Packard Forum Index » Modification Discussion

Quote:

Engines of that era were very detuned. The designer knew how to get more horsepower but had to balance the conflicting demands of smoothness,silence, long life, low manufacturing costs, ease of service and repair, broad power band and of course, the quality of fuel and oil available.

It is possible to increase horsepower up to 25% or so without shortening engine life or making major modifications.

No one mod works by itself, they all work together. A basic formula might include a larger carburetor or dual carburetors, reground cam, high compression head or milled head, dual exhaust or header, lightened flywheel and recurved distributor.

All this is best done as part of a rebuild, or on a recently rebuilt engine.

There are other things that are helpful, such as having the reciprocating parts balanced and doing a 3 angle valve job and possibly port matching and pocket porting. It all depends how far you want to go. On an engine that old it does not pay to go too far. A mild hop up adds interest and a little extra "oomph". Go any farther and you would be better off with a newer OHV engine, or possibly a newer car.

Put a blower, nitrous injection on it, and wait for the explosion.

My friend has a Hudson Hornet that is hopped up. The equipment include 3 double barrel Weber carbs, headers, cam, hot ignition and other stuff. This flathead six has over 200 hp at the rear wheels, measured on a dyno. It really hauls. The rpm is within stock limits.

As mentioned before the older cars were designed to be smooth, quiet, minimize shifting, and most importantly cheap to make. Lots of power can be obtained by using modern technology with little or no downside other than cost.

Dual carbs would help a Packard six, but the modification needs to be done as a package with other equipment such as a hotter cam and headers.

The Hudson 6 is a good engine to judge what a flat head is capable of. Most of them were twin h equipped and they often had aluminum heads as well. The NASCAR spec racing engine was a different animal all together though. With the factory aluminum head and twin h intake they were ported and relieved from the factory and had a pretty aggressive cam I have the specs somewhere but if my memory is accurate it was around .410 lift. the valve sizes were around 2 inch on the intake and 1.5 inches on the exhaust (or very close to that)and the engines were very large at 308 ci. Hudson had some built in performance that a lot of the engines of the era didn't the valves were at a pretty good angle in relationship to the deck increasing flow potential (this was on all of them not just the fast ones). You can make anything fast in perspective, you would have a hard time making a prewar engine out run a new mustang but it would defiantly be a fast prewar car with some fairly simple tricks.

Google turbo flat head six. I think if you do a little research you'll find a You Tube video of a guy who put a turbo and a multicarb set up on a flat head six. I might have been a Ford or Chrysler engine but a flat head is a flat head when it comes to this kind of modification. He put a suck thru system on his and it really looks and sounds wild. It would be way cool to open up a Packard and see a nice neat turbo flat head under the hood.

Check out Ebay and search for Edmunds. They have an aftermarket Edmunds cylinder head and two barrel intake for sale. Price is kinda high but I'm sure it's pretty rare.

eBay head and manifold are for Post-War Eights.

Hi
I bought a edmunds dual intake for my 52 thunderbolt 327 to enhance a rebuild ,I got it from a forum member
The intake came with a couple of stormb erg carbs ,aero s ,which I had rebuilt
It has a hot water circuit as the dual manifolds are noted to get cold because of the vaporized fuel mixture condensing on the walls of the intake and making for unreliable mixture
One y 's the hot water line from the I heater line from the water pump and y's back after the heater coil in to the head to make a parceled circuit ,this feature makes the edmunds systems desirable
I also got a 288 head and put this on for a compression hike
I ran a 12 v - gr system with a pertronix in the dist so I could run a hot coil
I used the 518 a conversion to get the overdrive
So what happened?
Don't know ,I over heat
Hmm
The radiator is recore ,the water pump and thermostats ,replaced hoses replaced the heat tube looks ok the heater core replaced and seems to circulate ,
Is it my dual carb set up ?
Ps can I attach phone pics?