July 1925 - December 1970
Gus Wilson's Model Garage
Alphabetical List of Stories Monthly Illustration Galleries Index Links-All Stories
Your Car Troubleshooting Practical Lubrication Gus Paperback 1 Gus Paperback 2 Socony Magazine
The Boy Mechanic 1954 Fact Book Do It Yourself Car Book (1955) Postcards Simple Auto Repairs
Of Interest...
In 1974 I moved my young family from North Dakota to Vermont to take a job at St. Johnsbury Academy teaching Auto Body. The caravan included a 1953 Studebaker 2 ton farm truck and a 1963 Studebaker Avanti R1 Coupe both packed to the gills. Times were tough back then and money was scarce. The Avanti, being the most valuable asset was to be the first to be sold. Unfortunately the weekend before I was to deliver the car to a buyer in Ohio I was in an accident and crashed the right front into a guard-rail on a snowy curve. The dilemma then was how to repair the car with so little money. I had been buying parts from Roscoe Stelford in Illinois for quite some time and we entered into an exchange agreement, Avanti parts for printing of an extensive Packard Ultramatc Transmission manual. The printing was done on an offset press and required a massive amount of darkroom , plate and press time but parts were needed to get the Avanti back on the road.
Roscoe and I talked many times over that year and on one visit to his home he showed me a treasure. It was the Packard prototype fuel injection unit developed in the final years of Packard's existence. It was incredible. I often thought of the injection unit as they became more and more common. A short while ago I received this attachment of the Stelford 56 Packard Executive with the injection unit in place. To my mind, it is a thing of beauty and typifies the excellence and forward thinking and advanced engineering of the Packard Motor Car Company.
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