Ultramatic Internals

Posted by BigKev On 2009/2/1 2:35:24

While sitting at dinner tonight at the PI Meet, I was talking to a gentleman that was the former National Directory/President of PI, and also writes many of the articles that are in the PI publications. He has a '53 Clipper and proceeds to tell me about his car. It has factory A/C and a few other rare factory options. He has owned the car for over 30 years. About 8 years ago, the Ultramatic went out, and he took it to a Packard repair shop on Oceanside, CA (the shop is now closed, gentleman retired). The repair shop gave him two options. Rebuild the Ultra with the NOS parts they had in stock, or use a '98 Mercedes 3 speed automatic. So I am thinking that they cobbled together some kind of adapter kit. The the story gets more interesting. From what this gentleman told me, (confirmed by another gentleman that knows of 2 or 3 more of these conversions). It still uses the Ultramatic case but uses Mercedes inards. Now he was not sure what they did to the inside of Ultra with the 96ish Mercedes parts. But all he know is that now he has a 3 speed automatic (with a passing gear as he descibed it), and it is entirely done inside the original Ultramatic case. He said when he got the '53 car back it was night at day on the highway. He descibed it was just like driving a car with a modern automatic.

So as unbelieveable as this all sounds.... I am going to try to get to see this car and see exactly what was done to it.

Has anyone else heard of such a thing?