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Don't have much to add except, good luck, glad to see another Clipper on the road!


Also, funnily enough, I have a Clipper custom someone put a 320 in place of the 352, you've got a 352 in place of your 320.

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And believe it or not there are probably some dealer swapped cars running around with the wrong 352 engine.

After Packard closed Studebaker found a lot of 352 engines in a warehouse. In order to get rid of them they had promotions to dealers that Stude would sell the engines dirt cheap and advised their dealers to stock up and offer Packard customers who might have a tired engine good deals to have a new engine for relatively small dollars. Replacing the 320 was almost a no brainer because who didn't want a bigger engine for cheap in that era. The sad thing is they also told dealers to offer to replace the 56 374 with the 352 and mention there would be an almost negligible hit on performance that would hardly be noticed and was probably worth it for the satisfaction of having a new engine. Several mentions of the found engines and the offers are in the Stude published tech bulletins from the late 50s.

Hi Anthony. I saw your thread a while back and knew it would be only a matter of time before you stumbled upon mine. Obviously we have similar cars, in similar conditions. Mine also has a door stuck but fortunately no mold in there (probably because much of the upholstery was made with man-made materials). Though there was a moldy back seat that I already ripped out. Mine is not "on the road" quite yet but it's just as well as I'm learning a lot on the way there.

I've been talking with another member on here and I think I'll be able to get a running engine to swap into it for low $$. Hopefully get things going a bit... and then hopefully the transmission works! It has fluid so one would hope... guess we will just find out.


After that I'm planning on replacing the brake system with one of those kits from Kanter. Hopefully can reuse the original brake lines. Also will need to add a fuel filter (do these cars have them?) as I'm sure the tank is rusty. Pretty sure there's still some gas in it actually, as I got quite a strong varnish smell when opening the gas cap. Obviously will need to siphon it out in the near future.



Very interesting, Howard. I haven't been able to find the engine number on my engine as it's too dirty/rusty, but if/when I pull the engine out I might be able to clean it up enough to tell if it has one or what it is.

After roughly a year of ownership, I just realized that my entire car had been repainted in the past.


In retrospect it was pretty obvious.

It's for the best of course, as it still has rust holes thru BOTH layers of paint.

Interestingly, there's also some rust holes in the fenders with obvious bondo work, and also rust holes with no bondo. So I guess it was rusty, was patched and painted, then got rusty again?

I mean, I knew it was a hooptie when I got it


Still planning on taking the passenger side head off the engine and honing down this one cylinder wall that I think it sticking up the engine. Need to figure out a time one of my cousins can help me out with it, I think.

Let's fire up the welder!!

Took out the heater core and generator yesterday. Still couldn't get that insert off the bolt so I ended up just hammering it straight thru the firewall. Generator came out easy enough. Looks to be the only thing left is unbolting the transmission dipstick tube and some vacuum lines, and disconnecting from the exhaust pipe. It actually doesn't look terrible down there so hopefully I can stick an impact on it and take it off. Then I'll need to ask one of my cousins to help me get the head off itself.

Soak those exhaust fasteners in PB Blaster overnight.

As a side note, I added a new wire under the front seat to adjust the front-to-back position. Not sure why the old one would have been removed. I see in the service manual that you do that to remove the front seat, but I don't know why that would have been done. Perhaps to work under the dash easier sometime in the past?

My car doesn't seem like it was messed with a lot but every once in a while I find weird things. Like how it was (lazily) repainted in the past, someone had bypassed the heater core, and also the radio dials were (re)installed incorrectly: the jam nuts were under the bezels. Surely this was not done from the factory, as it makes the tone lever useless and the volume knob falls off easily. I wonder if the dentist that bought it 32 years ago was trying to fix it up and ran into too many problems getting parts. As I heard he eventually gave it to his mechanic friend (who did nothing with it) who eventually sold it off to another guy (who did nothing with it) who sold it to me.

Owing to my seemingly-endless amount of stupidity willpower the Clipper project is continuing to move forward. Thanks to the generous donation of some spare parts by another forum member here (namely a 320 V8 engine and 56-style Nash-style Ultramatic) I have some important supplies for the car, or at least spare parts. By the way, why does one rocker arm have so much clearance? (Photo below.)

Not much garage space to spare so I built a lean-to right over the engine pallet with some abandoned metal I found near the road. Many thanks to PennDOT for making these supplies available to those in need.


By the way, I finally got around to taking a wire brush to the engine in the car. The engine number is 5562-7201, indicating that it is a 352 from a 55 Clipper 4dr. Who knows how long ago it was swapped in, as it is very rusty; rusty enough to look original (e.g. there is no obvious "rust seam" in the exhausts from what I have seen) and I could not find any record of that VIN in any registry. (Photo attached.) Side note, the new engine is from a 55 Hudson so has no engine number in the Packard location (yet).

The general plan is to rebuild the transmission and engine accessories over the winter and then dig into the engine next spring/summer. We will see how it goes... all advice will be appreciated.

P.S. Finally found some tires that hold air...

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My guess on your huge valve clearance -- that valve is stuck in its guide.