Just a stright-8 comment....

An old mechanic told me in the early 1970's that the GM stright eights were prone to wearing out their main bearings as it was difficult to balance such a long crankshaft in a mass production eviroment.

Packard did it, but Packards cost a lot. He considered GM move into stright eights as an attempt to make think you could get Packard quality at a Buick price.

I can't say one way or the other, but he was a guy who had worked on many of these cars during the 1950's. He did say they were really smooth running when they were tuned up right.

A straight eight crank is a lloonngg piece of steel. I bet balancing WAS a problem, as well as alignment.
9 main bearings would be better than 4 or 5.

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1982 300SD " Wotan" ..On the road as of Jan 8, 2007 with Historic Tags

I don't think cars from the 30's had any problems with unbalanced cranks. Packard SUPER 8s used 9 main bearing as did Nash others used 5 or 7 or whatever.. Buick had one hell of a good motor. Duesenburg did use mercury to help balance their cranks for some reason.

That is a nice looking automobile. The horns look really vulnerable though. I'll bet a lot of them got broken off.

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