Re: Men bet their lives on it - the Packard-built Merlin V-12

Posted by Deskdriver On 2017/3/30 10:46:22

I found this thread interesting. Knowing that Packard stopped car production in March of '42 to build the Merlin engines and also suspect they were building the marine engines for the PT boats.

But all this brought about more thoughts and questions. How did the war effect the number of males working for Packard? Did they hire women, we hear all about "Rosie, the riveter" but what about Martha the mechanic? Did Packard hire a significant amount of women to cover the shortages in their workforce?

Once the tooling was done to Whitworth threads instead of SAE, I am thinking it would have been easier to train the women in metric instead of the men to change from SAE. I know I've become frustrated working on mixed thread components, like my Chevy Suburban.

Is there any information about the Packard workforce during WWII?

I wonder how long it took to make and retool the factories?

What did Briggs Body do, stop production all together?

Thanks for bring this up.