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The flexible fender splasher is supposed to be there. Originally some sort of treated canvas in a dark color. Here's a thread on finding a suitable replacement.https://packardinfo.com/xoops/html/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=2292&viewmode=flat&order=ASC&type=&mode=0&start=0

Thanks HH56...It looked pretty stock, but with this car, I'm not making any assumptions!

9-29-10

Most of my time has been cleaning the garage to make room for my new media blaster. It has actually been kind of fun. I found a lot of parts for my Cadillac that I didn't even remember that I had! I sprayed some foamy engine bright on my suspension to remove the gunk on it, but it did very little. Looks like I will have to take a scraper to it. I'm kind of surprised about the rust on my car. The rust spots that are there are bad, but I thought I would find a lot more surface rust than I have.

For cleaning the suspension I recommend trying Easy Off heavy duty oven cleaner. Works best if it is a warm day. Spray it on, let it sit for 20 minutes. For really gunky areas, respray every 5 minutes or so. Then use a wire brush to scrub. Rinse with a power washer.

Note: wear gloves and eye protection. Oven cleaner irritates skin.

The oven cleaner is an excellent suggestion but I think it is lye based. Would take a little extra care if using around anything that might be aluminum or pot metal so nothing is damaged.

Thanks for the suggestion. I had read in BigKev's blog that he used oven cleaner too. I had the engine bright lying around and it was getting old so I wanted to get rid of it. I'll try the oven cleaner next.

Take a look at my blog and you can see the various steps and process I went through in stripping down my engine block and front end of all grease and rust. If i was to do all over again, I would have started with a heavy duty pressure washer with a strong sprayable degreaser, or find someone that does mobile engine steam cleaning. As the biggest challenge is removing all the accumulated grease, road grime and dirt.

I really had to get in there with a screw driver to remove all the crap from the around the suspension and steering parts. Some places it was 3" thick.

A wire wheel on a die grinder (with a face shield) works great from removing all the rust from the nooks and crannies.

10-01-10

Please excuse any misspellings. It's just after midnight and I had an hour to mess with the car. First part was hooking up the media blaster to the compressor. I wanted a small piece of air hose, but the hardware store only had one with a swivel for $20! For $10 I bought 50' of light duty air hose. I'll just use that.

After that, it was too late to run power tools so I scraped at the front brake. Pic below shows crap pile. It's hard to see in the pic, but it is at least 2" thick.

When I got tired of scraping, I removed the cotter pin from the hub and removed the castellated nut. I was glad to see clean looking grease behind it. Took the wheel bearing out and it looked pretty good. As a mater of fact, all of the rubber on the front looked nice considering how old they are.

Loosened the shoes with the star adjuster and removed the drum brake. From the paint left on the springs, I note the yellow one is upper left, orange upper right and red is the bottom spring.

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10-03-10

First part of the day was getting pissed off at my air compressor. Apparently, the electrical to my garage is not up to par and when I was trying to use my new media blaster with the lights on in the garage to see, I would trip the circuit breaker. Going to have to figure something else out. I'll probably need to hook a shop vac up to it too, because it clouds up pretty quick. Right now, I have the hole for attaching a dust collector taped off because glass beads were coming out of it during use.

After messing with that for a while, I continued to scrape gunk off the suspension. I looked for oven cleaner at Walmart, but I didn't see it in the cleaning product section and I didn't have time to hunt for it.

Now that I can see where some of the bolts were, I thought I should just disassemble the suspension to clean it easier. First was the brake backing plate. I just removed the nuts and the bolts with spacers. Left the wheel cylinder attached. I was hoping to reuse it, but I'll have to look at it more carefully. Removing the brake backing plate also removed the steering arm.

Next I jacked up the bottom of the suspension to take pressure off of it and removed the two upper nuts on the top of the steering knuckle. Couldn't get the bolt out though, even after removing the bolt for the pinch connection and prying with a large screwdriver.

Failing that, I tackled the shock. That was really stubborn! Had to use channel lock pliers on the body of the shock to keep it from spinning while hitting the bottom nut with my impact wrench. Once that was off, I tried the top with a screwdriver in the slot and a box wrench on the bolt. No way was that coming off! Put some vice grips on the tightest setting I could get to close on the shocks shaft and used the impact at full power on the nut. That did the job.

Then I removed the nut and unscrewed the bolt holding the lower section together. I lowered the suspension again thinking the spring would be free, but I forgot about the front stabilizer. Jacked it back up and used a socket and breaker bar with a 4' piece of steel tube on it to removed the nuts and bolts holding the mount to the frame. I was hoping to break it off because it wasn't budging, but the sucker broke loose! Packard sure used some quality hardware. Every time I work on the suspension of a modern car, I usually break at least one bolt.

That still didn't get it off and I had to work on my daily driver so I stopped for the day. Later on I read the manual and apparently, I have to remove a clip holding the arm to the lower suspension. Once I remove that, I think the spring will be free.

Everything had nice, clean grease on it. I was amazed how little trouble I had getting most of the bolts out. Still having trouble with that upper one. The manual says to use the camber/caster wrench to remove it, but it looks like a regular threaded bolt shaft to me.

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The upper pin is threaded and you need to use a 1/4" Allen wrench to remove it as per the service manual (That's all that the caster/camber wrench is)

One end of the pin has a hexagonal internal socket.