Re: Air Conditioned '55-'56 Packards

Posted by BH On 2010/1/17 17:30:11

Howard, don't give up on popping out some new valves just yet.

When I worked at Avanti in Youngstown, some 20 years ago, the limited nature of that car's production volume posed some real problems.

However, we found a shop north of Akron with a laser-cutter that could read CAD files, allowing us to knock out relatively small quantities of "blanks" as opposed to having costly trimming dies made. The use of CAD files as "soft tooling" was a plus - given Avanti's trial-and-error design approach, then. Also, we weren't limited to a single shape on any given sheet of metal. However, the edges of the parts were not perfectly clean - a bit serrated, like the edge of a quarter, IIRC.

I'm neither a trained engineer nor designer, but just tossing out some food for thought. There's gotta be some machine/fab shops in your area, today, with as good or better equipment and talent that can make some pilot samples, then do small runs.