Packard Forum Index » Post-War (1946-54)

Welcome to Packard-Land! From the photo, it looks like an awesome car and I hope you have much luck and pleasure from it. The fact that your better half endorses your project makes it so much the better! From my own experience, I found that my wife's enthusiasm for Packards grew once we had one we could drive. You seem to have already accomplished that!

Again, welcome and best wishes on your project.

Patrician....as long as I go fishing with my wife she will always help and support me with the cars! Really. Pinch me!

Owen D......I will have all those numbers for you tomorrow.....gotta watch the Twins mash the Brewers tonight!

Dell.....I would love to have some contact info for people that can help me come up with Woodie reconstruction. Please email that to me....I need to get my tailgate operational so I can use the rear compartment.

Jeff,
for including your '48 Standard Eight Station Wagon in the Packard Owner's Registry.

Here is the number stamped on my block.....prefix is clearly an N, the letters CAL stamped below. Warranty replacement? If only these cars could talk!

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Hmmm... We've seen the 'N' xxxxxx 'CAL' before. Interesting.

A question would be if the car was bought or had been in California any significant time.

As mentioned in the other post, the speculation on the other known cars with the suffix has been that the CAL is something California DMV required on a replacement engine. Would be interesting to see if that might correlate.

Why the N that precedes the six digit # ?

Also, the car is from Cali, still has 1963 black plates on it.

Any idea when a replacement might have been made?

Speculation again, but since there is no documentation (so far) of how replacement engines were numbered, one guess has been since M was the last official letter Packard used, if the replacement was afterwards, the N was next in line and chosen for replacements.

The fly in that letter scenario is if the replacement was done while they were still using letters, how would they have known M was the last.

If the engine is a 5 main solid lifter 288, then the numerals could fall in line with mentioned replacement engines. If it is not, then another question is where the numerals came from.

It would be nice to know the casting date on these engines. Seems to me if it's circa 1953, Packard would have been aware that 1954 (with the 'M' designation) would be the last year for the straight eights making 'N' available for replacement engines. Just more conjecture.

Very interesting speculation.....this gets back to my wishful thinking that if only these cars could talk.

I will get my scraper and cleaner out this afternoon and look for a casting date on the block.

I also have Model A and T Fords and have run across number discrepancies a lot. Makes the hobby more fun and interesting!

Also had a BB 1974 Corvette once that I sold. The buyer discovered I had the wrong replacement distributor in the car, had a major FIT about the wrong numbers, chastised me soundly! You would have though I painted a mustache on Mona Lisa!

Numbers are fun from a historical standpoint but the bottom line is to have fun with whatever Packard one has.