The '57 300C or '58 NY'er convertibles that we had back in the '80s (jpeg pic won't load?).

I like diesels and we had a Peugeot 504 Diesel wagon back in the '80s as well. Wish we had common-rail 4 cyl turbo-diesels available here in cars and trucks, Jeep Cherokee is supposed to get one.

As to Ford p/u torque figures, apples to apples: the PowerStroke diesel V8 has 1152 nM. I'm a Mopar guy: Dodge gas 6.2l has 580 nM torque, and the Cummins diesel (world's largest diesel maker of engines over 200hp) has about 1084 nM. The "small" Ram 1500 (ie: Dodge) now has a new EcoDiesel V6 by VM Motori with 570 nM torque. GM ruined the US auto diesel market with their junky converted Olds V8 gas-to-diesel engine in the late 70s, making diesel acceptance here very difficult, except in trucks.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all, may there be Peace on Earth and Good Will to ALL people!

On that note, please excuse the slight departure from Packard orthodoxy, but I love this! (note the signature!)

Attach file:

---

  (166.24 KB)

My rule of thumb is to just replace all caps as a matter of course.. the old saying in vintage radios is that the caps have already failed, or they're about to... they're cheap enough, the main deterrent is labor/time.

We had a '72 BMW 2800 (awesome but finicky), and later on a '74 BMW 2002 w/ 4 spd manual, we loved that car! But it was notoriously terrible in snow, so we went to a SAAB 96 and never looked back... nothing stopped that car! One time we got on I-70w after a concert at Kennedy Center in DC in the middle of a wicked hard blizzard, maybe 6-8" already on the highway, blowing snow, so we went 20 mi at maybe 30 mi/hr. and finally got off at our exit, and the MD State Police were blocking it... the road had been closed for hours... he couldn't beleive that we had gotten through!
We still have a '77 SAAB 99 2 dr "ducktail", my "summer" car in Vermont!

OK, let's get back to ZIL/ZIS/Chaika! Anyone know if the factories that made those cars are still producing vehicles? I loved Gorbachev's huge square looking ZIS (?) back in the 80s... it reminded me of a Dodge Polara in the front. Is there a successor to that car?

No offense meant, but to set the record straight, beer WAS available at BMW assemebly plant when we toured it in 1976, still in the '80s according to this, and as recently as 1992 or later in Germany, according to the Spartanburg SC newspaper when BMW opened their plant there, don't know about now.

digest.net/bmw/archive/v7/msg10707.html

Howard Sams Co put out their SAMS Photofacts for these old car radios, you can Google them and get them from their website... all Radio/TV shops got SAMS as part of a subscription service, they have voltage measurements, schematics, and list of all parts. I use them to restore vintage tube audio equipment, and prefer to use Sprague Orange Drop or Illinois capacitors in the vintage equipment. The voltage rating needs to be equal or higher, the capacitance should be reasonably close to original, but can go a bit higher if equal is not available. Do one at a time and make sure there are no cold solder joints. A good de-soldering tool is handy also.

The flaw in the Triplex locomotives was that as the tender emptied they lost considerable traction as the weight over the 3rd set of drivers was reduced, which sometimes did occur on some lines because of distances between re-fueling stations, one reason they were an evolutionary dead-end and only 3 were built, around WWI. The Big Boys which came later didn't have that problem and were used from 1941 all the way to 1959...when I was in 4th/5th grade!

Thanks Wesley.

Sorry to usurp the thread... here's one last one, more of interest to us old car fans: some very early historical film footage is here, a "living museum" if you will, of the most famous US car company and man:

youtube.com/watch?v=FaDprRfAYzg

What great models, thanks Gerd!

I'm also a big train nut, my wife's Mom and Uncle both worked for the B & O, the first railroad in the US, RIP.

"starting torque of steam locos frequently outbids modern diesel-electric" ... yes, especially this one! and it weighs 1.2 Million pounds!!!

youtube.com/watch?v=x8f9VFlNyDQ