Packard Forum Index » Pre-War (1899-1942)

Photographic evidence to following shortly, but this weekend we viewed a 1940 180 Club Sedan that had a dealer installed 327 swap done to it per the factory replacement instructions when the 356 motor was no longer available later in the mid 50s.

So it had a 327 with the factory "swap kit" per the Service Letter information. The engine number was N3#####CAL. It was a 327 9 Main motor.

The 'N' designation is unusually, as if it followed the letter sequence, that would mean it was produce in 1955. Obviously this was a service replacement engine, and not just a motor swapped from a later car. Not sure is the 'CAL' suffix was something Packard specific, or something used because it was done in Calif. Interesting to say the least.

It used the 356 water pump/pulley and timing cover setup and a special offset 356 style fan blade for clearance, and to allow for the front mounting setup. The manifolds and carb were the off of the 356, and the throttle linkage was from the factory conversion kit. The crossshaft looks like it is based on the 51-54 crossshaft, but is mounted further forward on the engine, and is not attached to the firewall.

Does the "CAL" appear to be stamped with different stamp dies from the characters preceeding the "CAL"???? Does the CAL appear crisply and not overstamped of some other characters???

The "N' is a bit more offset then the rest of the numbers, but the 3#####CAL is stamped nice and straight, and does not look like it was done by hand.

Hmmmmmm. The "CAL" is rather curious. FOr the mid 1950's i would not expect any corporation to have made any specific regional designation for any engine. Maybe in 1975, yes. But not mid 50's. Maybe the engine number is same as original engine number that came out of the car and the CAL was added while numbers stamped. Whatever the outcome, very interesting.

IIRC, right after the website started there was a discussion of another strange serial number. The poster also said he had a replacement engine & it was in a California done car -- although I don't remember if he & the car were here.

Believe it also had the CAL because there was a lot of speculation about what the CAL designation was. A second one now would seem to indicate that it does stand for Calif & we probably had some regulation requiring a specific format since motor numbers were used to register. I don't remember if it had the N though--I think it might have had extra numbers which some said might indicate a year.

Maybe this is the SAME car??? Maybe the Cali regulation was to stamp CAL when ORIGIANL numbers are REused from a scrapped unit???

Looking at the picture taken of the engine number, it sure does look hand stamped. Now it could be that Calif assigned this number as a replacement, or it was based on the previous engine number from the 1940 356 it replaced.....Discuss.

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That is a real curiousity! Except for some of the very VERY early cars that had hand-stamped engine numbers, that font and format sure doesn't bear any similiarity to any Packard engine # I've seen.

Just a crazy guess: The car was originally titled in California by engine number and when the engine was replaced with a factory engine (which I believe came w/o a number), a new replacement engine number was assigned by the Cal. DMV

The following SC's explain the swap and match what we saw under the hood as far as the parts configuration. They do not provide any guidance on the engine number.

https://www.packardinfo.com/xoops/html/downloads/SC/SC-VOL27NO7.pdf

https://www.packardinfo.com/xoops/html/downloads/SC/SC-VOL27NO9.pdf