Hey all. I'm an aircraft mechanic, mostly vintage repair and restoration for museums and private collections. I also run a shop working on mostly european bikes & cars. My projects skimmed down to the pertinent one to this site is a 1954 Packard Clipper I picked up about five or six years ago. The car was on her last leg and looking at getting chopped up so I picked it up for near nothing. I painted it within a few weeks of buying her then put it at the back of the shop for a few years and now I found it time pull her out and get it back on the road. I'm going with a SBC for now as I put together the money and ideas for a forced induction straight eight.
Welcome from New Zealand. I live a couple of miles from one of our local Warbirds branches and usually get to see a free airshow at weekends. Vintage aircraft is quite popular over here and we've got companies that restore planes for customers from all over the world. I love the idea of a blown straight-eight; supercharger or turbo? With your vintage aircraft experience, both apply (I had a friend when I lived in CA named John Burgess who did a lot of experimentation with forced induction on aircraft engines back in WWII.).
Welcome from Austin. You'll find plenty of good advice and assistance on this site. You won't believe the depth of knowledge here until you've been here a while.
Thanks all. The plan for the induction on the motor is a gear-driven compressor (lots of machining for me) regulated to put out to absolute pressure along with a single turbo providing the positive pressure to whatever I find suits my purpose. I have enough old school mechanical FI for different types of a/c motors that I will give that a try as well. My main problem is finding the correct motor; I am looking for the Packard 359 which has nine mains, is correct to the model car and is evidently so rare that I have never seen one except in photos. By the way, did any of you Austin guys make it out to Ginny's or the Phoenix yesterday?
Hi, I'm Glenn from copperas cove, tx too. I'm a fabricator working for a contractor on Ft. Hood. I have Sonny Bryants 71 winter nationals winner, which I am in the process of restoring. This 56 chevy is complete, however, I need more photos of the exterior and interior to complete it. I joined because of the great pics and hopefully, someone out there has more info about the car.
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