Re: New "What Ifs?"
Posted by Steve203 On 2014/8/13 20:48:23
well, yeah, but Stude was never a company to emulate from a business practices standpoint.
Packard didn't emulate Stude, it bought them. Packard married those business practices. And the way the deal was structured, the Stude stockholders had a controlling interest. The board couldn't even agree to close down one of the test tracks, so those redundant costs kept piling up.
Besides the question of whether the larger Packard bodies could have made the turns in the Studebaker body plant, could EBG have produced 150,000 Studebakers/yr, on top of existing Packard production? Maybe so, but the Studebaker stockholders would not allow South Bend to be abandoned.
One thing good about Packard/EGB is that it was almost under one roof
A huge advantage over the scattered complex that Studie had. That one roof had it's drawbacks. It was too low. Compare the pic of the EGB exhaust hood from 38, with the paint booth Kaiser had at W-R. The EGB exhaust duct is right under the ceiling. I have seen pix of the Concord St side with several ducts coming out of windows and going up the side of the building. Modern paint booths and ovens would not have fit in EGB without major rennovations. That fact probably also played in the decision to outsource body building to Briggs.
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Packard didn't emulate Stude, it bought them. Packard married those business practices. And the way the deal was structured, the Stude stockholders had a controlling interest. The board couldn't even agree to close down one of the test tracks, so those redundant costs kept piling up.
Besides the question of whether the larger Packard bodies could have made the turns in the Studebaker body plant, could EBG have produced 150,000 Studebakers/yr, on top of existing Packard production? Maybe so, but the Studebaker stockholders would not allow South Bend to be abandoned.
One thing good about Packard/EGB is that it was almost under one roof
A huge advantage over the scattered complex that Studie had. That one roof had it's drawbacks. It was too low. Compare the pic of the EGB exhaust hood from 38, with the paint booth Kaiser had at W-R. The EGB exhaust duct is right under the ceiling. I have seen pix of the Concord St side with several ducts coming out of windows and going up the side of the building. Modern paint booths and ovens would not have fit in EGB without major rennovations. That fact probably also played in the decision to outsource body building to Briggs.
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