General Information
All 1956 Studebaker Golden Hawks were produced in either South Bend Indiana or Vernon
California. The City of Vernon is an industrial city of 5.2 square miles located several miles to the
southeast of Downtown Los Angeles in Southern California. Most Studebaker documents refer
to the Vernon plant as the Los Angeles plant. In keeping with that , the Vernon plant will be
usually be referred to as the Los Angeles plant or simply LA. The Indiana plant will be referenced
as South Bend or SB.
No 1956 Golden Hawks were produced in Canada at the factory in Hamilton, Ontario. Although
there were certainly controls at both the SB and LA plants, some items on cars assembled at the
Los Angeles plant seem to vary at times with their South Bend counterparts.
Often there is no indication as to which serial number was affected when a midyear change was
made to the production run. An effort was made to check the production orders to determine the
approximate serial number, with a final assembly date, on or after the date of the change. That
does not, however, guarantee that the change actually was made at Los Angeles.
A good deal of the information shown throughout this Guide was obtained from the original
production orders, the 1955 - 1958 Studebaker Chassis Parts Catalog, the 1953 - 1958
Studebaker Body Parts Catalog, the 1956 Studebaker Passenger Car Shop Manual, and the 1956
Studebaker Accessories Manual. Additional material was garnered from the Studebaker National
Museum Archive.
While researching this material, I came across a few errors in the parts catalogs, as well as
several among the production orders. In most cases, I was able to identify the correct information.
Last Update - July 2, 2018
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