skateboardgumby wrote:
I'm looking forward to reading the article. I know this may sound pedestrian, but I've learned a lot of interesting historical tidbits watching American Pickers and (gasp) Pawn Stars.

skateboardgumby wrote:
While watching the show American Pickers, I learned that Packard was the first car company to have a dealership that used a neon sign. Although, it didn't say which specific dealership.

Steve203 wrote:
Leeedy, add to your list nearly every US Navy combat ship smaller than a carrier uses gas turbins.

But with all the money and talent put into automotive gas turbines, none of the companies that made that investment was able to make a business case to put them into production.

wrt Packard experimenting with fuel injection, they were not alone. AMC also experimented with the Bendix "Electrojector" system in the late 50s. Chrysler actually got a few Electrojector equipped cars sold, but soon retrofitted those cars with conventional carburetors because the EFI was so underdeveloped and unreliable at that time.

My focus on the "what if" threads is what could Packard have done, with the resources at hand, on it's own, without a handout from the government or other well heeled entity, to get itself past 1956.

We know how the Studebaker thing turned out

We have established that a purchase of Willow Run, as you suggest, would have broken them faster.

Best things I can come up with are the merger with Hudson as Barit offered, and diversification into truck engines, either on their own or by aquisition, but I don't know who in the industry at that time would have been small enough for Packard to aquire (Hercules in Canton, Ohio?)

MrPushbutton wrote:
I interviewed some of the original engineers from Chrysler's Turbine car program when I worked at the Walter P. Chrysler Museum. They really thought they had a car ready to go to market in 1962 when they ordered the 50 bodies from Ghia and built the bronze test cars. The drivers that tested the cars were chosen because they were good repeat Chrysler customers, bought a new car every couple of years. Most were professionals or executive types. They were supplied with the car for a two-week period and Chrysler paid for the fuel and insurance for that period. In return Chrysler asked that the test subjects (drivers) fill out a lengthily survey, as completely and as honestly as they could.
Three common responses were in every survey:

1) the car was slow to leave the line from a dead stop, at a time when a lot of cars were getting really good at leaving the line.

2) the braking sensation was weird, as there was very little engine braking when you let off the accelerator. The brakes were sized for this, they were ample, but they were drum brakes and the sensation was just foreign to drivers.

3) All surveyed said "my Gosh is that thing thirsty"! and that it was fine as long as Chrysler was paying the bill, but they didn't see themselves wanting to stop at the pump so often.

One of the biggest benefits that Chrysler saw was that there are just a few moving parts in the Turbine engine, and only about 6 bearing fits that matter, far easier than the typical piston engine.
That program was subsidized by the Gub-ment, it stayed alive until 1981, when the subsidy ended. That was the end of the program. Later cars, especially near the end in '81 had the benefit of modern microprocessor electronics, and fuel economy improved as a result.

Steve203 wrote:
I am talking about were not aircraft, but rather automotive gas turbines.

Problem is gas turbines have never caught on for surface transportation. I remember the Chrysler and Rover turbine cars. In the early 70s, Ford was experimenting with a turbine in a long haul truck. Union Pacific had a few turbine powered freight engines. Then there were the Turboliners that Amtrak had in the early 70s. They all went away when fuel prices rose.

Where gas turbines caught on in a big way, and where Packard had a good start was for aircraft.

Packard's XJ49 was one of the most powerful jets of it's day, with takeoff thrust of 12,000lbs. That makes it the equal of the Pratt J57, which first ran 4 years later, and being a turbofan, the XJ49 probably had fuel consumption 20-25% lower than the J57.

Being developed sooner, and being more fuel efficient, which translates into more range and/or more payload, it could have been used instead of the J57, or it's civilian variant JT3C, on several subsonic platforms, namely the early models of B52, KC135, 707, DC8 and several other less well known military and civilian aircraft. Pratt built over 20,000 J57/JT3Cs. That business could have been Packard's, if they had had the resources to develop and produce the XJ49.

MrPushbutton wrote:
Leedy-- that is the $64,000 question, and as I write this Detroit is being systematically dismantled by low-rent, don't want a real job losers who are thriving in an underground economy that rivals narcotics. These people are making money that is not taxed, it is not helping pay police, fire or services for city residents, and it's a lot of money.
Any building that sits idle is fair game, and the police are so vastly outnumbered and outgunned that they can't begin to respond to scrapping calls. They can't keep up with murder calls, so the priority of scrapping is low on the scale.
Almost every one of the 100 or so school buildings closed has been scrapped, including the lovely 1924 English Tudor elementary school I attended.
The city is full of scrap dealers, some are somewhat honest, most are not. The city recently enacted a scrapping ordnance, things like catalytic converters are not permissible for fast cash transactions and business transactions must have a paper trail--but there are ways around this.
I honestly think the only way around this is to starve out the bad dealers by taking the supply of scrap away--I'd station the national guard at every abandoned building for a year. Apply the rule your mother gave you "if it's not yours, don't touch"
But that's not going to happen.
We have one of the most impressive stocks of historic buildings in the country, if they can survive this wild, wild west thing until order prevails, if ever.

Steve203 wrote:
even this number is tiny compared to what the Ford Rouge plant was gushing out

I figure the Rouge is a special case as it is so integrated. The steel mill probably ran 24/7, so car output had to be large enough to use all that steel.

<i>I suspect there are still offline assemblies of specialty vehicles going on somewhere in the country still today.</i>

Seeing trucks with only the front clip on the chassis is normal as so many are fitted with custom bodies. And there are always custom shops whacking up cars. iirc that is how the Chrysler converts got started in the 80s: coupes were shipped to Cars and Concepts where the tops were whacked off and some reenforcement welded into the floorpan.

Kaiser at W-R was an early adopter of the present layout, with most of the stampings shipped in nested on skids, to be built up and painted at the head of the assembly line. Almost odd to me that Kaiser went to the expense to move Graham Paige presses to W-R as Graham's body plant was on Michigan in Wayne, just east of where Ford built Wayne Assembly in 53, so it was already close to W-R. Instead, the Wayne plant was sold to Gar Wood, which made garbage trucks there into the 70s.

Studebaker had a different setup. All the buildings were in a central campus, with a web of rail road tracks connecting them. The "new" body plant, built in the 20s, was at the north end of the complex. Final assembly was at the south end of the complex, so bodies were shuttled to assembly in rail cars.