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AN INTERESTING FORTY-NINE FACTORY PHOTO<br />
By Jay Friedman<br />
This factory photo, probably taken at Cadillac‟s Clark Street plant in Detroit, shows 3 workers lowering a ‟49 overhead valve<br />
engine into a car‟s chassis. After studying the picture a bit, there are several interesting factoids that can be gleaned from it.<br />
Art Gardner points out that the installation does not appear to be taking place on an assembly line; it looks more like a small<br />
side room since there are non-Cadillac cars in the background (of which the first is a Chevrolet or Pontiac station wagon while<br />
behind it appears to be a ‟46 or ‟47 Buick). Obviously, the three men are posing for the photographer. The guys doing the<br />
work seem to be the two men at the left and right, as they are wearing shop clothes and have their hands on the chain hoist and<br />
engine as they maneuver it into position. The guy in the middle must be a supervisor, as he has on a white shirt and seems to<br />
be motioning the guy on the left working the hoist to lower the engine v e r y s l o w l y and carefully so it won‟t bang into<br />
anything. The job of the guy at the right must be to push and pull on the motor to doubly make sure of just that, as well as to<br />
ensure that the downward facing motor mount bolts go straight into their holes on the frame.<br />
It's an early 1949 Cadillac engine, as there are 2 bolts at the top holding on the valve cover instead of the 4 bolts around the<br />
perimeter of the valve cover used later in the year. Also, the spark plug wires are enclosed in a flat enclosed conduit bolted to<br />
the valve cover, rather than the open metal loops used later in the year. In addition, compare the color of the paint on the letters<br />
and 3 lines at the forward end of the valve cover to the supervisor‟s shirt: it is somewhat darker. This leads me to believe the<br />
paint on the valve cover lettering is the silvery gray used on very early cars rather than the white paint used the rest of the year.<br />
Looking at the chassis, several tidbits of info emerge. The first is that there is a '48 horn ring on the steering wheel, a further<br />
indication that this is a very early '49 Cadillac. The '48 and '49 steering wheels are the same, but the '48 horn ring is a 180<br />
degree half-circle around the lower half of the wheel like the horn ring in the photo, while the '49 horn ring is a 360 degree full<br />
circle. The next thing you‟ll notice is that under the left elbow of the man at the right is a clutch pedal. Also, you can just<br />
make out under his left hand that there are two shift levers coming out of the steering column rather than the single lever used<br />
with Hydra-matic, so this car has a manual transmission. This is noteworthy in that less than 4% of '49s were so built.<br />
Art thinks that “perhaps this was a test engine that was run on a test stand for a while and then installed in a 48 chassis for<br />
some final testing before production began for 49. For example, the exhaust manifolds look "seasoned", meaning the engine is<br />
not completely new. All this may mean that the photo was taken sometime in 1948.