This factory photo, probably taken at Cadillac’s Clark Street plant in Detroit, shows 3 workers lowering a ’49 overhead valve engine into a car’s chassis. After studying the picture a bit, there are several interesting factoids that can be gleaned from it.
Art Gardner points out that the installation does not appear to be taking place on an assembly line; it looks more like a small side room since there are non-Cadillac cars in the background (of which the first is a Chevrolet or Pontiac station wagon while behind it appears to be a ’46 or ’47 Buick). Obviously, the three men are posing for the photographer. The guys doing the 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 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 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 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 ensure that the downward facing motor mount bolts go straight into their holes on the frame.
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 perimeter of the valve cover used later in the year. Also, the spark plug wires are enclosed in a flat enclosed conduit bolted to 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 make out under his left hand that there are two shift levers coming out of the steering column rather than the single lever used with Hydra-matic, so this car has a manual transmission. This is noteworthy in that less than 4% of ’49s were so built.
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 some final testing before production began for 49. For example, the exhaust manifolds look “seasoned”, meaning the engine is not completely new. All this may mean that the photo was taken sometime in 1948.
