1990 Celebrity Eurosport fixer upper

Figured I might as well start a thread on the wagon I got last spring. Buddy of my CEO was selling it. I had been seeing it around town since 2019 and admiring it. The previous fall I was out with my Cutlass Cruiser and got to park next to it and take some pics.

The good:
Straight body, zero rust even on bottom. That alone is worth the $900 I paid. Starts and runs and drives. 50k and feels like it, engine feels super tight still.

The bad:
Tires are shot. Brakes are soft. Hard to get started, and starts stumbling and smelling overly rich as it warms up. Radiator leaks. Drivers door lock doesn’t work (probably linkage). Dimmer switch hanging loose and actuator rod missing. Small ding in drivers side rear door. Paint is all intact but has a lot of dirt scratches, mainly on hood. With the right method they should clean up.

Last year I didn’t get to do anything but get the battery charged up good, and run my AutoXray scanner on it. Wasn’t anything definitive, but I’ll check everything out in detail once winter is over. This summer I wanna get it fixed up good. Maybe be ready for next year’s 80s show.

One thing I wanna do is put more Euro into the Eurosport. I already got some export taillights with amber turn signals, and some lights to use for side repeaters, and wire the sidemarkers to flash in sync. Thinking of duplicating the front turn signals into the rear bumper to use as rear fog lights. When the weather improves I’ll check out the junkyard, for those and the dimmer switch rod.

Also plan to do the same thing I did to my Celebrity sedan dash back in 2003. Create a factory looking oil pressure gauge and tach. Celebrity full gauge package did not include oil pressure. That’s kinda important. I made an analog tach for my sedan right after the oil gauge, but I may use the bargraph tach I have from a Century cluster if it even works after 15-20 years of sitting in my garage. The Celebrity offered the same bargraph tach but pretty rare and only up to 1988.

 

Sounded like a good idea. But deleting this thread if the forum continues to not allow me to post pictures. Even downsized ones.

 

When I first saw the car in summer 2019, at the local tire shop. I wanted it then. (It’s the same car because it’s got the same out of state sticker in the drivers lower corner of the windshield).




Then last fall when I got to park next to it at a local trailhead. Driven by the daughter of the guy I bought it from.



Then last winter a coworker sent me this from Marketplace. I had inquired but he really wanted 4000, so no thanks. After mentioning it to the guy I bought it from, it wasn’t his car listed. Kinda figured that as the ad has a seriously misaligned front wheel and busted grille. But what are the odds in this sparsely populated area, that 2 identical white 1990 Eurosport wagons would exist 13 miles apart?



So finally when my CEO came to me saying his buddy was selling his unlisted, I jumped on it. And here it is right off the dolly (still hitched to my Jeep in the background before returning it).



After about a week, the stone dead battery charged up nicely, and started strong all summer. Didn’t get any pics of the inside, but it’s pretty clean. Right now it’s buried in the snow, guarded by pine trees, away from all the salt snow in the driveway.

 

Figured out what was going on. It’s not just posting pics. It’s the same thing this site has been doing for years. Why I don’t post much. It’s like the site only operates on random shreds of connectivity. So to post, upload, or even just load a page to read, you have to catch it when it’s working. I started uploading pics and writing a reply at lunch, it worked for 10 minutes, then wouldn’t do anything for the next 20 minutes and then had to give up and go back to work.

I’m on mobile, and no other forum does this. At home I got a solid 100 mbps and same thing.

Anyway it’s working at the moment, figure I’ll upload some pics and edit later. Or maybe not, by the time I was done typing, the site quit again.

Now home after work. I see it posted when it finally got connectivity.

 

Here’s the optional “full” gauge cluster for the Celebrity. Does not include an oil pressure gauge. The spot on the far right would fit one, but it’s full of idiot lights, just like the leftmost section. Most of them unused.

So this is what I did to my 1989 Celebrity sedan in 2003. I still drive that car daily in the summer, and the gauge still works. I cut apart the idiot light labels, and reassembled the 6 applicable ones into one for the left side. Remapped them electrically on the back. Covered them with a few layers of translucent office paper covers to hide the taped up light labels.

I used a Celebrity temperature gauge from a spare cluster and rubbed off the graphic. A coworker who does decals on the side, made me a waterslide decal after I made it in paint shop. (He had limited colors at the time, I bet he could get the full color range now.) The oil gauge movement is from a Pontiac 6000, which has the same travel and position and sending unit. The 6000 needle shaft is just a little bigger, so I paid a local watchmaker to fit the Celebrity needle onto the 6000 shaft. I used 2 idiot light holes with #74 bulbs to get similar illumination as the #194 bulbs behind the other gauges.

For the tach, I used a 6000 tach movement and needle, I wanted to use a Celebrity speedometer needle cut down, but it wouldn’t balance. I made a label in paint shop printed as a photograph. I carved away a bunch of the dash beneath, and mounted it all to a plexiglass plate. To make the dash opening look authentic, I took a spare trim panel, cut out the sides from the radio opening, and reassembled them 90 degrees out as a tach opening. That still works too.



The tach I still have some other ideas to explore, but I’m definitely doing the same thing for an oil pressure gauge in the new wagon.

 

Snowstorm tonight, not working on anything but staying warm. So anyway ever since I was able to walk, I’ve been fascinated by vehicle lights, dash and exterior. I’d climb into our bank repo 67 Calais and play with the lights till I killed the battery, enough times that the electrical system failed I was told. Feel bad about it now but what did I know. I’d try to catch the sun and ID the dash lights. Go around parking lots and smudge the dirt off lights with my thumb to make them pretty. And wonder why some sidemarkers didn’t light up.

There’s quite the debate about amber rear turn signals. Part of me thinks the all red looks better, and the larger the brake light the better. But as a little kid I’d wonder why they made them use the same bulb, and other parts of the light were only marker light. Seemed like wasted space. Before I had a car I wanted to rewire some of them to use half the red for brakes and half the red for turn, just to see. Well some modern cars have done just that and IMO it kinda sucks lol. The other part of me wants to see the turn signal a different color, but not if it’s gonna make the brake light tiny. Then there’s the part of me that just likes to be different.

Well anyway, ever since I discovered that a Celebrity wagon taillight with amber turn signals was manufactured, I wanted to at least try it. It seems to only exist not for a Celebrity, but for a Buick Century badged as a Buick Regal Estate in Japan.



So I researched Japanese auto parts sites and decided to go for it. Since I already had this Celebrity which happened to be a good excuse to do so. Between shipping, duties, tariffs, etc. I probably paid way too much, but hey sometimes we all do that for rare parts on a project car we love.

And here they are. I used my LED flashlight to see how they lit up. There is a metal plate added as a divider between the red and amber. And a black plastic blocker plate over the rear middle area. Maybe Japan needs more division between the colors? But it cuts my brake light area in half and looks silly and has to go. The USA light shines in the middle.



So I thought about the best way to open these. Some people said use the oven, but if I melted them then I’d be screwed. So between Dremel cutoff wheels and saw wheels, a knockoff exacto knife set, a hacksaw blade, I cut through the old hardened adhesive and got the lights open. The grilles just pop off and I can swap on my black Euro grilles.

The black plastic part is thankfully just lightly superglued in place, so that came out easily with a knife. There is a 2nd shield leftover from the USA light that isolates the middle section as a marker light, which in this application blocks about 5% of the area, so why not remove it. Easily pried the rivets out of the plastic. The amber divider shield is just aluminum wrapped with butyl tape. It’s simpler than I thought. If one wanted to make more of these, just cut the top 1/3 off a USA light, and duplicate it in amber by following one of many youtube videos about re-molding taillights. Cut a piece of aluminum sheet, and there you go. I took measurements and made templates for the future.



Now that’s a lot better brake light! Now I’m waiting to glue (probably silicone adhesive) these back together until it gets warm enough to do it outside.

As far as the re-wiring, I pored over the wiring diagrams from my factory service manual, and it’s simpler than I thought. Just by cutting the brake wire going to the turn signal switch, it sends only turn signals back through the existing wires, even the hazards would work properly in amber. Then all I would have to do is run a wire from the 3rd brake light to the bottom bulb on each side, cutting the existing wire. And cut the taillight wire at the turn signal bulbs. No running wires the length of the car. And all bulbs would ultimately feed from their original sources, so no upsizing fuses or wires. And if heaven forbid something happened where I had to stick a USA light back in its place, it would work just like any modern car that has 2 red lights, one for brake and one for turn.

I’ve read enough stories about people saying there’s no Euro in the Eurosport. So I’m thinking about adding some Euro flair, these export lights being a start. Possibly side repeaters if I can make it look good and hide the wires without drilling. Possibly mount a set of the front bumper turn signals into the rear bumper as rear fog lights. Rewire the sidemarkers to flash in sync, as I read Euro spec requires this. Easy to do with a DIY switchback module which I already made for my trailer to make the sidemarkers do just that (link).

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/uvnt...ey=y46542v2wjjxpxo48my6vd8sz&st=t2ojd3ow&dl=0

So that’s my thoughts for now.

 

Finally the forum has loaded after my last post. Today I pulled the old gauge clusters I’ve had for 15-20 years out of the garage.

The Century cluster I was originally going to design an oil pressure gauge for the top right corner, similar to what I did with my Celebrity sedan. I never had a Century but lots of people on the forum did. Never got around to it. But looking at it in recent years, I realized it also had the rare bargraph tach just like they used in some Celebritys. Just in a different housing. So maybe I can make it work in the Eurosport.

First of all, it’d be a miracle if it even still worked. It sat on the top shelf of my leaky porch at the old house, with mice, bird nests, and squirrels crawling over it. Then on the top shelf of this garage for 10 years, with mice and water leaks.

First had to clean it up with a Clorox germ killing spray. Not too bad. The numbers wanted to wash away but I’d be putting on a new waterslide decal with a Celebrity motif anyway. The part sticking up might be a fitment issue, but I can always cut the board in a place with minimal traces, and relocate it. In any case I would cut off the speedometer part as needed to make it fit wherever I put it.



Then I rigged up my tachometer test unit that I used to repair the tach in the Cutlass Cruiser in 2018. I tested it on an old 6000 tach to confirm I got it right, so I didn’t fry this one.

And imagine that, it works!! Not totally accurate though, but a resistor in GM tachs is known to drift and/or fail. That’s what happened with the Cruiser tach, and a nice online writeup helped me with that. Unfortunately the whole site was deleted overnight by its owner, but I did print it and still have it.

It’s not the same setup with this tach, and not being an electronics whiz I wouldn’t know where to start. It’s possible this tach came from a 4 cylinder car, because if I reduce the counts by 1/3 it’s pretty accurate. At 5k it’s still a bit high, and 6k really high, but I don’t rev my engines like that anyway. Better to err on the high side.

I also could get the same results by using the proper counts, and reducing the supply voltage to 7.4 volts. Now that’s a workaround that I could do, by building a simple voltage regulator.



Here is a closeup of the bargraph at a simulated 6k rpm. I love the colors, even the hint of orange at each multiple of 1k.



I didn’t take pictures of the spare Celebrity clusters. I pulled them the rest of the way apart and cleaned them up too. So I have a Celebrity temp gauge and needle ready, because that’s the proper configuration for the oil pressure gauge. Last time I used a 6000 oil movement and had the needle redrilled. And after starting the place in the 70s, that guy is still in business. But I wondered if any of the other gauge movements might work. Well according to the FSM for my Cruiser (which uses the same senders along with the Century and 6000), both the oil and fuel gauge take a 0 to 90 ohm reading from their sender. So I might be able to use the spare Celebrity fuel gauge movement with its matching needle. I’ll have to try it once I get the cluster out.

So aside from building a voltage regulator (or buying one off eBay), I’m at a standstill until I can get the car out when the snow is gone. And while we have had a few really warm days, everything is still buried, and by the middle of the week we get more snow and winter temperatures with no end in sight.