It's a street rod. I'd highly suspect somebody simply grabbed a better looking plate off a coupe and slapped it on, figuring what difference would it make?

I'd steer clear of that one as well.

Okay, so my amp gauge had shorted out and was causing all kinds of problems which I recently remedied by simply by-passing the amp gauge until I can pull it out and have it rebuilt.

With my new coil and switch setup, and since it was a pretty and cool weekend, I took Sophie out for a drive Saturday and we put another 17.6 miles on her. Nobody was out for whatever reason so it let me get her up to 55 and 60 mph for the first time in a while. She doesn't seem happy over 60 because I REALLY need to adjust the valves, they are way out of spec!

Regardless! My oil gauge was giving me some odd readings. I use Lucas 30 weight zinc impregnated oil in the car, this oil only has about 350 miles on it, and I cleaned all the sludge out of the pan and from the pump filter when I changed the oil back in September, inside of the engine is squeaky clean and she was rebuilt completely in 2000. So, the dash gauge usually reads 35-40 pounds at idle and stays between 40 and 50 while she's at any speed over 40 or 45 mph. Last Saturday, the gauge kept going UP while she was at idle, between 45 and 50, and coming down to 40 or 45 when she was at speed. Once she was good and warmed up the guage settled down to showing her at 35-40 at idle, but it took almost to the end of the little drive to do this.

Just thick oil in the cold making the gauge give higher readings? I was just a bit confused why it went up at idle when the motor was colder. Never noticed that happen before. But, on the plus side, so long as the weather stays cool, she's super happy running the roads - just gotta' get those valves set! I swear you need three hands to do them in that car! Thanks!

No way that's a factory color combo. It looks like it was inspired by a vintage ice cream truck.

I am something of a purist for the most part, I like the cars to look and act factory correct, but when it came to this particular aspect, something that was expensive to replace and something that 99% of people will never see unless you bring it to a major CCCA car show, I went with the easier and cheaper route.

My crazy car has bigger issues I need to spend the money on that will make a much bigger impact. It's tough playing Packard when your wallet thinks you've got a Model A!

I just did away with mine after fighting with it for months. Put a conventional coil mounted on the outside of the housing with a single bolt late-model Mustang coil bracket and used a universal switch in there. Car runs and drives again finally, and since I'm not going to Pebble Beach anytime soon, nobody's going to really note the difference. And, it was about a $30 solution and works just fine, and if it does give more trouble years from now, it'll be a cheap and easy fix.

Good luck!

My '29 633 has been giving me electrical fits since late December. It would randomly run very rough, spit sputter, flat out die at an idle sometimes, until finally on January 1st, she popped the fuse on the firewall and I went into replacing and tracing all sorts of things.

I replaced the ignition switch with a universal switch, I'd already changed the coil and condenser, checked all the grounds, current just wasn't flowing anywhere from the kill switch except to the starter motor which is on it's own line, of course. Even the headlights stopped working, and this was a professionally restored and rewired car with the correct wiring harness in it.

Found the culprit today. The amp gauge itself had shorted out and wasn't letting any current through it. I bypassed the gauge, everything works perfect, she fired right up, went for a 6.7 mile test drive and all seems well.

Of course, I don't have an amp gauge now, so, does anyone out there know who has a '29 amp gauge or rebuilds them?

And if your car starts running rough and crazy and nothing else seems to work, bypass the amp gauge. On the '29, the ignition switch and the coil are fed through the gauge, so as it was breaking down, it wasn't sending juice to the coil. Crazy little world!

Good grief Tom, that seems like a small fortune! I had a pair of bumpers done on a muscle car locally a couple of years back and that was less than $800 total for the pair.

Chroming must be much more expensive up north than it is down here in the swamps!

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I think we have a winner! Never thought of the taillight bezel! That's a darned good match!

Looks like a very early instrument panel bezel. Can't say I've seen this style in a Packard before, but, it could be from a much earlier model than I've had the pleasure of messing about with.

I too am lucky, down here in Louisiana we have a number of stations that sell non-ethanol 87 octane fuel, primarily because we're such an agricultural state a lot of farm machinery absolutely has to have it.

Problem I ran into was with the switch from the summer to winter blend. My '29 ran fine on the summer gas, began vapor locking on the winter blend gas from the same station. As some suggested, I added some kerosene to the tank to dumb down the octane rating and that did seem to greatly help the problem.

By all means, try to stay away from ethanol, it destroyed my business partner's vintage Harley, he ended up having to replace everything with the fuel system, including the tanks. The previous owner of my car had obviously used it as well, as there's a good deal of rust in my tank. But since our driving season down here is winter because of the heat, I'm going to hold off on dropping the tank and cleaning it out until summer. For now I just try and keep an eye on the aftermarket fuel filter hidden back by the tank.

Good luck!