Dave, John Ulrich should be able to help. He owns a '32 Light Eight roadster and has plenty of earlier parts.

https://julrichpackard.com/

For late '30s through '50s Packard mechanical, brake and electrical items only, no trim or body, contact Jeff Adkins, Moose Motors, Penngrove (Petaluma), CA (707) 792-9985, packardguy54@sbcglobal.net

Tell these pros that Mike, '47 Super Clipper, Walnut Creek referred you.

Avoid aluminum head. Even with modern corrosion inhibitors, Red Line Water Water or No-Rosion, they are trouble. What's ridiculous are the guys who then polish aluminum heads until they gleam, which reduces surface area and cooling efficacy.

As described, Packard already suggested what owners wanting a trace more oomph could do. Skip the cowboy crap, don't reinvent the wheel. Get the engine right, "factory standard."

Good points. Thought it'd be nice, but i draw the line at an altimeter. I'd hang it from bottom of dash or on the steering column mounted period Stewart-Warner 4,500 rpm tach, an option in many cars in the late '40s, early '50s.

Avantis left the factory with vacuum gauges, as did many other cars, usually higher end, or sport/GT cars. You may recall many new cars in the '70s had vacuum gauges tho' with colored areas, no numbers, for fuel economy after the '73 oil embargo.

Have checked Summit Racing, who often have good stuff, but most are pricey with mixed reviews. All i want is a good-sized, three-inch diameter or so, vacuum gauge I can see while driving, with a 6-volt bulb. Please, no surmises. No junk. No fix its. No "you getcha a..."

If you know who has one, are using one yourself, or have one for sale, please PM me.

Happy New Year.

Have checked Summit Racing, who often have good stuff, but most are pricey with mixed reviews. All i want is a good-sized, three-inch diameter or so, vacuum gauge I can see while driving, with a 6-volt bulb.

Scott, your and TxG's, Wat's mpg all sound familiar. I long ago had a 3.9 axled '51 288 (later that year the factory revised to 3.54 like the 327 300/400), got about what the above posters report. However, my '40 120 with 4.09 (instead of 4.36) axle and overdrive, razor tuned, 32 psi cold Denman bias plies, once returned 22.5 mpg.
Yes, really. And much of that was 60-65 mph.

My '47 Super Clipper despite a 3.92 rear axle in lieu of usual 4.09 with overdrive and aforementioned 7.5:1 327 head, running 41 psi cold bias- s i z e d 7.00/15 Bridgestone LT radials gets half that. 356 Packards, like an old friend said of his '41 Cad conv. (346-ci L-head) when he left the Navy after War II, would "pass everything but a gas station."

However, a 4,300-lb. curb weight, flathead (L-head), 336.7-ci, factory compression 7:1 '51 Lincoln with 3.31 rear end and overdrive for a 2.39 final drive, won that year's Mobil Economy Run Sweepstakes with 25.488 mpg (ton mpg figure of 66.484). Motor Trend's editor Griff Borgeson, who wrote accurately and deeply about many cars both sides of the Atlantic, Channel, observed 24.448 mpg in this same car, which had been torn down and inspected to confirm being entirely stock after impounded when Chrysler complained.

Remember weight. For some reason, few old domestic car blokes care about weight. When Bentley coaxed their 278.7-ci F-head six, 3,750-lb.. 3.08:1 axled '52 Continental to 118.75 mph, they did so by greatly increasing tire pressure, removing the spare tire and back seat. Some of us are more interested in absolute speed than acceleration because the higher the former, the more relaxed ambling. The Bentley Continental's 0-60 was 13 seconds, same as a well-tuned 1940-50 356 Packard, tho' the lightweight '40 160 business coupe might manage just over 12 seconds. This aside because long ago, i fawned over Packard Darrins and Continentals. But honest Darrin owners admit that lovely as the 1938-40 editions are, factory cars are better. (1941-42 Darrins shared more factory parts but are to some of us overbearing, blowsy looking.)
Continentals have that cartoony rear overhang, and R-R/Bentleys have added, pointless complexity, as well as a nut-for-bolt copy of Packard's Saf-T-Flex i.f.s, abandoned in the '56-on Clouds and S-Types for the same reason Packard also used a conventional GM-type i.f.s. in the 1941-47 Clipers; the lowered floor pan left no room for Saf-T-Flex's long torque arms, and cost cutting at both Packard and in Crewe, England.

In short, don't go overboard on compression. A little boost, okay. More important: Look to the "compleat car." And lose weight. Bill Lear said, "I'd sell my grandmother to lose another pound from a Lear Jet." Packards were nonpareil road cars in the '30s and '40s, so don't fathom why most of the preceding may as well be in Latin.

According to a Chevron engineer, himself owning an old muscle car, any brand gasoline will last a year so long as not exposed to temperatures much above 80. But Stabil's not a bad idea, the regular not marine type. Keep it simple. Don't reinvent the wheel. Factory standard. Packard knew what they were doing.

Nothing you do will make them drive as well as a new Camry. Ferrari friends laughed that a stick Honda Civic of the '90s would outperform their '58 Berlinetta, '59 Pinanfarina coupe, even '63 Lusso; out accelerate, out brake, out corner the fabled Prancing Horses. A late friend owning a parade of high-end '30s, '40s stuff, Delahayes, Hispano K6 and J12, Delage D8, Bugatti Types 57 & 101, '39 Lagonda V-12 Rapide, supercharged '36 Auburn 852 speedster, Marmon 16, said his little Geo Metro "drove better than all that old crap," and his cars, everyone, first ran as intended, t h e n and only then went to the shows.
My Super Clipper has lower piston speed than the aforementioned Bentley Continental, which used an engine tracing to the 1922 R-R Model 20, itself cribbed from the '20 Buick Six, though in the words of the respected Laurence Pomeroy, "not so good." Again, R-R was disassembling a new Limited annually in the years just before War II to glean the latest Detroit production tips. My '47 Super is a Buick Roadmaster according to Packard, not a bad thing. If you fancy the '30s fire trucks and realize Duesenbergs overrated, overpriced (then and now), overhyped, taking nine years and several iterations to find homes for only 480 editions, then 385-ci Chrysler Imperial/Packard/Pierce-Arrow eights are the way to go. If you really want the overkill of a V-12, a Pierce over a Packard, tho' both obviously good cars.

Pardon the verbiage, but what i am t r y i n g to impart is perspective. Without that, and appreciation for the real thing, what's left of the old car hobby drifts more and more to retrorods, Frankencars. We've seen '30s Packard Super Eights and Twelves with big block Chevy crate motors.

Enjoy the ride.

Hope springs eternal, sports fans. Happy New Year.

Scott, an aside in a late '47 Packard Service Counselor, which you can read here via Literature Archive, and we wish more posters would avail themselves of the exhaustive information Kev has provided instead of asking the same questions over and over. It suggested that for owners of 356-engined cars wanting a trace more oomph, the 327 cylinder head, which came out in April that year with the bathtub convertible since war prevented tooling the Clipper for dropheads and woodies. This gives 7.5:1 compression. There is also a chart here on PackardInfo showing which heads provide a given compression on interchange.

A lifelong Packard maven friend has a 288 head on his '42 One-Sixty convertible's 356 for 8:1, and it purrs, starts, restarts on the button--or tap of foot, though many of us have added underdash buttons in addition to our Carter Car Start accelerator switch. This helps when you only want to blip the starter as when trying to line up the timing mark. Studebaker put their starter switch under the clutch pedal, which seems smarter.

A rule of thumb in the day was that all things being equal, an ohv engine could handle a full number higher compression, ie: 7:1, 8:1, than a flathead (L-head- valve-en-bloc) before pinging. So don't get carried away on boosting compression. An engine in good shape, well tuned, gives plenty of performance. Tho' Packard's mainstays were refinement and smoothness, their cars performed.

My 8:1 friend and i both use regular 87 octane without a hitch.

BTW, when Packard raised the 356's compression from 1940-41's 6.41:1 to 1942-'47's 6.85, they advertised 165 hp. instead of the previous 160. But despite later 356 bathtubs having an even 7:1, listed horsepower was back to 160.

In 1940, Buick ran dyno tests of all cars remotely sales competitors at the GM Proving Grounds. Packard's 356 produced only 131 corrected hp, an overstatement of 22.10%.
1940 Cadillacs had the greatest variance between advertised and corrected hp than any other GM product, 135 vs. 118 (130 vs. 115 LaSalle), a Series 72 Cad's advertised 140 was really 124.5. '40 Lincoln Zephyr's adv. 120 was 104. The '40 Buick Century/Roadmaster/Limited claimed 141 was not so far off the real 130.

Compound Carburetion was standard on all 320-ci-engined 1941-42 Buicks (Century, Roadmaster, Limited), with advertised hp. of 165. Buick in those days was even trouncing Cadillac in image, and was finally reined in after offering a handful of Brunn catalog customs. Buick and Cadillac were Packard's real threats, so much so that a year earlier Dutch Darrin observed, "Packard was so afraid of GM they couldn't see straight." 1941 traditional-bodied Packards were down 24% while the C-bodied '41 Buicks' and Cads' sales up the same percentage. Packard's five-year-old 1938 bodies, regardless facelifts in '40 and '41, were shopworn, box office poison, hence the dire need for the new Clipper, which was such a bellringer that in its truncated debut year it outsold the full year's production of less expensive One-Twenties, despite costing much more.
If not for the war, largely Clipperized 1942 would've been Packard's biggest volume year since 1937, when they whored themselves silly purveying the funky little six. The 120 was a snappy Packard. The six should've been offered under another name. Either you're a fine car maker or you're not.
1940 was a good year thanks to big price cuts. I owned a '40 120. A good car, but lower quality than a '39 120.

These were tough times for Packard, whose most profitable year ever was back in 1929, despite owning the infinitesimable fine car market (above $2,000 FOB) through 1936, and the 120 outselling all other junior cars, it the basis of all Packards other than 446 leftover Twelves from 1939-on.

So, the last thing Packard was going to do was let Buick stand as the industry's most powerful car, hence 1942's 160/180 claiming an equal 165. After the war, Buick dropped the troublesome, thirsty, plug-fouling Compound Carburetion and dropped their listed hp back down to 144. So Packard could relax, return to their earlier 160.

Short story, if you want to put a junior head on your 356, have at it. But don't expect a race car. And stick with the 6 degrees BTDC on timing, maybe a degree or two more given today's better, cleaner gasoline. But if you really want performance, get rid of all the dead weight you can, carry a couple extra pounds cold pressure in your tires, use 10W/30 full synthetic motor oil. The latter hasn't contained esters in many years, and those alone were what started decades ago the stories of drooling seals.

A free-running, well-tuned engine, brakes not dragging, and you'll see what sold Packards off the showroom floor. Characters today doing cowboy stuff, focusing on the engine instead of the entire car. Ridiculous. Whatever you do, don't more than just clean up your head at the machine shop. Taking off too much interferes with combustion chamber shape and could even allow the valves to hit.

A late friend ran a Packard-only shop, focusing on late '30s through '47. His slogan was "factory standard."

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, i'm a sport car guy who fell under the spell of overdrive 1939-47 Packard 282/356 on the standard wb. No better road cars from either side of the Atlantic or Channel those years. Unfortunately, the B-O-P production men brought in to cost the 120--even Chevrolet's sales mgr. Bill Packer was recruited to teach Packard dealers how to sell on credit--- wound up running the Company. They knew production, but not marketing, which is why Packard's advertising became shrill, Mickey Rooney/Diana Durbin "Hey, kids, let's put on a show in the barn," 1940's "It's happening on a 1,000 Main Streets" against Buick and Cadillac's sauve Constance Bennett/Cary Grant confident sophistication. Any competent copywriter knows people aspire to what the folks atop the hill drive, not Main Street.

Longer story short, these same one-trick ponies could later do no better than ape dreck like the Olds Fiesta, Buick Skylark, Cadillac Eldorado with the Caribbean, a stock convertible laden with another 200 lbs. of "sporty cues." The Packard of yore, the Packard who produced the '34 Lebaron sport coupes, would've anticipated, even trumped the '52 Bentley Continental.

Do not understand these characters wanting to add air conditioning to Packards. Packard offered such because that's the car biz. If you really want a nice old road car, the l a s t thing you want to do is burden your engine with power-robbing accessories. You have a cowl vent and vent windows.

Bottom line, factory standard and lose weight.

Again, Jeff Adkins, Moose Obsolete Brake Parts, Penngrove (Petaluma in the North Bay) is a lifelong Packard specialist who also supplies domestic drum brake parts Auburn through Zephyr to area parts houses. Prompt turnaround. (707) 792-9985, packardguy54@sbcglobal.net

As i PM'ed you, Mike Chirco can also help you, master cyl.
(520) 730-2246 packardautoparts@gmail.com Tell them Mike '47 Super Clipper, Walnut Creek, CA referred you. BTW, they have a pair of 2103 parts cars.
Tucson Packard. Long established, good people, reasonable.

We don't have Bugattis. This isn't complicated.

A a a n d, we have Michael Grimes at Max Merritt Packard Parts, (317) 736-6233, ext. 103.

Charod Marshall at Kanter Auto Parts, sales@kanter.com, (800) 526-1096, ext. 322

https://julrichpackard.com/ John Ulrich specializes in 1933-47, knowledgeable as all the above, most reasonable.

HH56's encyclopedic knowledge is boundless, as with his comment about the efficacy of fresh air ducting depending on sort of heater. Thanks as always, Howard.

We like what we like, but if there were better looking custom-bodied Packards than Graber's, i never saw them.