Studes in the News

Nice write up about the Plain Brown Wrapper in Hemmings Muscle Cars

I might have read this wrong, but I think it says he is running 427 Ford Heads on his Supercharged 289 engine :jd:

And they used some really bad language in the article, they said "Cast Iron Headers"

 

My bad, it says the intake ports on his 289 are as big as the intake ports on a Ford 427....


carry on.

 

:TU: Thanks, Donny:

The port sizes George was referring to compare the 427 Ford to the unique heads on the 304.5-cube Studebaker R3 engine, not the smaller-port "normal" heads on the 289-cube R2 engine. The heads [and the supercharger, of course] are the largest contributor to the power that comes from an R3 engine. Those heads are unique to R3 (single 4-barrel, supercharged) and R4 (dual 4-barrels, unsupercharged) engines. (To date, no one has brought an R4-powered Studebaker to The Pure Stock Drags because there are even fewer R4 engines extant than R3s!)

As you may know, George Krem and I are cousins and have been into fast Studebakers together ever since I was about 12 and he was about 16: I'm 58 now. I was with him the day we found (and he bought) The Plain Brown Wrapper new, and it was he and I who installed the new-in-the-crate R3 engine in the car in January, 1965.

There were two more brand-new, plain-jane Challenger V-8/stick 2-doors in that storage lot with what would become The Plain Brown Wrapper; one was Moonlight Silver and the other was Golden Sand. Studebaker only built 274 Challenger V-8 2-doors, so we were looking at over 1% of the entire production of 1964 V-8 Challenger 2-doors that day in the storage lot!

I wanted to buy one of them but I was "only" 18 and Dad reminded me that (A) I didn't have that much money, and (B) I had four years of college coming up, whereas George had just graduated from college. (The Hemmings article is slightly wrong on that point: George HAD graduated from college a couple months before buying The Plain Brown Wrapper; he wasn't "in" college as the article reports...but it's only a technicality of a couple months and over 40 years, we know how stories can be stretched...)

Cheers. Some year, Ted Harbit and I and maybe some other Stude guys want to "make" Casey's winter shin-dig. It sounds like a lot of fun, and we appreciate his invite. But this year, Ted and the surrounding counties in Indiana were on about Day 4 of NO electricity due to a massive ice storm last week, and with no promise of power until early this coming week!

Bob Palma
Technical Editor
Studebaker Drivers Club's Turning Wheels