Hello Pennock's! My name is Daniel, and this is my 1996 Buick Century Special wagon, named Kaiser George IX. I've done lots of things to it over the four years I've owned the car, and thought someone here might enjoy seeing things done to a largely forgotten and unloved Buick. So I'll start at the beginning, as you do.

I know this is a Fiero board, and I do not own a Fiero, but I also know car folks like to hear about unusual builds. This build is what I would consider "phase one complete". It's finished for now, and there are more things planned for the future. Upgrades galore, hopefully.

February 28, 2013, I brought the car home, and immediately put it to work, assisting in moving from a small apartment to, for the first time in my children's lives, a house, with four bedrooms, a back yard, and a two car garage. Here is George with some new dressers.


Five days later, the thermostat stuck closed and blew the factory original upper radiator hose, which, in turn, popped both head gaskets.


I spent the next ~5 months rebuilding the top end. You can find the thread here on a-body.net, or here on Something Awful's auto forum, Automotive Insanity.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here's how I felt during the repair.


Not long after, the rear brakes fell apart. I guess they didn't like having the parking brake engaged the entire time I was fixing the engine!

Then, in September, the transmission decided it would no longer shift out of park properly. If I put it in park, it would engage the pawl, but shifting out of park would engage the gear but leave the pawl stuck in place, so the car would not move! The only way to get it unstuck was to shift to neutral and rock the car back and forth until it popped free. It would also do that if I tried to shift from forward to reverse, so I essentially couldn't use reverse. Rather than do that every time, I just left it in neutral, set the parking brake, shut the engine off, yanked the key out of the worn-out ignition, and locked it up. If I wanted to go backward, I would have to push it myself.

In March 2014 I picked up a junkyard transmission from a place in southern California, which was the closest I could find one. One thing people don't tell you about the '96 cars is that lots and lots of parts are one-year-only on them, including the transmission. It took me a couple months to save up the money for the fluid, filter, torque converter, and mounts needed to do the swap, but I did it over the course of a few days during Memorial Day weekend that year, with a little help from a couple friends and my dad.


Now I could reverse again! Once that was done, I took it out to the drag strip to see what was what. It wasn't that great. I ran something like 18.34 @ 75 mph in the 1/4 mile, which is rather embarrassing, frankly. Me on the return road after racing a friend in his HHR, which ran 17.99.


The forum doesn't want to parse my video link for some reason, so here's the link to the video of the race. (Boring.)

After that, things ran fairly smoothly. My legal courier job kept me quite busy, especially around Christmas when I had to pick up well over two hundred "gifts" from one of my clients to distribute to their clients. I love station wagons.


Also, I don't know how to properly install shocks.



January 31, 2015, saw the procurement of 15 inch steel wheels from a Chevrolet Lumina and extra load tires, along with Cadillac Deville pie plate wheel covers, in preparation for a cross-country trip.


I also had a trailer hitch and external transmission cooler installed, so I could tow a trailer full of my mother-in-law's stuff from Kansas back to Vegas.


The car did amazingly well. It got 28 mpg on the way there, and 20 on the way back towing that trailer. I challenge any truck to get 20 mpg towing anything on the highway.

George continued being awesome. Wagons gonna wag. I was quite good at Tetris as a child.


Then in June someone stole the car from my own driveway. I recovered it a week and a half later, with a ruined steering column and ignition.



Which brings us to today (11-01-2015). I went to the junkyard today and got some small things for the white wagon!

In their infinite wisdom, GM decided that the A-body Buick Century would use a strut to hold the hood up. These invariably fail after a decade, and you end up having to use a pole or ax handle or whatever to hold the hood up. The A-body Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, essentially the same car underneath, still used a proper hood prop.



And it bolts right on to the Century header panel with no fuss, no muss. The Century hood doesn't have a dedicated hole specifically for a hood prop, but there's one that works well enough in the same general area.



I also snagged this vacuum line.



It goes from the back of the intake manifold to some tiny little line that ends up controlling the HVAC blend doors. The stock one was in terrible shape, and leaked like crazy. If I accelerated briskly, or had to climb a hill, the air would stop coming out of the front of the dash and instead blow out of the defrost vents.

Original:



New one installed. It's just to the right of the alternator and the power steering hard lines.



Also, at some point, the ABS wiring on the front passenger side ripped itself apart.



So I got a new wire.



And put it on.



Definitely worth the trip.

[This message has been edited by Left Ventricle (edited 05-09-2017).]