A quenching diode across the winding coil and a snubbing capacitor across the contacts will almost completely eliminate arcing. The contacts will still wear down from sliding friction, but at a much slower rate.

Then you put a 1 or 2 amp slow-blow fuse on the clock to protect the winding coil if the points stick closed. All sorts of things can make the points stick. The car battery running down is the most common one. The winding coil cannot take current for more than a second or two before it cooks. The winding coil draws 6 amps, but only for an instant that won't blow the fuse unless it draws current for too long.

Even then, the brass pivot holes in the geartrain bridges will wear out oval within a few years, causing the gears to jam together and stop randomly. You will forever fight that electro-mechanical movement trying to keep it running.

They were cheap. Even the great Packard used cheap clock movements by the 1950's.

Believe me I am a purist and I want my mechanical clocks to work in my old cars, but I have fought and fought and fought. The best you get is a couple years. Honestly just have it converted to quartz and it will run trouble-free for decades.

No matter quartz or mechanical, I wire in an on-off switch so I can shut the clock off when the car sits. It eliminates draw on the battery and it prevents unnecessary wear on the clock while the car just sits in the garage for weeks or months at a time.

Shoot, I don't know. Manufacturers don't usually publish that sort of thing. Probably between a pint and a quart. Buy a quart and it'll be plenty.

The old spec for most master cylinders was to fill them up to 1/4 inch from the top of the reservoir. That's what I do on mine and I haven't hit anything yet.

A lifetime transmission rebuilder friend of mine runs transmission pan bolts down until they are just barely snug then turns them all 1/4 turn more regardless of the torque.

I thought it was nonsense until I thought about it this way:

The goal is to produce the correct amount of "squish" on the gasket. What if the gasket is wider in some areas that others? Those wider areas would squish less than the narrower areas if the bolts were all torqued the same. It's all related to surface area and pressure per square inch. It would take more turns of the bolts in the narrower areas to reach the same torque.

By running all the bolts down snug, then turning them all the same amount, you produce the same amount of squish across the entire gasket.

Then it made sense to me.

The interior cleaned up quite nicely considering it's all original. The white nylon fabric looks dirtier in this photo than it actually is. It's really pretty material with silver threads in it.

You can see the steering wheel and column are a darker color than the rest here. That is because they are still the original Topaz paint. The dash and doors were repainted along with the exterior of the car probably twenty years ago.

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This photo of me with it was taken at a car show last Saturday.

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I bought this same car in Henderson, Nevada about one year ago. It's with me in Arizona now. Thank God it's out of the Pacific Northwest. The humidity and salt air up there did enough damage to it already.

It had deteriorated significantly from the photo at the beginning of this thread. It went through a chain of owners over the last few years who were not kind to it. They would buy it, abuse and neglect it, then flip it six months to a year later to the next sucker. That happened three or four times. Somebody sanded the paint and scratched the ^@$!# out of it. Another overloaded, shorted out, and generally just barbecued the rear body harness. Darn near burned this car to the ground. It had a few rust spots that nobody had addressed and were allowed to get worse. The chrome pitted more. Clearly bad storage. Just a lot of stupidity and neglect. I've had to work hard to reverse their bad decisions. People suck. Poor thing...this car deserved better.

It is doing much better now. I have done a ton of cosmetic, mechanical, and electrical work to it. Nearly everything is fixed and working now. Some things cannot be overcome, like the crappy repaint job that somebody did to it a few decades ago and the damaged chrome, but it is overall what I would call a very nice driver condition car.

It runs and drives very nicely. A good, strong runner. I've put about 700 miles on it. It has 65,500 miles.

It is not the original colors. I wish it was. The door tag says it was originally White Jade and Topaz. The current white is actually a pearl, and the current copper is lighter and more orange than the dark brown-copper of Topaz. The steering wheel is still painted the original Topaz. It's not Sardonyx either, because Sardonyx is a pink-y non-metallic. It looks like Mojave Tan from 1956. Who knows. Clearly a custom paint job from a few decades ago. Too bad they did a crappy job prepping and applying it.

The date on the heater box is February 5th, 1955.

I would love to know who the original owners of this car were, whether they dressed like me, and whether they listened to Perry Como and Johnny Mathis while driving it like I do.

The next item on the list is new tires of the correct size so my power steering works better and my speedometer is accurate. After that it's getting these darn turbo mufflers off it and replacing them with stock mufflers and resonators. I like my cars whisper quiet.

My brake light switch only turned the brake lights on if I stood hard on the pedal. Like...put yourself through the windshield level of hard braking. That's not good.

I'm a career auto parts man, and I searched through every catalog I have going back to the 1970's, and none had the 3-pin brake light switch for Torsion-Level cars, It appears this switch was made by Casco for Packard for only two years, and was never produced or sold aftermarket.

I bought a NOS switch from a Packard part supplier for $130. It didn't turn the brake lights on at all, and began leaking fluid from the crimp on the switch body after about the second pedal press.

A second $130 NOS switch did exactly the same thing. Both switches were leaking black goop out the threaded end after I removed them. My guess is there is a rubber diaphragm inside that is rotten after 68 years of sitting on the shelf and that black goop is the rubber disintegrating.

Many of you have heard of the 1970's Volkswagen switch (NAPA # SL159) that uses slide terminals instead of pin terminals. I bought one and it threads into the T-fitting on the frame rail perfectly. I created an adapter harness that plugs into the original Packard connector with individual pins, and to the Volkswagen switch using a Napa # EC428 connector.

The original Packard harness has three wires:

Pink: Power feed from the fuse panel. Hot at all times.

Light Green: to Torsion Level.

Dark Green: to brake lights.

If you are looking at the top of the Volkswagen switch, rotate the switch until the terminals are at the 3:00, 6:00, and 9:00 positions. Connect the pink wire to the 9:00 terminal, the light green wire to the 6:00 terminal, and the dark green wire to the 3:00 terminal.

The Volkswagen switch is very sensitive. It turns on at about 100 PSI. I did some testing on the vehicle and found that the brake lights come on just before the brakes begin to engage. However, I have had zero problems with the switch staying on after the pedal is released.

I'm sorry, but 25,000 miles at 104 mph doesn't impress me, and neither does the 250 hours on a dynamometer at full load that Packard bragged about in their SAE paper about the development of the V8.

The U.S. industry standard for dynomometer durability was for engines to sustain 200 hours at full load, 4000 rpm without major deterioration. That standard stood for decades. Well into the 1980's. You could expect a Chevy, Ford, or Plymouth to last 200 hours at full load.

Packard barely beat that.

I know of at least one domestic manufacturer during that time whose engines were good for 400 hours on a dynomometer. They later got them up to 500 hours with improvements to their valve seats.

It was American Motors Corportation. Their V8 that debuted in 1956 was rated for 400 hours, which is like driving at 100 mph for 40,000 miles.

Tune-ups on cars of this era happened twice a year, or every 6000 miles. Whichever came first. They consisted of:

-Inspect the spark plugs, wires, cap, and rotor. Clean, gap, or replace as required.

-Inspect the ignition points. Clean or replace as required. Reset the dwell with a dwell meter. A feeler gauge does not work for setting used points.

-Check the ignition timing. Adjust as required.

-Verify function of the distributor advance mechanisms.

-Spray the choke linkage clean with a non-residue solvent, such as spray carburetor cleaner. Do not oil. Make sure the linkage and plate move freely.

-Adjust the idle mixture screws to achieve the highest idle speed in gear, wheels blocked. Then turn the screws lean 1/2 turn at a time until the speed drops slightly. Finally, return the screws to the highest speed.

-Adjust the curb idle (in gear, wheels blocked) to 500 rpm.

-Service the carburetor air cleaner and oil breather.

-Inspect the fuel filter. Service as required.

-Apply a few drops of regular engine oil to the generator and distributor bushing oil cups.


The idle mixture and speed settings are the most relevant to your problem. Those settings change quite a bit with the changing weather and gasoline blends in fall and again in spring.

It's a typical manifold heat valve. As said, it's sandwiched between the exhaust manifold and the pipe at the flange on the driver's side.

The weight on the crank arm pulls the valve open by gravity when the valve heats up enough for the bi-metallic spring to loose tension. The spring pulls the valve shut when it's cold. It needs to move freely.

NEVER USE OIL! It will carbonize on the shaft and stick the valve. Use graphite lock lubricant, which is nothing more than powdered graphite suspended in solvent. Spray the shaft and work the valve back and forth. This is normal maintenance every few thousand miles.