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Dear All,

Has anyone ever seen a water jacket (water chamber cover) like the one pictured on the left in the attached SL page below?

I am getting a new repro water jacket for the 34 1104. In doing some research, Tom Rassmussen came across this page from a 34 Packard Factory service letter.

Thanks,

Tom

EDIT: The service letter is 8-15. It is present here. Note the scan is too light to see the details of the 'new' water jacket.

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I'm aware of that service letter and have seen plenty of 34 water jacket plates but never seen one of the revised form (with the nozzles or spouts as they call them).

The oil cooler mounting on the water jacket is a 1934-only feature; you often see that folks have eliminated the oil cooler and just put a plate over the opening. Not a good idea because if you study the water flow route you'll see that the water has to actually enter the cooler in order to exit into the rest of the jacket plate, at least this is true for the earlier style jacket plate. Blocking off the opening significantly inhibits the water flow thru the jacket.

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The new jacket has the plate, so the oil cooler will continue to be used.

It is interesting that they went to the trouble of designing the new jacket and apparently rarely, if ever, using it.

Cheers,

Tom

That is interesting, isn't it Tom. I forget the date of the Service Letter and how late in the model year run it was. Also somewhat interesting that the first use was in the factory-reconditioned blocks and that came before the running change in production. And to make it more interesting, you wonder what prompted them to make the change as all the 34s I know of run the earlier style plate and I don't know of anyone who has problems attributable to the plate. Now problems with the oil cooler core is another story - there is a Service Letter about an improved design core but I don't know if I've ever seen one of those or not, nor how it differed from the first style. I went thru one leak of the original core (which was hell to clean up from, what with all that oil in the cooling system) and replaced my core with a length of finned flexible high pressure tubing. Pictures enclosed if I can find them.

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