Re: Push button then & now

Posted by su8overdrive On 2022/9/20 15:53:47
Good connection, HH56. It was called "Electric Hand," a Bendix pre-select shift optional in 1935-36 Hudsons, came with a plug in the floor and shift lever clipped to the firewall under the dash, just in case. 1936-37 Cord 810/812s used the same Bendix unit, albeit with four speeds, 4th an overdrive ratio.

Off subject, but oft wondered why more vintage cars didn't have an overdrive within their transmission, as Cords and the 200 1938-39 (a few titled as '40) Bentley MX. Certainly easier for most motorists to use. The extra cost might've been offset by simplified inventory, production.

1936-38 Pierce-Arrows had the usual bolt-on overdrive of the era, but at least it was standard equipment on both the 8 & 12. Had Pierce been guided since the teens by ex-Burroughs cash register and Hudson executives as Packard was, they might've had the wherewithal to launch their proposed 25,000 juniors for 1938 at their higher than One Twenty's price point of $1,200.
There was suggestion the junior Pierces would've used Pierce's existing 384-ci eight monobloc with hydraulic lifters, a better engine, if we're splitting hairs, than Packard's or Chrysler's 384 eights.
If the junior Pierce retained overdrive, what a car. Since Pierce folded, some of us with 1940-on 356s w/overdrive console ourselves we've the next best thing.

Were Packard's Brigg bodies better than the Reo Flying Cloud/Graham Cavalier Hayes bodies the junior Pierce intended to use? Briggs bodies not as finely wrought as Fisher, if strong. Skip the wood veneer and cowhide--are the Pressed Steel bodies (Cowley near Oxford, supplied much of the English auto industry per Briggs, Murray in the States) used in the postwar Rolls-Royce and Bentley better than Packard's Briggs? Anyone have hands-on comparison experience?
As mentioned, in the years preceding War II, Rolls-Royce was annually disassembling a new Buick Limited to glean the latest Detroit production tips.


Still further afield, pardon, Pierce's plant, same size as Packards, designed, built at the same time by Albert Kahn also using his brother Julius's patented Trussed Concrete Steel Company construction fully survives, repurposed.
Buffalo, like Pittsburgh, was long down at the heels, but managed the renaissance Detroit couldn't.

Back to false economy, think it was Bob Lutz who suggested it was folly not to put your best upholstery in all your lines. That's what sells cars. My '47 Super came with the same hogs hair carpet as the junior 8s (which were nonetheless terrific cars, more sensible than locomotives like mine). Many Packards were drab within to the point of looking like ordnance vehicles, or they went the other nervous extreme like the 1946-47 Custom Supers, as if that sort of nonsense would make shoppers forget the '30s seniors or that there was no HydraMatic.

Really, how much more to plate the parking brake handle in all '40s Packards? The ex-GM big B-O-Ppers recruited to cost the 120 really were running the show. Until inspired by Darrin's proposal, which he was never paid for, the best Packard could do enroute to the Clipper, their sole non-postwar sellers' market success of the '40s, was graft 1940's new narrowed grille on a Buick in their styling studio.

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