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On your seat, since you said your power seat finally arrived did you buy a track and base assy from someone and then are trying to make a formerly manual seat power? If that is the case I would wonder if the frame would have those brackets. Anyway, be interested to know what you find. Possibly the brackets were broken off if the welds are as weak as I consider them to be on the Caribbean frame.

In building the seats, and doing a mix and match I would have thought that as space constrained Packard was at Connor they would want to keep bulky pieces to a minimum so would have a stock of bare seat parts that were all the same. Some parts such as the base section of the frame might even be the same for sedan and HT seats. Even if they were done somewhere else where space was not an issue, for inventory simplicity reasons they might still start out the same. When an order came in for a car they would grab a bare bottom and a few small pieces, send them to upholstery where those with power would get brackets welded on, then sedan or HT back supports attached via bolts or welds, and that assy get bolted to the power tracks. Somewhere in the process upholstery and plastic end plates were added per trim code and that finished assy then sent to the line. A manual seat would not get the brackets and would just get the back along with the simple tracks and finish upholstery.

Another thing I was kind of curious about was it looked like Z springs are on the seat you received. I didn't realize they had started using Z springs instead of coils on anything but 56 Caribbeans with the reversible foam cushions. The coil springs were treated as a selling point in prior years on higher end models thru 50 I think because dealers could remove and change coils for stiffer or softer versions to provide ultimate customized customer comfort. Figured the customizing had probably ended with the early 50s because of all the penny pinching the board did with the 24th series but still thought regular cars used coils on the bottom cushion until the end. Maybe I learned something new.

Yes, adding power seats and this seat frame is out of, I believe, a Patrician but the springs visible in the photo were from my own car and were original to it. I just laid the frame against it to check the fit. I can't speak for Caribbean as I've never owned one (but nearly bought a hardtop) so whatever you see in the photo is the way it came from the factory as far as springs are concerned. I stripped off the upholstery myself and it was definitely original!

Incidentally, I do need a nice pair of plastic bolsters in black should anyone be reading this and have a pair available.

Any horizontal surface is doomed around me so it took some digging to get the Clipper’s trunk open to retrieve the seat actuators. After doing so, I sat them roughly in place and see that whatever the anchors connected to are not there so they must be part of the seat frame itself. Remnants of whatever they were are still attached to the actuator housings.




I was surprised to see that the front/back actuator uses a simple square thread screw rather than the ballscrew that the vertical uses. I realize it takes more power to move the seat up and down than it does forward and back and ballscrews eliminate much of the friction in doing so but still, I can’t imagine using a cheap square thread! I had a look at the 1954 Patrician’s and I see that both are ballscrews.

As for the trunk, buried under this factory A/C stuff (much of which I have in duplicate) are the power window actuators but I don’t recall if the door lock solenoids are there or not so I guess more digging is in order.

The trunk finally open as a birds-eye view from the security camera shows.



The factory A/C stuff but quite a few pieces are stored on the shelves I set up specifically for this car including two under-dash units and square hoses, blower housings etc. Odd but my car seems to already have the pulley for the compressor even though it never had A/C. The dash with the cutouts is also on a shelf.