Hey folks, I was talking to an auctioneer friend of mine & he let me know about a sale he is having in a month or so. He is auctioning the estate of a gentleman who had an old garage for years and the widow is liquidating the contents. There is a 53 foot shipping container that is crammed full of parts with a lot of NOS stuff included. Mostly 50's parts with some 60's & a few 70's thrown in. Also included in the sale is a 1928 Packard opera coupe which is apparently fairly rare. The car is in pretty tough shape but is fairly complete. Apparently there is also a second complete chassis that goes with it as well. Would be a neat car when/if it is restored. the sucker is huge - it is longer than the 66 wildcat 4 dr hardtop beside it. there is a second engine in the weeds behind the car and the inside is crammed full of parts too. Most of the pictures I have been able to find have steel artillery wheels on them, very few with the wire wheels as this car has. Also there is a mystery V8 included in the sale too. My friend asked me to try & ID it if possible so I am turning to you guys for help. First the pictures of the mystery V8. it seems to have an aluminum crankcase with removable cylinder banks & a flat head type cylinder head. there are the letters "HC" cast into the head. the intake & Exhaust both come out the top of the engine. I was thinking that it is maybe a big truck engine or possibly military of some sort. the heads are half again the size of a flathead ford. Here is the pics, anybody have any educated guesses??? Here are some pics of the Packard. Not that anyone will likely care but the Buick is in the auction as well. It looks like they tore the front axle loose when they moved the car from where it was sitting for years. the rear axle is cockeyed in the car as well. The spare engine that is the same as the one in the car. check out the heavy duty aluminum mounts. This diff is also included with the parts. No one seems to know whether it belongs to the Packard or to the mystery V8.
The mystery engine is an early Cadillac, I think late 20's, early 30's. I've seen the HC on some old Cadillacs, never seen that casting mark on any of the LaSalles with the same engine. Could it possibly mean "High Compression", even though the compression was only about 5.5 to 1. Maybe the Cadillacs had higher compression than the LaSalles. General Motors Corp. Cadillac V-8s (1915) Cadillac didn't invent the V-8 - but it was the first to sustain that engine configuration with volume production. The original 1915 "L-head" design yielded 70 hp from 5.1L and introduced thermostatic control of coolant circulation. The addition of a counterweighted two-plane crankshaft in 1924 further enhanced Cadillac's reputation for smooth, quiet running.
Subscribing... Every time I think I have seen every V8 there is, someone on here comes up with a new one. My first thought was a Cadillac, but the HC throws me.
There was an H-C auto manufactured in Detroit, Michigan in 1916...a 28 horse power roadster @ $600. and touring @ $650.
By any chance, anyone, could this be a Cadillac V8 out of a Sherman / Patton Tank? Did they not use two of these as power plants? I am asking this because the "HC" on the heads lead me to think this.
I'm not the Caddy expert but I think by 1937 Cadillac had gone to a one piece block casting so I think this model would be a bit out dated by WWII.
mctim64, that is the same engine that is in this Packard. I am uploading some more pics of the car since there seems to be a fair bit of interest in it. The plug wire organizer thingie (technical term right there ) is inside the car. the little petcock valves - does anyone know if they are a decompress valve or a primer valve?
No, this was an earlier version of the Cadillac Flathead V8. This early engine (in various iterations from 1914 to 1936) has cylinders that bolt on to an aluminum crankcase. In 1936 Cadillac introduced the "monoblock", with the cylinders and crankcase being a single casting. A pair of this version of the Cadillac flathead v8, at 346 cubic inches each, were used in the M5 tanks.
Somebody posted this & then must have deleted the post. Looks the same as the caddy engine just without the plug wire covers. weren't Caddy & Lasalle kind of joined at the hip in those days? 1931 LaSalle has the HC on the head. See this Barrett-Jackson advert: http://www.barrett-jackson.com/application/onlinesubmission/lotdetails.aspx?ln=1265.1&aid=304&pop=1
I was told by the owner of the car that I posted that they are for priming on cold days, not the kind of thin you want to do if you paid good money to own a "Packard".
I look at that cool old stuff and I am struck by one imposing question, WTF happened to America? We were on such a brilliant and utterly cool path........ There is no engine made today that is more cool than either engine featured in this thread, and these were built near about a century ago, it should make everyone sad. I love "old tech", and old style.
I would tend to agree with you, although engines today are much more efficient there was a time when the engine was a work of art and ment to be showed off. Just a bunch of plastic covers now.
If you're interested in "Old Tech", you may be interested in the Silent Knight sleeve valve engine that was tried in the early days. It was invented by an American, and used by several different car manufacturers of the day, including the Canadian built Russell which was built by the Canadian Cycle Manufacturing Co., we now know better as CCM as seen on many hockey helmets today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Knight_sleeve-valve_engine_(Autocar_Handbook,_Ninth_edition).jpg The primer cups were common on many engines built before 1912-13 when electric starters became available. You will see them on many stationary hit and miss, marine, and automotive engines of the era, it made sure you had fuel in the cylinder so hopefully you didn't have to hand crank it much to get it going.
Thanks for the link, I will enjoy it. I remember when I was a kid and I "thought up" sleeve valves.... LOL,,,, they would not have any valve float etc... I thought I was brilliant, turns out even then I was nearly 100 years late even back then, and still it didn't work as well in practice as it did in my head! Anyway, it is hard to look back at stuff like this and think that for 40+ years, the "be all end all" for many of us was (and still is sometimes) a production engine that was made for 30 or 40 years. We should have done better than that, we lost something somewhere, we need to find it.
We are not all ignorant of the old tech, on the HAMB you are kind of preaching to the choir. I am only 33 but in my senior high school auto shop course, when everybody else was rebuilding 302's & 350's I rebuild a flathead 6 out of a 39 dodge. The teacher thought I was nuts. It was kind of funny, the rest of the guys in the class had never seen anything like it & that was everyday stuff to me. Come to find out that I am part of a small slice of the general population. I am a hot rodder. I seem to fit right in here with the rest of the misfits & screwballs. Drive On!
That's a 443 Packard, too bad it wasn't put in a barn 40-50 years ago. Series 4 with a 143 inch wheelbase, hope somebody with vision and a lot of money restores it.
I remember this car from when the gentleman who owned it was still alive. It always sat in the same place. Unfortunately, it sat outside of his garage for many years exposed to the worst that the Canadian weather could throw at it. As I stated before, from the looks of the axles they were none too gentle when they pulled it out of its resting place. It was one of the "gonna fix it up someday" cars. Maybe now it will actually happen.
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