Packard Forum Index » V-8 (1955-56)

I have an NOS balancer that at first appearance has no holes drilled in it. However when you look at the back flange there are seven shallow balancing holes drilled there. I would assume they balanced that part at the factory so that it could be field-installed with no further balancing required. I ran a flap sander on the inside of my original balancer when I had it revulcanized for ease of installation. They did, for a small fee, rebalance the part after the revulcanization.
I had to make a homemade jig to pull the balancer off. The one shown in the shop manual is a real heavy-duty affair.

Greetings, Eric, et al,

The front balance dampers are not really interchangeable. Packard assembled their engines, then ran them on a test stand and final-balanced them by drilling holes in the front damper and flywheel or welding weights on the flex plate.

Having said this, I have interchanged them many times when everything else was rebuilt, thus changing the fine tuning Packard did originally.

This probably needs its own thread, but 4 of 5 of the engines I pulled down had the balance damper cracked down the keyway. I have developed a kit to fix the crack and change the front seal to neoprene.

thnx, jv.

From above: "The front balance dampers are not really interchangeable. Packard assembled their engines, then ran them on a test stand and final-balanced them by drilling holes in the front damper and flywheel or welding weights on the flex plate."

AND with the torque converter installed too??? PS and AC pulleys on damper during balance????

The photos I have seen did not have any accessories or torque converter installed.

"The engine is motored sufficiently to indicate the amount of unbalance, at which point rotation stops and the prescribed amount of unbalance compensated for by automatically drilling into the crankshaft pulley and welding a slug onto the flywheel. As a result, the stack-up of tolerances that otherwise might accumulate during the assembly of the engine is reduced to not more than 1/4-inch-ounces, thereby insuring precision balancing of every engine."

thnx, jack vines