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Board index » All Posts (TimCole)




Re: 1934 Pittsburgh Auto Show?
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Tim Cole
Hi Jeremy:

That meeting between Edsel Ford and E.T. Gregorie is documented in the Society of Automotive Engineers Sanctioned Biography of E.T. Gregorie.

Gregorie had super-imposed a pencil trace over a Lincoln Zephyr profile. Edsel flipped.

The next variable is why was the car shown in Pittsburgh?
Well, Pittsburgh was a stop on the Pennsylvania Railroad. If the car was being shipped to New York for transit to Puerto Rico then they may have borrowed it for the show. Perhaps by mistake.

Gregorie was Ford Society and would have been around some rather exclusive venues in Puerto Rico. So would the Packard.

I don't doubt that Packard would fill an order like this, especially for export where it would be less controversial. I remember Dough Heimuller had a 1934 V-12 with a factory built oversized trunk. Paul Lamb had a 34 sedan with leather front door panels. And El Baldrige had a formal sedan with leather rear door panels. They had an entire body division starving for orders in 1934.

If that car was going straight to Puerto Rico via the Export Dept. I don't doubt for a minute that is was factory.
If the customer was domestic then I might expect the order to be picked up by say Derham or Rollston who did lots of super specials like Chryslers with Lincoln Continental Bodies on them, and Packards with Cadillac doors and windows.

Good luck finding pictures. You might try contacting the Frick Museum in Pittsburgh.

Posted on: 2009/4/13 20:07
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Re: 1934 Pittsburgh Auto Show?
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Tim Cole
Hi Jeremy, Here is a silver dollar idea I had today:

In 1939, E.T. Gregorie (chief of styling for the Ford Company) held up a pencil tracing of the profile of a long hooded convertible victoria to a visiting Edsel Ford. "What do you think of this Mr. Ford?" "Oh boy!, That's fantastic!, Don't change a thing on it." I'm not sure, but I vaguely recall that E.T. had just returned from vacationing in Puerto Rico. When the full scale model was rolled into the studio at Ford the result was so different from E.T.'s usual work that everybody thought he had gone crazy. But all present soon agreed that the new Lincoln Continental was a very beautifully proportioned design. It's certainly within the realm of possibility (given the pencil tracing rather than a sketch) that E.T. Gregorie had brought back a photograph of the Packard he saw in Puerto Rico.

Given also, that to this day, the school of Art and Design regards the Continental as one of the five most beautiful automotive designs of all time, it's easy to conjecture what happened to any studio photographs of the car on file at Packard. They were flushed. When the new Lincoln started cutting into Packard sales somebody in styling must have realized that management would go absolutely ape if they found out it was a Packard design.

Stranger things have happened. Tracing (no pun intended) this car's history may pay some handsome dividends if successful.

Posted on: 2009/4/13 18:01
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Re: 1934 Pittsburgh Auto Show?
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Tim Cole
Let me put two more cents in here and go away.

The reference to the car on page 435 of the Packard Book is too vague. It warrants a red pencil note of "please be more specific".

Another thing that bugs me is the missing fender skirt emblem in what seems to be the only period picture of the car. If this job was done in Detroit, I would think that the emblem would be there. If it was a parts list play, they may have overlooked the emblems.

Sometimes cars like this show up for which there isn't any information. Especially around New York and Philly. Sometimes they were side jobs.

Posted on: 2009/4/12 12:17
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Re: 1934 Pittsburgh Auto Show?
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Tim Cole
Here is my take on this rig.

Given that Ed Blend lived around Pittsburgh if there was any information more than a single picture he would have found it. My guess is that the car was an individual custom done locally. That is, the Lebaron fenders and running boards were ordered via the parts book and the conversion made by a local shop. The car may have been loaned by the dealer for the display or put there as part of the dealer's own display. If this car was a Packard factory job it would have been shown in more than one place, and there would have been a studio picture.

I saw another oddball like this years ago. It was an individual custom 180 Club Sedan chopped to look like a Cadillac 60 Special. It even had 60 Special doors on it. That car was a Rollson job.

Posted on: 2009/4/11 17:10
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Re: Most reliable Packard engine?
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Tim Cole
Theoretically speaking, I suppose the V-8 should last the longest. The earlier cars suffer from rotten (or no) air filters, by-pass (or no) oil filters, and poorly engineered cooling systems due to yet to be published petroleum company research.

I guess this will bring a lot of angry responses, so while I am at it the Straight Eight L-head design suffers from serious theoretical handicaps as well.

Don't get me wrong, when they were new they ran beautifully and drove like a million bucks.

However, only a crackpot would suggest that modern cars aren't as good. This wasn't the case in the 1960's when you really couldn't buy a good car. In those days old Packards drove better than a lot of brand new cars, but almost everybody complained that Packards burned too much gas.

I remember one old lady telling me "Oh yeah, we had a Packard and we were always putting gas in it. You couldn't go around the block without running out of gas."

Posted on: 2009/4/4 16:44
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Re: Bob Turnquist
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Tim Cole
Really?

I spoke to him last year. Years ago he was a family friend and when I was a school kid he gave me a study desk that was his when he was a kid. Later on we lost touch and didn't have contact for decades. It was actually comical because we would be in the same room and he didn't remember who I was and I didn't introduce myself because there wasn't any reason to. And nobody present knew how well I knew the Turnquists. So I heard all of this and that and even knew Bob's 1940's roommate in Brooklyn Heights. Well, that's the way rich people are. Except that I'm not rich and will say that as far as wealthy people go Bob was actually better than most.

Posted on: 2009/4/4 15:39
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Re: Problem with Engine Knock
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Tim Cole
You should be able to pin point a cause without tearing into the poor thing.

For one rod bearing knocks don't get better as the engine warms up, they get worse.

Don't rule out the fuel pump.

Lets suppose you have a piston problem. If the car doesn't miss then you can hook up a compression tester to each cylinder and start the engine. If you have a low relative reading on one cylinder then look for a broken ring or a stuck ring. Be sure to ground out the plug wire or you will damage the coil.

A damaged piston will also show up as a low first puff during a static compression test.

You could also have loose carbon banging around in there too.

Another likely culprit is a sticking valve. That you can find with a vacuum tester.

Posted on: 2008/3/9 21:08
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Re: Standard 8 '49 - oil pressure
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Tim Cole
What the manual refers to is mainline and secondary (tappet) pressure. They don't actually talk about calibrations, but what you have is an oil galley on the right side of the engine that feeds into a smaller bypass cross-channel that feeds the oil filter and tappets. That cross bored bypass is calibrated.

Thus when they talk about normal oil pressure at 45 mph being 40 psi they aren't necessarily talking about pressure at the sender. Packard seemed to like this sort of obfuscation. The earlier manuals drive me crazy with their contradictions.

I had this customer come in because his mechanical oil pressure gauge read all over the place while the dashboard gauge was mostly steady. The engine didn't knock when I pushed it up to 40-45 in second. Yet the mechanical gauge says the motor has crummy oil pressure. However at 40-45 mph the mechanical gauge is reading 25 psi while the dashboard reads 30. Next I look in the manual and see "normal oil pressure is 40 psi" but they don't say whether that is mainline or secondary. They only say that less than 20 psi is a problem. Well I do know that the mainline pressure is at least 25 psi because that is what the gauge says. My conclusion here is that the motor passes all of the minimum requirements stated in the manual and that the gauge might as well be an idiot light (it may have had the wrong sender). The purpose of the manual being to diagnose a customer complaint.

When I was overseas working for the Air Force they used to bring me these Fords that would have erratic oil pressure gauge readings - zero or middle. Well if the gauge is at zero and the motor isn't clattering it is obvious that the oil pressure is good. You wouldn't believe the trouble I had trying to convince the military that the Ford gauge was calibrated to a default value. That wasn't in any manual.

Posted on: 2008/2/28 20:56
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Re: stick to auto swap
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Tim Cole
Dear BDK:

The key phrase here is "good customer".

Coverting to automatic is very expensive and unless they insist on keeping that car you could probably do better by finding them a trade.

That way you would get the new work on the next car, which is safer than this one time conversion. The first one always takes twice as long and in this case you don't get anymore of this type of job. You will probably lose money on the job.

After the trade the power steering issue depends on whether the tie rods are inter-changable. I don't know.

The customer is not always right. However, if they are a customer you value you try to keep the business. There are a lot of people you don't want as customers.

Posted on: 2008/2/27 20:05
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Re: Trans fluid change
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Tim Cole
Hi Bowman:

Given you have no obvious problems I would leave things alone except that the Packard manual does recommend periodic fluid changes - 25000 miles.

Next question is - who knows what is in your transmission anyway.

Dexron contains friction modifiers that are of no benefit to Ultramatic. Type F will perform differently that Dexron in identical hyraulic systems from an engineering standpoint. Again this should not affect Ultramatic.

Thus Type F is closer to Packard Specs that Dexron.

Now there are Type A fluids out there that contain no friction modifiers and do not have the hydrodynamic properties of Type F. However they are usually oils sold for the second tier aftermarket. I presume they are probably just 10 weight motor oil with a dye in it.
10 weight motor oil may be perfectly okay for Ultramatic given no extreme or winter usage.

However, type F seems the best pick for Ultramatic.

Posted on: 2008/2/27 19:45
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