Apparently all ended well, tho' sorry none of us could help.
I had the grille out of my '40 120 when i rebuilt it in 1974-76, so, as mentioned, the above from memory. And i'da remembered more if it was such a battle as you had.
Wondering if at the factory Packard might've installed some light canvas/cloth strip around the grille where it fit against the sheet metal, and over the many years on your car Down Under it might've harbored moisture and rusted, "glued" your grille in place?

But, all's well that ends well.

Been decades since i had my '40 120, but make sure the bolts at the bottom are undone, too, as well all of them along the sides. It should slide out. If i recall, the lower splash pan bolts to the bottom of the grille.

Can someone help this fellow?

L78's are huge. If memory serves, those are what tuna boats like early '70s 5,000-lb. Lincolns and Cadillacs took. 235s are huge, used on 5,500-lb. SUVs, won't look right on your svelte Clipper. They're way too wide and would likely interfere with full lock to lock turns, and rub the rear fenders on, for example, a freeway on or offramp at speed.

235s won't look right, that's for sure. Perhaps some junior 1942-47 Clipper drivers can advise. Your wheels are 5-inch by 15, 1942-47 senior Clippers on the 127-inch wheelbase use 5.50-inch by 15.

However, 1941-47 Cadillacs on the standard wheelbase use only a 4.50 x 15 wheel, and these are heavier cars than corresponding senior Clippers, let alone your junior. This spec underscores how well engineered Packards are. Since such 1941-47 Cadillacs originally rolled on 7.00 x 15 tires, i'm wondering if you could use Bridgestone or Yokohama 7.00 x 15 bias-sized LT radials like some of us senior Clipper drivers use. Until 2003 or so, Michelin also offered 7.00 x 15 and 7.50 x 16 radials, the latter ideal for many larger Packards, Cadillacs and other CCCA Classics of the '30s, as many owners could tell you.

If you don't care about authenticity or understatement, you can buy these with a whitewall vulcanized at a stiff price from Diamond Back.

Nearly added the phrase "regardless of some ads" to my above post. See now i should've. We've all seen people paint otherwise nice cars garish colors like the lipstick red seen in the above magazine ad, forgetting such hues had no bearing on reality and were simply meant to arrest the page-turning public's attention.
Packard was in business to sell cars. You do this by offering people what they want, or think they need. Too often we see every conceivable factory and dealer option tacked onto unremarkable cars. You can't add elegance, understatement. Not all women can pull off the little black dress. Some need distractions, all the help they can get. So it is with automobiles.

Equating blackwalls with "funeral cars" shows a limited range of field, but to each his own.

Your Packard Clipper is a fine automobile by any yardstick. Less is more. No tubes, no whitewalls, no funky external metal sunvisor, no fog/driving lights, no gimracks. Try it. You can always ad that effluvia later if you feel deprived. But this leads to my May 9th post on the General Forum "This ad would've made all the difference," contrasting Packard's inept marketing of their fine junior models from 1938-on compared with the skill Rolls-Royce/Bentley marketed their increasingly rationalized fare.

Yeah, can't count the times we've seen a big old touring or expensive car fly off a cliff, but the car rolling over and bouncing off the rocks on the way down is a '50 Chevy.

But somehow, doubt they'd crack up a '38 or '39 Darrin for the opening scene of a 1942 movie. And i'd love to see a video and/or close-up stills of that funeral scene mentioned above.

One of our friends on the CCCA's Forum found this for me.
Meanwhile, would love to see the funeral scene for the title character, as mentioned in the above post, that looks like a used car lot of late-model Packard Twelves, either a video or stills.

As with the 1976 Prestone antifreeze Jack Palance with his 1946-47 senior Clipper sedan, i had to go slumming on the CCCA's site to find it. C'mon, Packard men (& ladies?), snap to it:

Trailer #1 Scene from Keeper of the Flame Movie (1942) | MOVIECLIPS

If this doesn't paste, just visit the General Forum of www.classiccarclub.org and click on the thread "Keeper of the Flame" to see trailer for the 1942 movie that includes the opening Darrin scene.

All the above give good advice. Avoid tubes. They increase tire temperature, add to unsprung weight, and are wholly unnecessary so long as you sand- or beadblast the wheels, make sure the rivets are tight, then paint or powdercoat the smooth wheels. Powercoating's nice merely as it's tough and holds up especially well.

Both Bridgestone and Yokohama still make LT radials in the bias ply sizes of 7.00/15 and 7.50/16, the former being what i use on my '47 Super. The only hitch is that your '47 junior takes slightly smaller tires than the senior Clipper, so you may have to settle with one of the "close enough" metric-sized radials.

BTW, all Diamond Back does is buy Yokohamas in the case of the two bias-sized radials mentioned above, or metric-sized radials for owners of other old cars that don't use 7.00/15 or 7.50/16, and vulcanize a whitewall on the side, for considerable cost.

Since your car's a '47, and NO 1946-47 cars regardless of make, model, price range, were delivered with whitewalls, for the sake of historical authenticity, leave the whitewalls to the suburban concours d'nonelegance crowd. A very, very few '47s were delivered during the last month or so of the model year with whitewalls, but 1941-47 Packard Clippers are one of those rare cars that look internationally, timelessly bespoke off the factory line, so why bugger them with whitewalls? You'll "see" the car better without them. Less is more.

If you're forced to buy one of the metric-size radials, because of their wider profile, talk with other 1942-47 junior Clipper drivers to make sure you get a size that doesn't interfere with lock-to-lock turning, or chafes against the inner rear fender, etc.

And, when you mount the tires, don't use or let the tire shop use soapy water to help them slip over the rims. Use talc. Why introduce more moisture into that environment than already exists in the air?

Thank you, Oz, Wizard Emeritus.

Meanwhile, the divider window is certainly a curio, but the big picture is why oh why couldn't Packard in the US have so smoothly, adroitly, upmarketed the juniors as the above English ad, instead of the clumsy downhome hokum most of the junior ads were, increasingly so 1938-on?

The English learned long ago that Main Street do not want to view themselves as Mainstreet.

Of course, everything today is "upscale." When have you ever seen anything advertised as downscale? Yet Packard managed to do just that in their 1938-on domestic junior ads.

The below was posted amongst the Recent Photos sidebar of this very site. We've read so many times over the years how the junior cars bled the Packard name white, despite BMW and Mercedes today having no trouble selling Taurus/Camry-competing 3-Series and C-Class cars.

And, if we've learnt anything from Rolls-Royce, which various esteemed British motoring journalists have themselves dismissed as "....a great confidence trick" and "a triumph of craftsmanship over engineering," upscale advertising is everything.

Perception is everything.

After all, from 1935-on, when most of R-R's business was aero engines, automobiles more of a boutique sideline, all Rolls-Royce/Bentleys, other than the handful of troublesome Phantom III V-12s, trace their engine to the original junior "Small Horsepower" 20 of 1922, itself based on the current Buick Six, only in the words of one English motoring writer, "....not so good."

And, of course, after the war, R-R and their Bentley clones were largely assembled cars, with bodies by Pressed Steel, who whacked out bodies for half the UK motor industry, even lowly Austin, just as Briggs supplied Packard, Chrysler, Ford.
R-R/Bentley increasingly used GM components; HydraMatic, Delco ignition parts, etc.

With that in mind, look at this smart ad for the lowly 1938 Packard Six. My meager computer abilities prevent my attaching the ad you see to the right of this forum here. Perhaps one of you tech-savvy souls might manage that.

If only domestic ads for this car had been as crisp, upscale, Packard might've danced along as Packard, not the also-ran they became from 1948-on:

1938 PACKARD-ENGLAND ADVERT-B&W
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Advertisement courtesy of Old School Paul and FLICKR.

This is hilarious, thanks. I scrolled down to their top 10 list, after reading their dismay over how the 1941-47 Clipper morphed into the "bathroom" Packard in the main text.
When i read that entry's concluding sentence, beneath the pictured recreation of the one-off Clipper ragtop Darrin built for Errol Flynn, lamenting the bloated 1948-50 models, "Who would want such a car?" i was laughing aloud. Immediately wished the late actor Raul Julia was still around to read the history, narrate, do the voice over.

I'm with Dr. Dyneto on corn-produced ethanol. Monumental waste of land, resources, water, not including the Virginia-sized "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico devoid of any life where the Mississippi dumps heartland petrochem herbicides, fungicides, fertilizer, pesticides.

Gasoline has higher BTUs than any fuel, more bang for the drop. But ethanol's with us, so it's good to know what materials are compatible.

Off the subject, perhaps, but Henry Ford originally intended his Model T and Fordson tractor, comprising fully
half the nation's, and world's, automobiles and tractors, to run on agwaste ethanol, as Brazil wisely uses today. But at the time, John D. Rockefeller controlled 90% of all US bulk oil transport, so with gasoline prices as low as a dime a gallon, Ford followed suit, despite believing it was "....folly to burn petroleum. It makes a great lubricant."

Had Henry pervailed, GM, Reo, Nash, Hudson, Packard, the Dodge Brothers and the entire industry likely would've followed.

I've heard veteran engineers say a given i.c. engine runs "sweeter" on alcohol than gasoline. And the entire Indy 500 field runs on methanol, which is vile stuff.

We should welcome any and all alternative fuel cars so there's some gas left for those of us who really need it.

I couldn't care less what powers what we drive to the grocery store. The overarching threat to us all, and our cars, is overpopulation, but that's a juggernaut decidedly off topic. Had we stablilized national population at around 140-150 million, where it was during the 1940s, as many scientists urged and urge, we could all relax, and the steam buffs among us still enjoy a restored "Hudson."

Like the late publisher of Hemmings Motor News, Terry Ehrich, I'm a card-carrying environmentalist. What's a better example of reduce/reuse/recycle than rejuvenating and driving judiciously a Packard? Go easy on the EPA. Like any bureaucracy, they've blundered. But on balance, as someone who recalls LA smog in the mid '50s, greater NYC and Boston in the '60s, and the cesspool the beautiful Hudson River became, the EPA helps us all breathe a whole lot easier.

Some of us are also in favor of turning on the tap and having clean water, since if there's anything dumber or more wasteful of energy, resources than bottled water, we've yet to hear of it.

But, yeah, corn ethanol is for the birds. Corn is for popping while we watch the Packards in 1942's Tracy/Hepburn Keeper of the Flame.