ClassicCar

No knock on Hudson but their stepdown wiring diagrams were not the best. There's also a wiring mistake that carried through all years 48-54 without being revised! Try to get a wiring diagram from Rhode Island Wiring or use the one from Motor's manual . They are a bit clearer. My 2 cents:)

Alex you do great work especially when you have to start out with copy that was never clear to begin with.

If memory serves,there is a foul up on the passenger side wiring with the courtesy light and the way in which the connectors and switch are shown. It really had me going nuts until I realized they had mis connected the leads to the wrong spots. No biggie but that mistake carried on through the 54 model year. Here is another mystery; why didn't Hudson ever show the wiring for the heater/blower??? . They show turn signal wiring which was less common than heater/blowers but no wiring schematic for them. Weird. Another Hudson mini mystery :)

Durn sight simpler to read back in the teens and 20's!!!!!!!!! :D

Hudsonly,
Alex Burr
Memphis, TN

Most mauals of the time seem to leave a lot "Out" . I think the reality is the type of mechanic / owner then had a certain expected level of knowlage. And so they would leave out details you just should know .Such as the positive ground issue ,every junk Hudson you see in the hands of a new owner lately .Has a 12 volt battery installed backward (negative ground) and fried everything. There was one on ebay the other day ,still had the old generator so quite sure it was not converted to 12 volt.
They never heard of a 6 -volt battery ,besides that where would I get one they ask ?
Roger

I think the biggest problem lies in todays car culture. From, at least, the 1950's on back this was a nation of tinkerers - before WWII the country was largely agragarian (sp??). Cars, and trucks, were made to be serviced so most farmers and/or their sons were able to keep the machinery running. In the 1950's, and earlier, we literally built our cars from stuff we hauled out of junk yards and put together. That we weren't all killed shows that either the cars were bullet proof, or we knew what we were doing (oh really) or just plain damned lucky.
Look around your neighborhoods and count how many kids are out working on a jalopy - nope, Mom or Pop will buy Jr his first car and Jr really couldn't tell a spark plug from a lug bolt. In the 50's and earlier it was the other way around. Of course another problem is there are no junkyards to salvage cars from - not like we had pre-1970's. Personally, I can see why kids today don't want to work on cars - for myself I'd work on anything up to about 1975, I'd look at anything from 1975 to around 1990 - after that I don't even want to open the hood.

Hudsonly,
Alex Bur
Memphis, TN