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They made engines for a number of independents that couldn't make their own...

So why didn't they make a "modern" v-8? Looking back, it was essential from a marketing perspective. Would it have kept anyone alive?

Or did companies like Kaiser have a living will? DNR....

You always pose the most interesting questions.

K-F and Checker were the only automotive Continental engine buyers by the time the V-8 era rolled around, and most of K-F's engines were made under license from Continental in their own engine plant with additional supply from Continental as need arose.

That engine had wide industrial usage and I have sat upon forklifts with essentially the same engine as in my 51 Kaiser Special. A smooth running, torquey, economical piece it is too.

K-F was hard at work on their own V-8 (some excellent photos of the prototype recently emerged on ebay) so Continental would not have had a volume customer for a V-8 engine.

As Kaiser sales dropped to the basement they had to give up their own V-8 plans and tried to source from Oldsmobile but negotiations failed when Olds could not promise supply due to their own demand.

So the short answer to your question is that no one in the automotive field needed a Continental V-8.

Of course, they might have worked on one, but we need a Continental historian to answer that.

As a side note: Continental did produce OHV 4 cylinders.

A bit off-topic but Continental made engines for some prestige auto companies, for example the 8-cylinder units used by duPont and Peerless among others. All duPonts and some Peerless' are bona-fide Full Classics despite the fact that they didn't make their own engines. The Continental L-8 engines were highly regarded.

Hi

I spoke with a Kaiser-Frazer enthusiast about the V-8 Kaiser was developing and dropped to fund the Henry J. He told me the Kaisers insisted the engine have major commonents made from aluminum. In this case it was to be aluminum block, cast-iron heads. Apparently there were considerable issues which eventually nixed the project. Why they wouldn't simply use cast-iron throughout until the aluminum difficulties were overcome is unknown. Interesting, the two engineers who designed the Kaiser prototypes were later large responsible for the AMC's own new V-8 engine in 1956.

Postwar, Continental was down to Checker and Kaiser for customers. Truckmakers preferred big displacement in-line sixes, seeing no advantages in the emerging OHV V-8 for their purposes. The industrial equipment makers were the focus of Continental's business at the time. Their engines were well-engineered and built, were held in high-regard throughout that industry.

Continental-engined Full-Classics are some of the more interesting low-production offerings of the time. Though, I imagine at the time, some people still looked down on them as "assembled cars"!

Steve

Dr. Dyneto -- Always wondered whether the proprietary Continental L-head eights, or the Lycoming L-head eights, used in various "assembled" higher end cars of the late '20s, early '30s had the edge. I read decades ago one knowledgeable sounding source giving Lycoming the edge, as did an ancient mechanic who worked on both when they were used cars, but wonder if that might simply be due to Lycoming's exposure powering A-C-D products.

Further afield, but most A-C-D products were slickly marketed, overrated. Auburns of the '30s copied, and trailed, Buick and Hudson styling by a year or two, the handful of boattail speedsters notwithstanding. The Duesenberg Model J was obsolete within two years of its introduction, this and the tanked economy being why it took 'til 1937 to sell 480 of them when initial plan was to sell 500 Model Js a year.

Cord 810/812s were novel, but underfunded. The only A-C-D product that exuded affordable quality and wasn't overhyped, was the Auburn 12, the best bargain in automotive history. We know the Auburn 12 and Cord V-8 shared the same canted valve arrangement with the one-year-only '31 Oldsmobile V-8 and 1932-39 Packard Twelve, but let's ferret some Big Picture insight, not let this detail steer us to Lycoming.

Both Continental and Lycoming produced aircraft engines,
but Lycoming may've gotten a PR boost from powering A-C-D products. Remember that 10th grade dropout, former car salesman, stock market marauder E. L. Cord was twice on the cover of TIME magazine, the only industrialist ever so spotlighted.

Elcar, Gardner, duPont, Graham-Paige, Roamer, Jordan, Ruxton, Peerless, Locomobile, Overland were among those using Continental and Lycoming side-valve inline eights, many of the preceding considered CCCA Classics, since what the 1941 Cadillac Club of America thinks still matters to people who need the C-word to feather their nest.

But it would be nice to find some vetted, period, insider views as to whether Continental or Lycoming had the edge.

Thanks. Interesting question and good answers above. We now return you to your '50s discussion, already in progress.

su8overdrive, I really did enjoy your post and it is a most interesting topic to develop further, though probably not on this thread (and my apologies for first steering it in this direction) and perhaps not even on a Packard forum except perhaps as it relates to the Packard Twelve of 32-29.

I don't really have much to contribute to a better understanding and comparison of the Continental and Lycoming engines but would really look forward to learning more about them. A friend who has rebuilt a goodly number of the Lycoming V8s (Cord 810/812) says that despite being only a 3-main bearing design (and the Packard Twelve was a 4-main bearing design), they were a very well-engineered engine.

Hi Su8overdrive

You've posed a question that has nettled me as well:

" Always wondered whether the proprietary Continental L-head eights, or the Lycoming L-head eights, used in various "assembled" higher end cars of the late '20s, early '30s had the edge."

Before I usurp your query as if it were mine, I yield to you starting the new thread first.

Steve

Thank you, Dr. D and 58L. I'll leave it to others to launch the new thread. That way no insular souls will be "bent eight" out of shape. Some of us may enjoy a given make, but don't live in a vacuum, like to see our cars in perspective.

As mentioned elsewhere, i've several friends who are lifelong Cordites. In fact, last month i spent an afternoon on my back torquing the rod bearing caps on a friend's '36 810. The Lycoming is a good little engine,
the best part of the car, other than the 1942-47 junior Clipper size. The engine's only Achilles' heel(s) are the weak aluminum cylinder heads. The car's foibles are well documented elsewhere, but i'd add a ridiculously large turning circle to them.

Viewed as what it was --- the Duesenberg One Twenty --- and that it shares the identical bore/stroke with the woefully underrated Packard inline 288 of a dozen years later, the 1936-37 Cord 810-812 is interesting, being a fellow upmarket car. Aaaaaaand, we should never forget that the Packard Twelve was never intended to be East Grand Avenue's topline world beater, but a front-wheel-drive competitor of upper echelon Buicks.

Packard's nine-mained, 384-ci Custom Eight was to remain the Company's topline product.

Only after Cadillac launched their V-16, which was, to Packard's chagrin, a straight eight with the firing impulses halved for less crankpin loading, despite years of Clark Street crowing over the merits of their V-8, did Packard abandon the FWD idea, enlarge the V-12 and offer it as their topline alternative, knowing the public would become enamored of the more must be better mystique of "16 cylinders" and the trickle down panache bestowed on lesser GMobiles.

Judas, how's that for a NY Times run-on sentence?

Meanwhile, if any of y'all want to teleport our above posts to a new thread, you've my blessing.

Packard didn't become an also-ran 'til Alvan Macauley left the Company in April, 1948, coincidentally just before the launch of the pug ugly bathtubs, what Tom McCahill, dean of road testers (who'd raved over the '46 junior Clipper Deluxe Eight in Mechanix Illustrated), called "a goat."

Compare those sorry giant pillbugs with the hipper '48 Cadillac styling.

Packard limped along with '50s hohum, which several industry observers dismissed as looking like "bigger, gaudier Fords."

Even back in the '20s, when Continental and Lycoming were powering upmarket cars competing with Packard's lower lines, it helps to see the Big Picture. The key in those years is that Packard was apart and slightly above the pack,
hadn't yet fallen to merely anticipating GM's next move,

let alone being run by former GM production men as they were increasingly in the '40s.
Some fine cars were still wrought in the '40s, the cognac from the previous dozen years of Depression and desperation, simply because Packard didn't turn into an also-ran overnight.

Quote:

Well, you have to remember that I don't know anything, but I have heard of a company called Kaiser Aluminum.