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Hopefully I did this right and the photo posts. It's not nasty underneath like this anymore but look closely at the shims between the rear mounting point of the control arm and the crossmember. My car has shims on both sides at this location. I thought "Oh know, it's been wrecked!"...but I see absolutely no signs of it having sustained frame damage but obviously, it needed shims to gain additional caster...What baffles me is that the shims look to be factory installed or dealer installed as they have original undercoating on them. Now I'm wondering if the crossmember to frame rail assembly was performed correctly when built.

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No explanation but I wouldn't put any stock in the presence of "original" undercoating as a clue as I'm fairly confident there was no factory undercoating available. Perhaps dealer-done, perhaps later in the car's life?

Never seen any shims like that on the vehicles I'm familiar with.

I recall my dad having a couple of his cars done at the dealer in the 50's but I know if the option had been available to him, he would have ordered it that way from the factory. I'm not even real sure that the car had a full blown undercoating applied to it as it seems to be spotty at best or a poor application. Still, it is a mystery and I never ran across a single reference to shims at this location in the Service Manual but they sure look like something that was made specifically and professionally for the application, not homemade by any means.

I have seen plenty 'o them over the years. They make up for cars having run into curbs, or even just a bad day at the frame factory. If there isn't a problem with the way your car drives, there is not a problem.

My 54 patrician has them on one side. Appears to be from the factory

I thought I had your answer but after looking at your picture again I'm not so sure. Looked at my 51 and noticed that there are reinforcing plates on the top of the cross member where the lower a frame attaches. Nothing between the a frame cross shaft and the under side of the frame. Thought that maybe someone took yours apart at one time and just reassembled it wrong. I'm not a front end man but it looks to me like those spacers you have would do almost nothing to the geometry of the front end. If anything they would affect the camber slightly.

Other makes of cars in those days came from the factory bent. Some, like the Chevy II and Ford vans, dogtracked right off the show room floor. So Packard was doing better quality control with those shims.

I like the original paint on the oil pan too.

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It seems to drive just fine. I haven't gotten deep enough into the drivers side but noticed on the right side that the coil spring tower didn't appear to line up correctly with the front most rivet hole in the frame when it was installed. It appears that when the rivet was swaged, it wasn't seated all the way and it forced a small crack into the frame so I'm thinking that there was a little "mis-alignment" going on when the frame was assembled or maybe even a bad stamping job on the rail. That's a really tight curve in the rail at the shock tower so maybe the machining was getting worn in that location and it was beginning to throw some of the calibrations out of whack...who knows but it seems fine other than the fact that the bolts with the shims are longer and don't have holes for the cotter pins to be inserted into the castle nuts. That being the case, they were loose and had to be tightened at least a turn or more.

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Well at least mine's not the only one with shims...mine has a stack of 3 on one side and 2 on the other.

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Me neither Bob but I'm thinking that it would affect the front to back angle of the spindles. Being installed under the rear of the control arm seems like it would basically "kick" the wheels forward or tilt the spindles towards the front of the car and therefore change the caster. I thought camber was the inward and outward angle of the wheel and caster was front to back.


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Tim, that's bare metal with a self application of oil to keep it from rusting!

This is a shot of the right side showing the 2 shims.

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