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Old thread I know but I am doing the rear brakes on my 49 and had to buy the special whacka mole puller to get the hub off. I was thinking the same thing, just drill out the rivets and boom, you can remove the drum without the hub but then I read your comment on having issues on keeping the holes aligned. I think I will do this to mine but I will grind the heads flat on the face of the drum then separate the two pieces. If Im right that will leave the rivets in the hub and I can tack weld them in place and after a little clearancing with the disk sander I bet they would still work as pegs to align the drums. The idea of having to use a puller just to get to the brake shoes, thats not the best design.

While I'm still messing with my sleepy Packard I happened to be under it and was messing with the drive shaft and found there is about a 1/4 inch to 3/8 of an inch of play when turning the drive shaft before you feel it hit the ring gear. Were they really that sloppy? This car has around 47k miles and I can see that the rear end was leaking due to the amount of gunk on the bottom of it. I'm hoping that the gears aren't trashed but if they are where would be a good place to get another ring and pinion?

And I did try to free them up with oil and letting them sit for a little while then turning the engine. Its not my first rodeo, I went with what I could see in the numbers and the smoke from the filler tube. Now removing the ridge is not a big issue, I can do that when i pull the head back off.

A second reason I went with rings was I was seeing blow by while cranking coming from the oil filler tube so it was getting compression into the crankcase as well. The old rings didnt seem to have that much spring to them.

The main reason I went with me rings was low compression numbers during testing and seeing blow by coming out of the oil fill tube. This isn't my first engine as I've built several over the years, just not a straight 8 on an old 6 volt system. I'm not sure what the RPM should be for a good strong starter but even before I replaced the rings it wasn't really flinging the engine over that fast. I did go through and thoroughly clean the ring grooves of carbon build up as well. Also when I had pulled the old rings of they just didn't feel like they had that much spring to them.

The gaping seemed fine but no I did not gauge it. The box listed as standard and they were individually packaged in a 3 ring package, oil ring and the two compression rings plus springs. Given they were still in original packaging, new, and marked as standard I figured it was a pretty safe bet they haven't been swapped, even verified the sizing with a standard set so I know it's not the rings running into each other. The car has 46k miles on it and has been sitting pretty much untouched since 71. Right now the starter can manage maybe a engine revolution per second. Where is a place to get a new head gasket and are they really running 150 dollars plus?

I was under the assumption that these metal head gaskets can be reused? There was a very small ring ridge, not enough that I was ever worried about when rebuilding other engines. Yes I use the same connecting rod inserts because they looked almost new, did install them with assembly lube to protect them. The cylinders were honed before the pistons went back in to clean the walls. The new rings I got were front grants and look to be nos from the 50s or 60s and have springs behind the oil ring and the second compression ring which seems to be why the fit is so stiff.

Ok so I had really low compression so I bought a standard set of rings. Swapped them out and now the engine is a lot tighter than before but now the engine turns over so slow I can't really get any compression readings, my oil pressure gauge doesn't really want to show any pressure now either. Has anyone ran into this before? I'm almost tempted to hit the starter with 12 volts to get it to spin the engine fast enough to overcome the tightness and get some oil pressure build up again. When I did the rings I took a wire wheel and cleaned the head gasket and the head and the block surface, maybe I need to get the head surfaced because the gasket looked a little dark between some cylinders. Any other ideas I could look at?

Does anyone know where to get another starter? Are there any newer starters that would work with the original 6 volt system?

I looked them up and they had almost nothing for my 49, on to ebay I guess.