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Don, I too love the detailed analysis. To further support Kev's analysis, my block was cast 22 Dec 1936, and marked as delivered in Cleveland 31 Dec 1936!

Weird though - on my car, the date of casting is on the drivers side of the block.

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Wow, the timeline on your car was very quick. One week to cast the block, build the engine, assemble the car, and sell it! Mine clearly didn’t go that quickly as it sold in Kansas City on July 8, 1937

I just edited the post - 22 Dec, not 24 (typing is hard), but yeah - out of the sand to sold in 9 days seems crazy to me too.

1937 was Packard's highest volume year. They were turning and burning them for sure!

I wonder how many shifts the factory was running at that point.

Casting date of January 14, 1937 is confirmed. Now, based on how quickly Ken’s car was turned around, it appears that cars rolled off the assembly line less than a week after the casting date (at least in one case).

If that’s the case, my estimated manufacture date of January 18, 1937 looks like a pretty decent estimate.

In any case, I think I can say with confidence that my car was built in the last half of January, 1937.

I had my new aluminum machined hood louvers that I had gotten from Max Merritt ceramic coated (Cerakote) in clear gloss. You actually cannot tell that they've been coated, but they will be sealed and it will prevent oxidation.

Anyway, they were done today, so I picked them up and delivered them to the body shop. The shop wanted them to test fit everything on the hood. They fit great, as expected.

While there, I took a look at the new progress. The owner of the shop wasn't completely satisfied with how the rear end repairs had come out, so he had the guys revisit that. And, he gave me a credit on the hours for revisit. That was all without me saying anything. It just gives me a good feeling that they are doing things right and workin on the up and up.

Today they had pulled out the center divider bulkhead. They had to remove one front door to get it out, but all the doors have to come off anyway. The car looks odd without the bulkhead.

I meant to include something in my last post. When I first took my car to them, I emailed a copy of the 120 Body Manual that I had gotten on this site. They have told me several times now how helpful that has been. They also said the will definitely be passing it along to their upholstery guy as well since it shows a lot about how that all goes together.

We just got back from our trip to the Dallas area to visit our daughter. While there, I dropped off my dash panels and interior trim for woodgraining. I’ll be really excited to see those pieces done. I also retrieved a couple parts from Flackmaster.

I have a “new” headlight switch since mine was causing problems. This one is a NOS, but still had 88 years of dust accumulated. I have started cleaning it up. Before I started, I had about 2 ohms between the main input terminal and all of the other terminals when the switch was in the corresponding position. Most of that resistance was between the points of the thermostatic relay. I carefully cleaned the points and got the resistance down to between 0.1 and 0.2 ohms. At that point, I still had about 0.5 ohms to all the terminals. I sprayed the switch down internally with contact cleaner and operated the switch repeatedly. I now have 0.2 ohms from the input terminal to all other terminals. Should be good to go!

I also came home with a transmission top plate. i have a 23rd series transmission with R11 overdrive that I’ll be putting in later in the year. To install it, my existing top plate would need to be modified since the 23rd series transmission was column shift and not cane shift. I wanted another top plate so I could keep my original transmission whole in case any future owners ever wanted to put the car 100% back to original. The cane on the new top plate had a bit of oxidation. I took some steel wool to it and it cleaned up REALLY nice. So, I think I’ll likely use this one with the new transmission. Here are before and after pics.