Re: Why didn't Continental make an OHV V-8?

Posted by su8overdrive On 2012/7/24 16:24:37

Thank you, Dr. D and 58L. I'll leave it to others to launch the new thread. That way no insular souls will be "bent eight" out of shape. Some of us may enjoy a given make, but don't live in a vacuum, like to see our cars in perspective.

As mentioned elsewhere, i've several friends who are lifelong Cordites. In fact, last month i spent an afternoon on my back torquing the rod bearing caps on a friend's '36 810. The Lycoming is a good little engine,
the best part of the car, other than the 1942-47 junior Clipper size. The engine's only Achilles' heel(s) are the weak aluminum cylinder heads. The car's foibles are well documented elsewhere, but i'd add a ridiculously large turning circle to them.

Viewed as what it was --- the Duesenberg One Twenty --- and that it shares the identical bore/stroke with the woefully underrated Packard inline 288 of a dozen years later, the 1936-37 Cord 810-812 is interesting, being a fellow upmarket car. Aaaaaaand, we should never forget that the Packard Twelve was never intended to be East Grand Avenue's topline world beater, but a front-wheel-drive competitor of upper echelon Buicks.

Packard's nine-mained, 384-ci Custom Eight was to remain the Company's topline product.

Only after Cadillac launched their V-16, which was, to Packard's chagrin, a straight eight with the firing impulses halved for less crankpin loading, despite years of Clark Street crowing over the merits of their V-8, did Packard abandon the FWD idea, enlarge the V-12 and offer it as their topline alternative, knowing the public would become enamored of the more must be better mystique of "16 cylinders" and the trickle down panache bestowed on lesser GMobiles.

Judas, how's that for a NY Times run-on sentence?

Meanwhile, if any of y'all want to teleport our above posts to a new thread, you've my blessing.

Packard didn't become an also-ran 'til Alvan Macauley left the Company in April, 1948, coincidentally just before the launch of the pug ugly bathtubs, what Tom McCahill, dean of road testers (who'd raved over the '46 junior Clipper Deluxe Eight in Mechanix Illustrated), called "a goat."

Compare those sorry giant pillbugs with the hipper '48 Cadillac styling.

Packard limped along with '50s hohum, which several industry observers dismissed as looking like "bigger, gaudier Fords."

Even back in the '20s, when Continental and Lycoming were powering upmarket cars competing with Packard's lower lines, it helps to see the Big Picture. The key in those years is that Packard was apart and slightly above the pack,
hadn't yet fallen to merely anticipating GM's next move,

let alone being run by former GM production men as they were increasingly in the '40s.
Some fine cars were still wrought in the '40s, the cognac from the previous dozen years of Depression and desperation, simply because Packard didn't turn into an also-ran overnight.