Intro and Background

The Beginning I

        A little background is due for this blog. Back in 1969 my grandma bought a gold 4 door hardtop 1970 Buick LeSabre off the showroom floor in lovely Berwyn, Illinois. Twenty years after that, my grandma quit driving and passed the car over to my mom. I learned how to drive on it, tried to teach a friend how to drive with it, and that friend backed it onto a fire hydrant. That was about 1998ish and forced my mom to get a new(er) car, since she needed something to get to work with. The car was partially fixed and I drove it throughout the rest of high school. I found another 70 Buick and my friend and I bought it together my junior year. After high school I joined the army national guard, went to basic and AIT, and upon getting back, got the other car from my friend and he got a new car. Actually, the frame had broken, so I just somewhat inherited it from him and he got a new car. Or it went something like that anyhow...getting fuzzy.

The above is a mid restoration shot of the one that was my grandma’s car. The car below was the car I bought with my friend which the frame broke on.

For future reference, the one that was my grandma's will be refered to as the "gold car". The one I got with my friend, that ended up being just mine is/was the "brown car".

The gold car's frame was pretty crappy after 30 years of Chicago's salty winters and a new frame/body was swapped in. A 455 was also sourced, built (to about 450hp….I unfortunately lost the dyno sheet when I was deployed with the national guard) and installed. Then I just started collecting parts for it and fixing it up. It's about done now, but it needs paint.

But it was put on long pause because of the brown car. The brown car became my daily driver once I got it from my friend. It was a good car...these cars are great driving cars, but it too had spent it's entire 30+ years in Chicago, resulting in a lot of rust also. I put off fixing it as I think having 2 projects at once is a bit much, but it got to the point where even I didn't feel very safe driving it. The frame rotted apart in the rear, and I had it supported with a metal brace, chain, and bungee cords. And since the rear bumper bolts to the frame, it would bounce up and down over every bump. Kinda funny, but kinda scarry. More scarry actually.

    I wanted to fix it (because I'm sentimental and didn't want to get rid of it) by getting a new frame and replacement sheetmetal. However, after searching for around half a year for a new frame to swap in, I came to the conclusion that it just wasn’t worth it. I'd find stuff, but it would cost much more than the car was worth to get it to the great city of Berwyn.

    But luckily, while a-surfin' the v8buick site, I found Calvin, a fellow Buick nut who had a 70 LeSabre for sale. He just kinda wanted to get rid of it; it had no engine, and another guy needed the rear bumper and decklid. Good for me! I got the car for $300, and U-Hauled it back home (another $300). I swapped part of the front clip, bumpers/decklid, and drivetrain into it, and wha-la, new car, and a two door too!

    The brown car had needed a lot more work than this new car (from now on, the "green car") so I figure that the brown car can at least partly live on in this car, and it satisfied my sentimentality that way anyhow.

The Beginning II

Well, this is what the green car looked like when I picked it up. The interior was in great shape, but badly in need of a cleaning; the guy who had it before Calvin had it must've smoked like a crack addict because there was a nasty layer of grime over everything. It still gets on the windows when you roll them down and up. Anyhow, it took about 8 hours of hard core cleaning to get the inside nice again, but it was worth it. That's the interior after I cleaned. It came out unbelievably nice for the age of the car. Oh, and the nasty brown mat is from the brown car because this car didn't have mats and I don't want to mess up the nice rug. And I put those gauges in when I swapped in the engine…I figure it’s better to know what’s up then rely on idiot lights.

Since getting the car, most of the ‘improvements’ I’ve made have been to fix the body. When I say that the car was in better shape than the brown car that it replaced, I guess I really need the stress that the brown car was in horrible shape! The trunk floor of the green car had rust in the typical spots for these cars – around the body mounts. The quarter panels had rusted around the bottoms behind the rear wheels as well as a little in front of the rear wheels. And the fenders had rotted behind the front wheels due to leaves and other crap collecting there over years and years.

The easiest to deal with was the fenders. I found some fenders from a 69 LeSabre for $10 each from a guy trying to get rid of stuff. Again, this was a v8buick.com find. The 69 LeSabre didn’t have the port holes in the same position, nor the same marker light, but I honestly don’t care. I’ll just fill the holes for the portholes and drill new ones so the 70 portholes can be put on. As for the marker lights, I think the 69 marker light location looks pretty good and most people won’t notice anyhow.

The trunk floor issue was solved by me learning how to weld. If you click on the link to the right entitled ‘Body Work,’ I go over it in there. There’s the welding tutorial too, but it’s still not done…sorry about that. What I haven’t posted yet is the quarter panel replacement, however if you check this site and look at the pics, you can see the general gist of it, and that’s basically what I did. I learned something very very important in the process…don’t weld more than about a 1” bead at a time! The heat will warp the quarter, and that’s a HUGE mess to fix.

I’ve done a few minor other things to the green car that weren’t related to fixing the body up. One is to install an electric fan. A fan from a mid-90s Volvo fits nicely in and is a simple wiring job consisting of just a relay and a temp sensor. I’ve also changed out the alternator for a 140 amp unit because of the sound system I have in the car (subs draw current, and no, I don’t drive around setting off car alarms and making people deaf). I also picked up a kit from Scarebird for a disc brake conversion, but as of the writing, haven’t had time to install it. Whenever that actually gets done, I’ll update this again.

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