a 16th series car in a later car.

However, the rest of the parts in the shift linkage wear as well especially the two arms on the steering column and the internal spring in the shift column is another weak point. All of these problems create lost motion that results in the 2-3 shift fork moving before the 1-R fork is in neutral. When the car was new the shifter was very "snappy", that is there was a built in tension in the detent so that a small amount of force at the shift column would cause the transmission to snap into and out of gear - like a remote control. Well, it doesn't take long for such a system to produce wear and slop. I suppose all the linkage points could be built up and remachined, but the weak point is in the detent which - being under considerable built in force to produce the self shifting effect (shifter snap) - causes the cover to distort and disable the whole system. It was a great sales feature that sold cars but not very robust.

Now here is a strange story: I did some work on an 18th series car that sat in storage for 45 years. The car was passed down in the family and when the son showed up to drive it he couldn't shift it. I showed him the imaginary shift gate method and his response was "It didn't used to be that way". Go figure. When the car came in the linkage was seized and I had the column apart to free everything up. However, the cover must have become distorted because the detents were sloppy and difficult to align properly as per the manual.