Packard Forum Index » Project Blogs

As a 1956, your car has negative ground so is it possible that something in the charging system is from a 1955 or otherwise has reversed connections?

Next time you are under verify nothing electrical happened to cause the compensator to drive so long as to change the transverse bar positions far enough to become reversed. If that happens, assuming nothing got damaged in the process, everything will be out of sync mechanically. What the control switch might want as a very slight level change in one direction will become a big movement the opposite way because the correction direction called for is mechanically wrong and instead of correcting the slight out of level condition it keeps making it worse. This can happen if something shorts or more often, when someone manually tries to move the suspension either without watching the compensator if jumping terminals or when the limit switches were bypassed because of an incorrect installation of a manual switch.

This is a birds eye view from above. Verify the short transverse bar going to the drivers side is at the front of the compensator and the long bar to the passenger side is at the rear. The slight open angle of the V shape at the compensator drive link should point to the passenger side. If bars are reversed you will need to CAREFULLY manually control things while you watch and drive them back around to normal.

Howard, all good under the car. The bars are fine and the TL works as normal when stopped. It was just odd how it immediately raised the rear up when driving when I flipped the switch. Not sure if anyone else has had this happen with worn bushings or not.

Take 2 seconds and remove the generator belt from the generator. Then take an alligator clip jumper and connect arm [Edit: chassis ground] to field on the generator. Then take a jumper cable or at least 16 awg cable and connect bat on the regulator to arm on the generator. You should see the generator quickly get up to speed and spin the same direction as the engine spins (CW from front).