Packard Forum Index » Pre-War (1899-1942)

This thread How Packard Builds a Body c1930 on the AACA Website contains 3 films about Packard wood body building. Enjoy.

O_D there's a TPN in the last scene of the 3rd film. If you can identify it, wouldn't it be amazing if it was one of the numbers in your database!

Thanks for the link ... it is reallhy interesting to see how manufacturers used so much wood in the body production. The last car with an ash frame was a Morgan. I am surprised that Packard and other car manufacturers were so locked into wood when there was so much steel being produced and available. It seems like a hold-over to the wagon and buggy production. What year did Packard finally go over to all-metal frames and bodies?

While being relatively easy to work and shape, wood is great for furniture and other items subjected to low stress; but it seems to me there are obvious down sides to wood as a core structure component of an automobile. After an accident, wood is not malleable like steel and cannot be bent back into shape. The wood elements damaged must be replaced and rebuilt. It seems more like boat building. In a crash a wooden frame would crack and splinter, as opposed to crumpling or bending and staying intact.

Years ago I read an article about an old man whose Pierce-Arrow was involved in a crash. Realizing that there was no body repair shops around who knew how to fix a cracked wooden frame, the gentleman enlisted the assistence of a teenage boy to disassemble the broken pieces and rebuild the frame from scratch. I cannot begin to image the labor involved in such an effort.

The silent Packard film, Part 3, really drives home the complexity in making a fine car with a wood-framed body. Even with the metal jigs to keep bodies somewhat consistent, I'm sure a slap with a mallet or trim with a wood file is inherent in the history of these cars. As for the behavior in a collision, you need look no further that that interesting drive down (Wilsher?) the 1935 Los Angeles street in another film that was shared on PI earlier this week. For a few seconds you see a tow truck hauling a virtually collapsed wreck of a sedan. The next likely fate for that car might be a bonfire and I wonder how well the occupants fared?

My grandmother's household once had an early 1920's Nash touring car that was hit from the side. Since it was then a relatively new car, no authorized repairs could apparently be made in St. Louis and the car was shipped off to Kenosha for rebuilding. It was gone three months and was apparently still unsatisfactory when it was returned. That began a steady series of Packard purchases by the family until they switched to Buicks after WW II. Luckily, none of those Packards got hit or the brand switching might have affected them, too.

In St. Louis, when 1954 Corvette production shifted from Flint, operations were set up in the circa-1919 "Mill Building" (plant 19). That building had been largely under-utilized after Chevrolets moved to "all steel Turret Top" construction in 1933-34. Perhaps some might think that making cars out of fiberglass instead of wood was a natural progression. With many additions and modifications, that Mill Building cranked out Corvettes until 1981.

I have a picture of a 733 Dual Cowl that was hit by a tractor trailer on the NJ Turnpike. Utterly destroyed.