1990 Buick Estate Wagon Hearse

We don't see flower cars in this area (rural Washington State), but we have a heck of a lot of limos! Folks hire 'em to haul 'em around wine tasting so they don't get thrown in the pokey for driving full of vino.

I blocked and am in the process of machine cutting/polishing now. It is looking pretty good considering....

 

Parrott's Funeral Home in Tyrone, GA uses a restomodded 1938 Packard hearse in their fleet. Beautiful, elegant car. 472 Cadillac, 400 turbohydramatic.

 

Here are some pics from last weekend...
Here she is washed, before any blocking. It looks pretty good from a distance but there are a couple of nasty sags and some serious orange peal that needs to go.

Here I have blocked the corner of the roof with 1200 grit paper with a sanding sponge. Before I went over it again I washed it down with water with a little dish soap in it to help lubricate the sand paper.

This is hard to see, but it is amazing how much sanded paint winds up in the bucket even though it doesn't look like you are doing much. I dumped the bucket out several times and got fresh water. Also, the paper gets replaced often.

Here I have washed it again and taped off the edges - I'm not exactly a pro at machine buffing, and I didn't want to cut through the edges. As you can see, it looks pretty good after sanding.

I don't have a finished pic yet: After polishing I wasn't satisfied with the orange peal still left in certain areas that either were much worse or that I just missed with sanding, so I'm going to re-sand and machine buff it.

 

Dang, this thing has a long roof! I've wet sanded/polished twice, and there is still some non-uniform shine. Maybe I'll do it once more, then be done.

I want to put it back together!

 

Haven't had time to do much lately, but my goal is to have one more cut/buff, the windshield installed, the wheels painted, and the trim on before Halloween.

Yesterday I cleaned up the wheels (scouring powder with a brush first, then scotch-brite with scouring powder) and painted them flat black.

Since we are going into winter I decided to paint the gizmo that the hubcaps bolt onto and put on some nice chrome lug nuts. The winters here are slushy and icy making for some very difficult to clean wire hubcaps.
First I painted 'em white, then painted their feet black to blend in with the rim. Topped off with a polished bumper bolt screwed into the hole. I'm not sure I like the white, but that is the way she'll roll till I change 'em or cover them up again with the hubcaps.

 

Found the gizmo for my Pontiac in the glove compartment. I almost threw it away thinking it was some sort of odd scrap piece. Not sure what kept me from doing so but darn lucky I kept it.

 

When I got the hearse the first thing I wanted to do was pull the wheels off and check the brakes. I couldn't get the bloody hubcaps off - no tool anywhere.

I like the hubcaps, though, so I thought this would be a handy way to keep them from getting lost in the garage, and they absolutely keep the cap on the wheel (we have some rough roads around here).

In fact, I noticed a ticking noise at slow speed. I pulled the hubcap off the offending wheel - and it was the only one that didn't have a 3/8 bolt holding the cap on. The center of the cone was broken out. I JB Welded the center back together, bolted the cap back on, and no more noise.

I have switched to a 3/8 bolt to hold all of them on instead of the mickey-mouse set up that was stock. A nut driver is duct-taped to the jack!

 

Happy Halloween!



New windshield, windshield/back door trim re-installed, wheels painted. The glass in the rear door was leaking, so I had it removed and re-installed when the windshield was replaced, too.

Haven't got the rest of the trim on yet, though.....

 

It's looking good! Great work.

 

Well, Ive got all the trim on (cut and buffed 3 times!), got the windshield wiper rest (from a junkyard about 70 miles away) replaced. This was a little difficult to do since I could not find an exact replacement, so I had to modify one that was almost the same with some very careful grinding and drilling. Sorry, I forgot to take pics of that.....I was in a hurry! Until that point, I couldn't run the wipers because the arm would catch on the windshield.

I also completely detailed the interior: shampooed the carpeting, door panels, etc. By the way, carpet shampoo works really good for cleaning hard vinyl and rubber arm rests, etc.

There are 2 things I want to get done on the interior before spring: Replace the headliner and add a good sound system, which will be hidden.

 

Booooo! Hissss! Booooo!

 

The Buick was running OK, but seemed to be a bit rich. After doing some research, I learned that the O2 sensor should be replaced about every 50K miles on the 5L Olds V8. I switched out the oxygen sensor ($22 at NAPA) and she is now purring like a kitten again! The sensor tip was charcoal black on the old one.

Interestingly, the tranny shift points changed also: each gear seems to shifting at a slightly higher RPM, which is a good thing!

 

Had a pretty bad vibration occurring at about 45 mph so I rebalanced all the tires which did absolutely nothing. After checking out the drive train, I realized the u-joints were shot and I could see where the drive line was touching the tunnel. Apparently it was like that since new.

Got the joints replaced and "relieved" the tunnel. There is still some vibration but not near as noticeable. My tranny guy checked the carrier bearing for me and assured me it was fine. I suspect balancing the drive line would help, but what really needs to be done is to change the angle from the rear end to the drive line, which can't be done without major work.

 

This story isn't really related to the hearse (Evangelina), but you might find it entertaining:

Weekend before last I decided it was time for an oil change for the 2003 Dodge diesel pickup. Got the fuel and oil filters, the oil, the drain pan etc handy after warming up the beast.

Got situated with the creeper, pulled the plug, then remembered that I had gotten the wrong pan. I tried to re-install the plug before too much hot oil dumped on the driveway but my fingers got hot and I dropped the plug. As per Murphy's Law, the plug fell into the pan and into the drain hole of the pan, plugging it perfectly!

The top of the pan filled up and approximately 2 gallons of oil dumped onto my blacktop driveway! I had about 5 or 6 lbs of floor dry and built a dam around the black lake creeping out from under the pickup.

Fortunately, there is a parts store about 2 miles from my home so I raced (sort of) over there and bought a couple bags.

Needless to say, it took all morning to do this service job.......