Re: Trying to fix my 56
Posted by Leeedy On 2021/12/17 12:26:24
Quote:
Marvin wrote:
I haven't crawled under the car, but 95% of the sheet metal looks great. Under the lower trim on the passenger rear door has been touched up and appears to have a bad primer job. Not sure what is going on there. Plus, the front passenger door "pops" when opening. Guessing a shim or alignment issue with the hinges. When the car is dry, there are spots where the primer shows through. It appears red. Just picked up a Y292 fuel pump. Will be working on it this Saturday.
In the 1960s and 1970s you could buy these cars cheap –especially from someone who imagined they had some kind or horrible technical problem and just wanted out of the car. V-8 Packards were and are very sophisticated (and yes complicated if one does not learn about them) automobiles.
I strongly advise you to learn about your Patrician prior to attempting to work on it. I strongly advise against guessing. Get yourself a factory workshop manual and an Owner's Manual. The mysteries tend to no longer be mysterious once one learns about these wonderful Packards. AND you have the added benefit of preventing injurious and potentially expensive blunders to the car. Owning the manuals doesn't cost –it saves.
Most mechanics have never wanted to learn about Ultramatics. And people in general were baffled by the Torsion-Level suspension–and still are. Even today, there are still people (even in auctions and magazines that ought to know better) claiming these cars had "air bags" or saying other things about the suspension system.
My favorite was the one where the transmission was supposedly "locked up" and hopeless. If it had a selector lever, I would hand the owner some money... reach under the car, push up on the linkage and watch it pop out of "Park"... and then drive away. On pushbutton cars I had several tricks to get it out of "Park" (usually when the unit had over-ridden proper position)... and even more tricks to keep the selector from over-riding. Old electronic devices are... old electronic devices. But that's all. And yes... today if one needs pushbutton issues repaired and addressed, by all means, see Mr. Pushbutton who is the pro from Dover on this Packard system.
Now. For the issue at hand...
People who come into these cars years later after the car has been sitting (and even people who owned the cars previously) never understand two very important issues related to fuel delivery :
1.) Flex coupling hose at the fuel pump (sooner or later) dry rots. They ALL do. This is not a Packard fault,as often thought. It is merely the nature of the item –on any car. The result are tiny cracks (sometimes invisible unless you bend the hose to extremes). On occasion, these tiny cracks allow AIR to be sucked instead of gasoline. Result? You get starved carbs, erratic flows, stalled engines. Far too many think these conditions are caused by the fuel pump, vapor lock or even fuel filter. Even mechanics jump to these conclusions when the real problem is very simple. First thing I would replace is the flex hose coupling. These are guaranteed to go bad. Not IF... just when. And don't rely on mere visual inspection. These little flex hoses can look beautiful and appear perfect, when in reality they can have more holes than Swiss cheese!
2.) What I call "the index finger"... the small metal intake tube inside the gas tank that bends up and angles down is prone to plug with rust. Especially in the elbow bend of the tube. So badly does this occur that I have seen compressed air fittings BLOW OUT trying to pressure-clear this tube. The sharp elbow in this tube makes it nearly impossible to un-plug and clear with a wire. And this condition is made far worse with today's Ethanol blend gasolines that encourage rust to occur.
The upshot of all this is that most people blame the factory mechanical fuel pump (or even the carbs or fuel filter) and never realize the real issue causing the problems. People waste huge amounts of money and time going out and buying fuel pumps, hooking up electrical circuits, and playing with the carburetors. But all the fuel pumps and carb rebuilds/replacements in the world will never repair either problem listed here.
Of course if the index finger intake tube in your tank is clogged or plugged solid (and they very often are), the easiest fix is also expensive, but it works: replace the tank. A typical "boiling out" of the tank usually will NOT repair a clogged intake tube.
Also...people yank the permanent ceramic gas filters thinking these are bad and imagining a paper unit will somehow improve things. In reality the original ceramic filters were sophisticated and very good units that should last a lifetime. And they are easily cleaned. No need to replace them.
Packard engineered some very fine automobiles. If these cars are merely re-set back to the way they were when new, everything should work very well.This Post was from: https://packardinfo.com/xoops/html/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=239664