Packard Motor Car Information

Re: Jeff's 48 Custom 8 Victoria Project

Posted by bigmoparjeff On 2013/10/20 18:07:55

Tonight's chapter in the Packard saga is mostly about component restoration. I've been really eager to actually start reassembling the car, but there seems to be an endless list of small jobs to do in order to get everything ready. I spent a lot of time rebuilding switches. For a 65 year old car, this Packard has a lot of switches. Off the top of my head, I believe there are at least 24 of them. Not one switch on the car was working properly. At best they had high resistance, and many had no continuity through the dirty contacts. Luckily, most of the switches are fairly easy to take apart, and are built out of simple components that can be cleaned and greased to make the switch work like new again. There are only two switches that can not be taken apart: the reverse lamp switch and the switch on the overdrive lock-out cable. On both of these I was able to spray electrical cleaner in through the terminal screw holes and work the switch repeatedly to get the contacts to clean themselves. Final testing with an ohm meter was done to make sure I did everything correctly. Like many digital meters, mine will read .5 ohms when the actual resistance is closer to zero. If it was actually .5 ohms, that would be too high.

California dirt road dust had made it's way inside the heater, vent, and wiper control cables, so they were all frozen in place. After bead blasting, I soaked them in kerosene to free them up. I lubed the rack and pinion units that move the cables, and they all work nicely now.

The blower motor was cleaned, lubed, and got new wires.

I replaced the shaft seal in the Ranco heater valve,and put the heater box together.

My overdrive lock-out cable was in rough shape, but $300 for a new one isn't in the budget. Thanks go out to the person who had the idea of using a split collar to re-secure the cable to the housing. I remember reading the post, but forgot who came up with the great idea. I bought a collar from McMaster-Carr, and now the cable works as good as new.