The Grand National - "State of the Union"

So it was a Saturday morning earlier this year (around April I guess) and I was really bored so I was looking around on Turbobuick.com. I went into the cars for sale forum just to check out how the Grand National pricing was holding up in this bad economy. The market has gone down a little, but not much. I wasn't really ready to buy a GN just yet but one of the first posts was for a GN "roller" in Wisconsin. Basically a mostly-complete car minus the engine and trans. It was a 1987 and the body and interior were in pretty good shape. I figured it would be a cool project for the summer, something my dad and I could work on. That idea kind of died off because both my dad and I were way too busy to conquer such a project. So I ended up enlisting a restoration company to build the car. They send me pictures once a month and I'll share those along with other project milestones along the way.

The first set of pictures is from when they took delivery of the car. I have to warn you, they document everything.

The GN As It Arrived

The next set of pictures is the parts that I gave them with the car. A lot of the parts came with the roller but I bought some new parts:

• Door seals, truck seals
• Front and rear bumper fillers
• Upper and lower door panels
• Steering wheel, trim ring, horn button
• Dual gauge pods for A Pillar and Console. The car had an A pillar single gauge but it wasn't installed right and was the wrong color.
• Billet door escutcheons
• Window switches, lock switches
• Door handles
• Ball joints
• Tubular front control arms (we put them on already)
• Shocks

The Parts Inventory As Delivered

The next step was to get the engine and transmission to them. I bought the engine and tranny from the same person I bought the car from. The engine:

• RJC Racing Billet block girdle kit, powdercoated oil pan
• ARP Main studs, #2&3 billet main caps, neoprene 1-pc rear main seal
• ARP oil pan studs, extended oil pickup for girdle clearance, all main caps machined
• Stock crankshaft machined .010/.010, cryogenically treated and micropolished, rolled fillets
• Stock rods resized, shot peened, polished shafts with ARP rod bolts
• J&E Forged 3.820" bore custom turbo pistons, 8:1 comp. J&E lightweight pins and file-fit rings
• BHJ Racing balancer with reluctor ring, JW "The Wheel" Flywheel, both SFI approved
• Complete rotating assembly balanced and assembled by C&S Performance
• Crane 214/210 custom grind turbo Billet roller camshaft, Crane hi-rev roller lifters, rollmaster dual roller timing chain, hardened chro-moly pushrods
• Elgin high-volume ported front cover for impoved oiling with Melling high volume oil pump
• Clevite 77 Race Serices rod, main, and cam bearings. Brass freeze plugs
• Complete assembly by C&S performance. Balanced and blue-printed, Extensive machine work for girdle installation. Caps machined, align-honed, block zero-decked, etc.

The top end...

• Champion GN1 14-bolt aluminum heads. Brand new castings. Full race port by C&S Performance. Gasket matched and ported to custom intake. Crane roller valve springs installed with titanium retainers and hardened keepers. Upgraded valve seals, with C&S 5-angle race valve job. Stainless Champion intake and exhaust valves. Cometic multi-layer composite head gaskets with Hylomar seal applied for assembly. Scorpion 1.55 Roller Rockers.
• ARP 120,000 PSI head studs, ARP stainless polished intake bolts, Fel-pro 1200 intake gaskets
• Stock intake with extensive race porting by C&S. EGR welded closed, EGR tower milled flat and smoothed, matched to GN1 heads and Fel-Pro gaskets. Intake powdercoated argent silver and clear-coated by Classic Coatings in Sheboygan.

The Engine When I Delivered It

At this point they had already began to strip the car. Some things they pointed out to me in this set of pictures:

• The lack of rust on the body of the car, even when stripped to bare metal (a really good thing)
• A few tiny problem spots, one on the trunk that I knew of
• How crappy the paint was on the car when they started. They took a picture of how it chipped off like old lead paint.

The Car Being Stripped

When they got deeper into the car they noticed a few things. At some point the car must have been through a ditch or something. The frame under the driver's door was damaged badly and there was a huge "rip" in the steel where it looks like someone had pulled the car out. There were some sizable rust holes in the frame behind the trunk and a few other spots. It wasn't worth fixing the frame and we agreed not to want to use a questionable frame so I bought a 1986 Regal to use solely for parts. Gino (who sold me the car, and engine) found it for me. He's been a great resource. The car has an awesome frame, and they'll also use a lot of the little bolts and brakets here and there. It was a 307 V8 car, and the transmission actually looks pretty good. I'll probably scrap everything we don't use but who knows...

The bumpers are off already but otherwise the car is pretty complete. I had the car on my trailer and at a gas station I had a few guys wanting to buy it from me... hah.

The Parts Car Documentation Photos

Over the last week they stripped the body off of the parts car frame, and also got the body of the GN in primer. Here are the pictures of their progress the last few days.

The Parts Car Gets Stripped and GN in Primer

Since the body will be completely off of the frame I went ahead and ordered all new body bushings and mounting hardware from Energy Suspension. I also ordered a complete Hotchkis suspension setup. They'll start installing all of that on Monday.

My car history

So the first post here is going to be a big one since it's been awhile since I bought the car and a lot has happened. But the first thing that people always ask is "what the hell is a Buick Grand National and why do you want one?". So first I'm going to explain some of my history behind my cars and what the future holds.

I've always loved cars and most specifically I've loved a few different types of cars. It all started with my dad and his Corvette. He had one of the first C4's made and I loved that car. I remember we'd go driving in it (back when I was 5 or 6 years old) and I would love how it sounded, I loved how it looked, the interior was crazy for it's time (completely digital dash) and even though it wasn't the fastest thing ever, it was the fastest thing that I had been in and my dad wasn't afraid to open it up.

By the time I was 16 I already had 2 cars. I had a 1992 Camaro, 25th Anniversary Edition, Black with Red stripes, T-Tops. Of course I couldn't drive it in the winter so I had a 1989 Buick Park Avenue to drive in bad weather. My brother had a 1987 Camaro and a 1988 Buick Estate Wagon, my dad has his Corvette and his truck, my mom had her Cadillac STS, and my oldest brother Brian had a Nissan Maxima. That's 8 cars for 5 people, but Brian was in college and we could fit both Camaros and the Corvette in one stall of my parents garage so it wasn't a big deal.

My first car...

For some reason or another, a lot of my friends started getting trucks so I had to follow the bandwagon and sold the Camaro and the Park Avenue to buy a truck. I ended up getting a 1993 Chevy Silverado, it was a step-side short bed, non-extended cab, with a 350. Exactly what I wanted. I was working at CSK Auto at the time so we put a small lift on it, 33" Mud Terrains and rebuilt the 350. It ran strong and served me well through my senior year and in college. I sold it to Greg (my current roommate) for next to nothing and we still beat the crap out of it to this day. It will sit for months on end, get woken up to haul something heavy as hell or when the weather gets really bad, then sit some more. I had put 3" exhaust straight piped out to dual 4" stainless tips but time took it's toll and Greg had to cut it off since it was all loose.

Here's a picture from 2001 (I think).

So once our business started growing I started looking for a new car again. I wanted something sporty but also wanted a sedan. I wanted an Acura TL, but I wanted the version that you could only get in Southern states. Up in Wisconsin, all of the Acura TLs you see now are lame. They're pretty much all automatics, with shitty brakes, shitty winter climate package, no ground effects, and now they're common as hell. I took a one-way flight down to Texas and bought a sweet TL. It was a 2004, Parchment leather on Black pearl metallic, 6-speed manual, Brembo brakes. I did a fair amount of mods and it was a badass car for a few years.

At this point I had the TL and my green truck but the green truck was on it's way out as far as a daily driver was concerned. The A/C stopped working and I went into work on a Saturday in June. It was the first really hot day of the year and then it started raining. So it was hot as hell but pouring rain. Needless to say I was either sweating my ass off from the heat or getting soaked driving with the windows open. This was the green truck's last straw. I really liked the new style Ford trucks so I went to the dealership and they had a 2004 F150 FX4 Super Crew cab there that was only a year old. It was owned by a lady that did crafts and she had a hideous topper on it and plastic that covered the back seats. I met her when I picked up the truck a few days later, she was taking delivery of the same truck, just a 2005. Apparently she gets a new truck every year. Of course I can't keep any vehicle stock so I put a mild lift on the truck, tint, and full audio system. Winter tires are 35's on the stock rims and the summer tires are 325-60-18 Nittos on black rims. I drive my truck the most out of any car and I just turned 100k on it.

So in 2007 a guy at work wanted to buy my TL and I really didn't drive it that much so I sold it to him and started looking for a Corvette to buy. I always have loved Corvette's and wanted a Z06 really bad. The C6's had only been out a short time and I didn't want to buy a new one so I ended up finding a 2006 Z06. It is C6 Corvette VIN #00000551, which makes it one of the first Z06's ever made. It's now Katech Street Attack serial #7. Katech Engines Street Attack Package. Scroll down a bit past Stage 1 and Clubsport if you want to see the package. It's a fun yet scary car. Here's a picture I took with my dad giving my mom a drive after dinner one night. She's not a big fan of the car. The cam lope at idle freaks her out I think.

Next came the really high gas prices of the Summer of 2008. My truck gets fairly poor gas milage, which is too be expected, but it was costing me about $100 a week in gas. I drive a lot and have a tendency not to baby the gas pedal... oh well. I was at Ballweg's in Middleton for a Corvette event and got talking to the sales guy that I liked. I had heard a lot of good things about the then new Cobalt SS's (the turbocharged ones). I put a deposit down and ordered one. I figured it would be a good gas saver but also fun to beat on. A month goes by of GM saying, it will be there tomorrow, it will be there next week, it will be there tomorrow, etc. The dealership was on my way home so I'd swing through when I saw a delivery truck, but my Cobalt was no where to be seen. We checked the order status and it had to go from factory to factory, back to the original factory, then got hailed on so it needed a new body, and basically looked like it would never show up. At the same time, one of the service techs was thinking of trading in his 2006 GTO that he just bought for a new truck. They had great deals on trucks, and 0% financing, because with gas at $4.70 a gallon, you'd be an idiot to buy a big truck. I've always liked his car so I cancelled the order on the Cobalt and we wrote up the sale for the GTO. It started off at 400hp stock, and I left it there for the summer. My standards on gas mileage are low so I was loving the 22MPG. Long trips I can squeeze 26 running in 6th gear at about 80MPH. The winter brought Kook's Signature long tube headers, X-pipe, full Borla stainless exhaust, a Volant intake, and most importantly an LS2-edit license and a few tunes from tuning god Jim Hall of Halltech Systems. Also has the standards, tint (excessive tint according to some state troopers...), Eclipse DVD Navigation deck, 2 JL amps powering a single W6 and Focal K2 Power front stage. It serves as my daily driver in the summer.

And now for the real purpose of this blog, the Grand National! I've always loved the G-Body cars. I think my first experience made me a fan. When my dad and I were looking for my first car we went and test drove a Monte Carlo SS. It had been slightly modified and was in great shape. It also had some transmission work done and I remember my dad stopping out on a country road to see what kind of power it had from a dig. I was only 15 and didn't even have my learners permit yet so I was in the passenger seat of course. He stomped on it and it spun a little but launched nicely. The shift into 2nd was hard. Really hard. The tires let a loud chirp out and did it again into 3rd. At this point I knew I wanted a G-Body. I don't exactly remember why we moved on from the Monte, it was either too expensive or the guy had another offer or something else. We bought the Camaro a few weeks later and I was happy, but every time we went to Spring/Fall Jefferson (big car show here) I would look at the Monte Carlos. I would also long for the Grand Nationals there but they were (and still are) ridiculously priced.

So that brings me to the beginning of this year....

Blog I guess

I was looking for a good way to document and keep track of the build of my 1987 Buick Grand National. I have a lot of info and pictures but had no way to make it look nice so I signed up for this blog. So I guess I'm blogging. I'll update this as I get more pictures and get parts and stuff.