Very sory to hear Kev, my thoughts are with you and your family.

She also made it into the news here in germany!

spiegel.de

There should be an oval metal tag on the side of the distributor. It should say autolite or delco.
Assuming you can get your head down there and read it....
I think there are also pics in the shop manual you can look at.
The electronics in the pertronix like pretty much all computer stuff needs 5 volts for switching. If a 12v car drops a few during starting no big deal, but when a 6v car drops it can lead to harder starting (from what I read online) Some people have had trouble, others good results with 6v and pertronix. Guess if your charging/electric system is good it should be ok.

I downloaded the catalog, and I see they have:
1946-54 autolite is part #1585A (add N6 to part number for 6v neg ground)
For Delco distributor Part Num 1183 (add P6 to part number for 6v pos ground)
I have an 1183 in my 53 327 with delco and 12Volt conversion. Are you 6V pos or neg ground, and do you have the delco or autolite distributor? (Delco would be my guess for a 288)
Hope this helps,
Mike

Wow, time flies. Yesterday was a momentus day in my packard's story. I moved the project to a garage much closer to me so I can work on the car more often, and I finally picked up the rebuilt engine from the machine shop. Thanks Gregor for helping me with towing and workshop space!
The engine builder took more than a week for tear down and rebuild, so this is one expensive engine! (OK, the shop was also working on an Alvis race car from the 1920's which made my engine rebuild look cheap) Anyway, new engine and OD trans will be going in after some grey paint in about a week or so. That should be it for running gear for a while, and then on to the rockers and wheel wells.
Am excited to get back onto this project, but think it will still be next summer before she is on the road.

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When a battery is dead, and you hook up the jumper cables from the running vehicle, and try to start right away, you are asking the running vehicle (and the jumper cables) to charge the battery, and start the car at the same time. This is a big load on the charging system of the running car, and probably why the car would not start. After charging for a few minutes the 'dead' car started since not all the juice was being taken up by the dead battery.
You can also remove the dead batt from the circuit while starting, and then reconnect once the car is running.

The magazine skinned knuckles had an article on this recently that is probably clearer than what I tried to explain here.

If you search the archives for 'Dummy timing chain question' you should find the thread where somebody went through this before. (And as usual the thread went on to all sorts of places)
Can't you use the whole 51-54 chain and cover?

As I Remember from some old posts here, the older chain is wider and also has a "deeper" housing around it. I think you should be able to use your 51-54 chain. Hope that helps a bit.

Thanks for the tips. That will be a little bit easier to bolt the cross brace onto the tranny mount before dropping the whole thing in as a unit. Motor is delayed another week now since the shop building my engine has vacation for their local 'volksfest'
Taking the time to sandblast and POR15 a few parts in the meanwhile...Also trying to locate (here in Munich) some rubber to replace the mounts on the radiator frame....All the autoparts stores here can really only deal with a vehilce number and their computer system. Thinking outside the box is not so common here :-/ Will try by an industrial rubber supply next.

Here is a question, the nuts/bolts that hold the radiator frame to the frame, they are like castle nuts but there is no cotter pin. I mean: the top of the nut has thin cuts in it similar to a castle nut. What is the purpose of this? Were they some sort of lock nut, like what today has a nylon insert?

Cheers, Tobs

Found this on 'The HAMB' which is all hot rod stuff. Not many packards show up on this website (once in a while), but here are some sketches made by a young Dick Teague. Their forum does have a lot of fabrication information.

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/?p=16807

Have a good one! Tobs