Craig's - 1956 Panther Project does body-off

Posted by Craig Hendrickson On 2013/6/9 16:19:49

Good progress is being made once again on my resurrected 1956 Packard Panther Project! I and two good local Packard friends (Bud & Lance) SAFELY and SECURELY tackled pulling the body off my 1956 Clipper Super (5647) -- to be "Panther" -- chassis and separating same so I can more easily work on and modify the chassis.

The purpose of this thread is to provide some detailed pictures and discussion about this exercise. I posted this in the regular 55-56 Forum because there's nothing custom or modified about doing this. Hopefully, this will be guide for someone else who wants to separate the body and chassis, but isn't sure how to do it or would like some ideas about same.

We did this body off separation over 3 work 1/2 days spread out over about a week's real time. We took this amount of time because Bud's 73, I'm 67 and Lance is mid-40s, but has back problems. We vowed we weren't going to hurt ourselves doing it. Besides the last two days, the outside temp was 111F+ in the mid afternoon. We solved the heat problem by starting at 6AM and stopping around 9AM. Also, I left my portable swamp cooler on all night for the front garage and turned on the wall A/C unit in the bonus room (rear single garage) ditto. That really helped fend off the otherwise oppressive heat for a while.

I'll post pictures of each of the 3 day's work in the next 4 posts. Feel free to comment on the pictures and/or my comments.

Craig