Tweet
Having a late lunch (locally made chili) w/ some Buddy Miles coming out of some new/small/amazing Sonus speakers (but it's an LP on my Tecnics SL-210), reading Jay Leno in Octane (my favorite car mag). Also playing a little fetch in the office/workshop with the puppy Otis... (2 yo brindle Boxer of my son Andy that I puppy-sit).
Jay is opining how the Packard was a precursor to what happened to the US auto industry in the 70's... but the engineers (according to Leno) and marketers were eventually able to bring the US back. Packard was very interesting.. they were the first with true mass air conditining, a real steering wheel, the first production V12 engine, and they built the American version of the Rolls Royce Merlin V12 for the P51 Mustang. The Packards had an amazing self leveling suspension in their last 2 years of production (55-56), and a pair of chassis-linked torsion bars that tied the fron and wheels together (that managed "pitch" which was an issue with a problem with large American cars of the 50's).
It's a good article, not sure if it's online.
A very good childhood friend of my dad's that lived locally in our neighborhood in Seattle was a Packard collector starting in mid 70's. I would go by on occasion and he would let me in to look at these giant cars and tell me a bit about them. He was a bit of a character, had worked for the State Dept overseas for many years (not really sure what he did, and he would never talk about it), and his later years (he only passed a couple of years ago) I would search eBay for him to find some oddball parts. Not long after he passed, his niece asked me to help the family with moving the cars along to other collectors. Well, I thought he only had the few that I had seen over the years in the garage at the commercial property he owned... not so! He had managed to collect 65 Packards! A man after my own heart. We managed to find a few longtime Packard guys that took the whole lot of cars and parts...., I can only imagine how they felt. I'd love to find a treasure trove of Porsche parts/cars like that....
Ok, time to take Otis out to drag me down the street, and then back to assembly of Bi-iodes and headlight assemblies (I'm wayyyy behind).
cheers,
E
Jay is opining how the Packard was a precursor to what happened to the US auto industry in the 70's... but the engineers (according to Leno) and marketers were eventually able to bring the US back. Packard was very interesting.. they were the first with true mass air conditining, a real steering wheel, the first production V12 engine, and they built the American version of the Rolls Royce Merlin V12 for the P51 Mustang. The Packards had an amazing self leveling suspension in their last 2 years of production (55-56), and a pair of chassis-linked torsion bars that tied the fron and wheels together (that managed "pitch" which was an issue with a problem with large American cars of the 50's).
It's a good article, not sure if it's online.
A very good childhood friend of my dad's that lived locally in our neighborhood in Seattle was a Packard collector starting in mid 70's. I would go by on occasion and he would let me in to look at these giant cars and tell me a bit about them. He was a bit of a character, had worked for the State Dept overseas for many years (not really sure what he did, and he would never talk about it), and his later years (he only passed a couple of years ago) I would search eBay for him to find some oddball parts. Not long after he passed, his niece asked me to help the family with moving the cars along to other collectors. Well, I thought he only had the few that I had seen over the years in the garage at the commercial property he owned... not so! He had managed to collect 65 Packards! A man after my own heart. We managed to find a few longtime Packard guys that took the whole lot of cars and parts...., I can only imagine how they felt. I'd love to find a treasure trove of Porsche parts/cars like that....
Ok, time to take Otis out to drag me down the street, and then back to assembly of Bi-iodes and headlight assemblies (I'm wayyyy behind).
cheers,
E
Comment