Re: 1940 Packard Super 8 160 Station Wagon (Cantrell) Factory Air Conditioning!

Posted by Brian Wilson On 2020/4/22 17:12:33

Looking at this from afar...wooden framed bodies on cars disappeared in the 1930's for good reasons. "Woody" wagons were an anachronism. They were comparatively expensive to build, and never really had global appeal. There were a few lingering examples of them - mainly from the UK coach builders - after WW2. These were called "shooting brakes". Armstrong-Siddeley also produced one post war, but they didn't sell many.

I guess there was not enough demand even prewar for Packard to want to build such a model themselves. But specialist builders persisted for some years.

So that brings us to the example here. It was clearly built for Bill Harrah, who happened to fancy that style of body. And he - or maybe somebody else - wanted air con. It was fitted this way because the vehicle was never intended for commercial use. It must have been quite expensive to build, but that was hardly a problem for the Harrah's.

It appears to be well constructed and sits on a genuine Packard chassis (origin/type unknown) with some original panels. It's not very different in that sense to a lot of the other rebody jobs, such as Ferraris, which were popular at that time and often incorporated a genuine chassis from a more mundane model. So what's to get excited about? It has not been passed off as the real thing, which is the biggest risk with these things.

It's just someone's idea of a nice car. Not mine, though!

As for the later metal-bodied "woodies" - it's hard to see the point. But they were popular enough for major manufacturers to include in their model line-up in the US.

Brian