1970 Buick Estate Restoration

Ok **** its been ages, I have got through so much but these photos make it look like stuff all haha

OK stripped out the POR 15 because it sucks, recoated with epoxy primer, still have more to go but its a low priority maybe in the next few days. I want to bang some black 2k on the floor to but if I dont get there epoxy will be fine



Ok so kept doing all the rust, small patch in the corner of the rear guard



Ugly funny shaped patch in the rear tailgate jamb, pretty ****ty design with no drains here. Once the window well in the rear quarter went it looks like 10cm of water had been sitting here until it rusted through



Same with the other side, patch was allot more simple



Had to cut out the whole lower rear quarter section



Half way through piecing it together, would have been nice to do this in one pice and swage it in but just needed it done and I need some better tools



Blocked this out on the expoxy quickly with 180 using dry guide coat, love that ****



Spot fixing a few bits with easysand, its just a super fine polyester filler



Smoothed out and put back into epoxy





The whole car is actually now in 4 coats of high build urethane primer and has been for about 4 weeks, wanted it to sit for awhile and do any shrinking. Almost ready to block this and prep the door jambs & rear of doors for paint. Doors will then be hung and get the outside ready for paint

New spray gun 1.3 & 1.4 tips Austuro brand, pretty much a high end copy of a Iwata LPH-400, almost bought the LPH (or w400) but was talked into this gun, not dissapointed yet, sprays primo.



Engine came out and the firewall got bare metalled and epoxy primered.



Let this cure and did the seams with sika, I then sprayed more epoxy and wet sprayed some industrial (cheap) 2K black over it



I had piles of parts sandblasted, gas tank, bumper brackets, millions of under bonnet bits etc. I got the guys at the blasting place to epoxy the parts so they could sit around for abit. I scuffed about half the parts with red scotch brite and hung them in the shed for paint, hit them with epoxy primer and wet coated more 2K black on them. This black cures super hard, its good **** $120 for 4 litres and it mixes up to 6 litres with the hardener



OK kind of catching up to where I am at now. Today I fixed abit of rust in one of the doors, cut out this double skinned section and cleaned it up with various grinder attachments. Welded in a patch panel to the outside skin, painted the inside of both and welded it back together




Bare metalled all the doors over the last week, paint stripper, wire wheel, nylon stripping disks & finally cleaned up with the DA and scotch brite. One door had a pretty epic dent, took the best part of a day to fix using mostly welded on studs and a little slide hammer.



Hung the doors in the shed and epoxy primered them, hit them wet at the same time with 2k urethane primer mixed up as high fill mode. 2 coats of epoxy & 3 of high build



Sitting in the spare room curing, will block sand and fill a few small blemeshes next week



So the body is getting pretty close, due to time constraints with bathurst coming up I may get someone else to paint it. It is just so time consuming setting up the shed for a propper paint job

When I pulled the engine I went about checking it over, sadly there was copper coloured flakes in the oil! So I fully stripped the engine to find every main had run to some degree. Looks like it had been re-shelled in the past with std sized bearings (ie no crank gind or align hone) 455 mains tend to not be in-line and round after 40 years, so seems the re-shell without straightening things up has caused the problem. I have dropped the block off at the best engine machinist I could find, no one has a align hone large enough in Brisbane so I have to get it align bored. Anyway the block just passed the sonic test (very close to .1" on the pin side on number 6) it has already been opened up to .03" over so we should get away with 0.04" over but the block is on its last over bore! Full host of new parts pistons, cam, bearings etc are all on the way from the USA, should be easily done in time

Dropped off the driveshaft to be rebuilt yesterday, need allot of work it has a few big hits in it. Will be getting new tube, rubber dampener & UJ's. Also dropped off the radiator to be flushed and tested.

Also have a epic list of misc parts I will be ordering very soon, new fasteners, weatherstriping, alt, new starter, disc brake conversion etc etc

Busy busy!

 

All the panel work was done about 2 weeks ago now, big rust repairs on the tailgate (whole bottom edge replaced) unstiched some big patches in the back of the bonnet and did my best to clean up the rust.

The car was dropped off at the painters with 99% of the panel work done by myself, paint guy was stoked and he just had to prime and wetsand to get it ready for paint.

Car at the painters, it was all done in stages due to his booth size and the time constraints. Their paint guy is magic, it all came out the same shade thankfully.



Got the car back on the 21st of September, 1.5 weeks until we should be driving to bathurst to pick up some fellow OS'ers

 

So keen on a new page haha.

Anyway I started on the sound deadening on the firewall first so I could bolt **** up and not have it in the way.



Thanks to Phill who chucked down the rest of the sound deadening so I was free to do other stuff

 

So next thing in my crappy photo log is the engine.

The bottom end was completed on the 29th of September so 5 days before we were due to depart. There's something so awesome about a newly machined block with fresh pistons etc






The heads were reconditioned aswell, all valves and seats got a 3 angle cut and new springs and retainers



So banged it all together on the night it came back, dialed in the cam and adjusted the pushrods.



Painted it but it came out real ****, no time for fixing that though, worst dark photo ever



And heres one of it after the trip. oil line on the mechanical gauge came loose and squirted some oil on the fan, so abit messy.



Heres teh specs/shopping list:
70 455 block
line bored mains set to 0.002" ACL bearings, block squared and decked 0.02" on a CNC
Oil pickup gallery enlarged, all main oil gallery turns radiussed
ARP rod bolts, rods ballanced and resized for 0.002" clearence
10.5:1 compression 0.04" over cast pistons ballanced with the rods, plasma molly rings
70 455 heads, 3 angle valve job, new 100lb valve springs, 0.015" cut from the head
Retro B4B intake manifold, cut down to fit the shaved heads and deck
TA212 cam 470"-218' Intake/.475"-230' on the Exhaust
New TA Hydralic lifters
TA adjustable pushrods (saved time measuring and ordering a solid set)
Stock good condition rockers
Double roller adjustable cam chain/gears
TA shorty headers

Compression is roughly up slightly over 11:1 it runs fine on 98. It goes really well, just pulls and pulls even being in a land barge

It actually returned 16L/100km on one fill up of the journey on the open road which is ****ing amazing, still have tuning to do aswell so could better this

 

OK so the body was coming together and the engine got dropped into place. The three next big hurdles on this thing were the vinyl roof, woodgrain panels and installing the glass

Had Camel put me on to a decent upholsterer who would do the vinyl roof, I sadly didn't get any pics of the install but the guy was awesome. Went on in a few hours and came out perfect, good price aswell




Next was the wood grain stick on vinyl, now I was keen on a profesional to do this but every place I rung the guys were retarded. They all told me it wouldnt work blah blah. basicallt they all deal with the real thin normal sign wrinting vinyl and were all cocks, that was about 10 shops I tried. Once placde would do it but they wanted to charge me $800, told them to piss off I'll do it myself.

So I hung it down the side of the car, marked out each panels cut them one at a time and stuck them on! scary **** as there was no room for do-overs at this stage





Thi image is jumping forward and was taken after the trip, still a few bubbles to sort, but it came out real well.

 

OK so about time I finsihed this! All these pics are stolen from D & KY as I had no time to take photos.

So we left off that the car was back from the painters and I had done most of the wood grain, the boys from NZ showed up around this time and things really started cranking.

Fender skirts on, radiator support on, new radiator from the states, bent up some new steel trans cooler lines. You can also see my new blinging internally regulated alternator, also got a new steel fuel line to the carb, makes things nice and tidy



I set D to putting the tailgate together, the double action mechanism has 3 latches and a swiveling hinge in the lower left corner. I think the latches and lockouts etc drove D slightly insane

Anyway the tailgate was a rusty piece of **** that really needed to be un-stitched fully, but that would be a nightmare. Anyway I cut a bunch of stuff out of it






To this



This ones late at night, guards were frustrating to hang, american cars of this era have terrible panel fits from the factory, many shims were used in the front end alignment!



Next morning, bonnet on, some lights going on




Philly installing some internal wiring, or some sound deadening. Cheers Mc Nilly



Boom, tailgate is hung.

 

Front bumper went on, this was real gay to get fitting sweet! it required trimming down the rubber stop that supports the middle of the bumper. Due to the panel gaps being allot closer on the rest of the car the bumper probably sits around 15mm further back than it used to.



Pow, underfelt



Still on the front end in this shot,




Front on,



Late night rear bumper hanging





This is the only shot I have of me installing the front disk brake conversion. Anyway it uses 71 Riviera disks and giant 90's Astro Van calipers,



This is the new brake bias booster, has a few different restricters you can run to run less rear bias. HAd to quickly mod the factory bracket and change a couple of brake lines to get it all to work.



Carpet installed thanks to D



Seats installed



Dickie seat in, and allot more of the trims, rear lights etc



Boys got the dash, in. We didn't get the electrics on the seat going properly so the cabin is abit cramped in this photo.



And in about 8 days after it came back from the painters as a stripped shell we had something that resembled a car



We took the car for its first drive the day before we were meant to leave for Bathurst, everything was behaving well, car held temperature and oil pressure was strong. The brake booster had developed a leak on the push-rod on the brake pedal side. We pulled it apart about 6 times and managed to make the leak less with a o-ring replacement, un boosted brakes weren't going to stop us driving this thing down though! during the last days of installation we also found the wiper motor had given up, again like the booster there was no way we could replace it at short notice so we had it apart several times for bench testing. The motor finally went on the bench with a spruce up, but failed as soon as it had load on it in the car. Anyway KY set to converting the wiper motor from my XF ute to work in the Buick, we lost the auto park feature of the wipers but who cares!



I have since ordered and replaced the booster and wiper motor

Anyway heres one from the trip down to Bathurst, we left Brisbane at around 7.30pm for Bathurst, this next photo is at about 5am an hour or so north of New Castle. Camel had a few running issues, but we sorted it and kept rolling.



Back on the road and about 30min north of New Castle. The keen will notice the dents in the tailgate, it fell off when I sat on it! We didn't have the syncronisation sorted on the latches and it fell off in gate mode. Gutted but its a easy fix and I have paint left, then I can hurry up and chuck the vinyl and chrome on it.

 

So done some stuff to this, but mostly just driven the **** out of it, it gets out most weekends

Dropped roughly 2.5" out of the ride height and have it sitting roughly at the legal height here, for insurance purposes I'd like to stay legal. The other half of me says its way to high and just bag it already, we will see

Rear springs are egg shaped so got some in from the US, old vs new




Chucked in some air helper springs aswell, helps a **** load when you load it up!



In the front I scored some new springs from the US and gave them the chop to match the back. Chucked some new shocks in the front and have some air shocks for the back to which I may need when its super loaded up for Bathurst.

Then I gave it its first clean since I put it together and rolled down to the Brizvegas custom car thingy. Its basically a sweet low key hotrod show that has a few bands and markets, good day

 

OK so I'll go through and try tidy up all the lost photos. The story of the rushed rebuild is I was trying to get it together to attend a famous race meeting here. The race is the Bathurst 1000, the Australian V8 supercars race a 1000km endurance race here every year and this year was the 50th anniversary. I had invited some friends to attend from overseas so I had to get the car going for this road trip. We ended up getting the wagon sorted 2 days before we were due to leave, luckily the car performed perfectly. We ended up doing 2500km on the trip and it was amazing! nothing like some pressure to get a car finished, took 12 months and learnt a whole bunch along the way.

I still have the interior to finish and all sorts of finishing touches, but for now just enjoying it.

 

G'day Mate!

What a great story on bringing back an excellent Estate model year wagon! You certainly have some mad skills!

Thanks for all the detail of all your work along the way.

rating for sure!

Keep us posted on finishing up work and adventures. Thanks again!

 

Wow! Your Estate Wagon looks fantastic! So much hard work and talent to bring it up to this excellent condition! You must be so proud! :2_thumbs_up_-_anima

What a handsome one-year-only wagon!



David

 

Damm, Spencer!

Man-o-man-o-man!!!

Very cool project, looked really nice in the before pics, looks stunning now. I'm jealous!

Best regards,
Tom

 

Hi Spence

Guess I better do a build thread for my Commy - but mine is a bucket of **** compared to what Spence has done. (I'm not just saying that to be humble either)

 

This was awesome. At first I couldn't figure out how you were getting so much done so quickly, but then I saw it took place over several months. Awesome job.