1988 Buick Regal

the wheels are doing the best RATLUK YO!!??!! impression and are corroding merrily. not a bad old thing to float round in and i'll spend a few pence tidying it up. bought oil, filter and 5 litres of atf today for 32 quid. waxoyl will probably cost me £30 ish and i'll get a rockauto.com order in next month for the mounts.

best bit is the insurance, my berlingo was 670 third party, buick is 310 fully comp.

That think is amazing, there are a lot of cool yanks on these pages at the moment

What a bloody god awful car !!.............I LOVE IT !! ;D ;D

in between work i've started playing. changed the fluids and filters, pumped the tyres up and pressed it into daily service. going great so far!



wheels need some love



also, I carried a little mod that i've wanted to do to a car for a while. standard stereo but with stealth 3.5mm jack input.

so, I started out with a delco fm/am stereo with a tape unit under the dash. quite a handy unit in that it has a small cubby hole built in to store a phone/mp3 player.



bought a cable for £1 off ebay and stripped off the insulation to reveal 3 wires, 2 audio and 1 earth.



now, most guides on the internet tell you to connect the wires straight to the cassette head. unfortunately mine doesn't have the 3 usual pins but 4 and a common earth!



sooooo.... cue ripping all the guts out of the tape unit, and sitting dabbing wires into various bits of its guts until music wafted through the car. (lots of popping and banging noise first by accident and the occasional bit of smoke )



eventually I found the 2 wires in the main ribbon cable for the right and left output channels to the head unit. bit of deft soldering and jobs a good 'un. soldered the brown wire to the body of the tape unit as an earth. bit of reassembly and voila! retro looks, new sounds!



only one issue is that to make the radio switch the tape player on, a cassette needs to be inserted to trip the microswitch inside. a minor concern, the motor and tape head are now disconnected so the tape is just for show.

in other news, just to kill the "can't use an old car everyday" crowd, i've filled it with scrap and gone to the weighbridge, been the tip, gone shopping, and it will now be my only transport so will be earning its keep hauling tools around.

Nice mod with the cassette player.

Those ones have a funny head on them- two sets of read heads to minimise on the moving parts. It's able to play the tape backwards and forwards without having to move the tape head from track to track. A lot of players shuffle the head up and down instead.
Switch the wires and the music would play in reverse...

--Phil

ooooh a looky-see on cardomain.com shows a few that have had the treatment. most are "yo, got mah ryde on deez sick 20's yo yo yo..." but this one looks very nice

www.cardomain.com/ride/217464/1988-buick-regal

just right.

I love the dashboard. I might be going mental, but I heard these ride on plastic leaf springs. Will it be going lower?

its about 3ft wide dan, bit big for a 'tina! hows it going anyway?

springs wise, coils up front but a soddin great big transverse leaf at the back like a big overgrown yugo/127. god knows how you lower it without a load of curse word camber.

plans so far are to smooth a few bits off, paint the lower half silver if i can get rattle cans mixed to match, replace the interior wood with brushed ally, waxoyl, sort all the knocks out and get the wheel situation sorted.