Duane, I have those pics and then some, when we were at the Burn Foundation Concours d'Elegance show. Nice with two of our Stratomist Blue Buicks there!
As the first dialogs about Brad‘s car surfaced, I was thinking that we should have a GSX owners stories thread.
Yeah, Well it was a little hard to change the course this thread was going, so I had to come up with something. Zach, I got my 71 car in probably 100 boxes and by using date codes, was able to figure out all the correct parts and options with the exception of the steering wheel. I had an NOS 71-72 Black rallye wheel so I put it on. There were no holes in the date coded core support so I figured it never had one. Also my car is a late production car with the electronic dash pot, and all the weird brackets that go along with that. It also has a side mount battery. So the battery and cables are completely different then the early 71 cars. 1971 cars are so hard to figure out. Duane
Duane, These are off the interweb I had at work, I've got personal ones at home I'll try to get to. Mike
OK, Here are some pics of my 71 GSX for those that want to see them. These are from the Allentown Concours d'Elegence show. They are almost the same pics that Mike posted. I will post more pics in a little while. Duane
OK, Here are some from the 2007 BPG Nats. Including some of Brad's revenge. It only took him 18 years to get back at me. Courtesy of James Weinman. I have a very good group of friends don't I. Enjoy. Duane
Seems like we could copy and paste from this thread and start a new one regarding GSX owner stories. Just a thought. Incidentally, Troy‘s car #202 is at the new museum in Georgia now. Apparently the wheels have been changed to aftermarket. The steering wheel has been changed and it may be wearing stage one ornamentation under the hood.
OK, here is another story, how I met Brad and his father Marvin I had just started making Buick interiors and at the time was making just 69 and 70 seat covers. I only had a few sets of seat covers for each year but decided to take them to the GS Nationals to show people my wares and hopefully get some sales. (I think it was either the 1988 or 89 GS Nats.) Anyway my dad and I jumped in his pickup and went to Bowling Green. We got up to go to the track for our first day and stopped at Shoneys for breakfast. Directly in front of us was a young guy with what looked to be his father, in matching GS jackets. I asked if they were going to the meet, they said yes, and they offered to share a table with us for breakfast. We did introductions all around and then started talking about cars. I asked Brad what type of car he had and he said he owned the GSX Prototype. I then told him I was going to restore his interior. Brad comes back with, a little forcefully , “Well who are you and what makes you think you are doing my interior?” I came back with “Well according to Dave Kleiner, I am the only one he will let touch it.” Brad thought for a few seconds and says, “Well if it’s OK with Dave it’s OK with me.” That’s how we met, and it was even before I got to the Nationals. Duane
Thanks for posting all the pics! That interior is pretty wild, no wonder it was so challenging to restore. I'm no expert by any means on these cars, but there are several design ideas that are noticable from what ended up into production. Glad someone was able to restore and save this piece of history!
Brad, do you know if the front seat frames came off the Riv like the door panels or was there just more foam added Ok now I know what the deal was with the stripping over the rear quarters, if its the same issue that I read about the 70 GSX's. These 71's are beautiful!!
If I told you how they were constructed, you'd laugh me out of the building and call me a lie saying NO WAY!!
The molded armrests, on the front doors of Brad's car are "one off pieces" as well. They were the design study pieces used to create the production molded armrests for the Riviera doors. They were hand laid fiberglass pieces, with a vacuum formed skin over them. They must have been pieces that were laying around in the Design Studio so they used them. By the way, this "scenario" of adding Riviera style pieces to a Buick Show Car was something they did again when they designed and built the Buick Blackhawk. Yes history did repeat itself. As for the staggers on the GSX stripes; All Production GSX's used paper masks to align the stripes on the cars. (I even have the part numbers for the masks from sheets I got from Ron Frakes design meeting notes, from when they were designing the cars.) The side stripe paper mask ended at the center of the rear wheelhouse. Then the mask for the back of the quarter started and continued up to the center of the rear spoiler. Then the reverse masks were continued on the other side. This overlapping of the paper masks created slight off sets when they painted the cars. Depending on how well the alignment was, you will see staggers that vary from barely being visible to pretty good ones, and they will be over the rear wheel wells and right down the middle of the rear spoiler. The one thing to note is this, the cars were completely assembled at the time they were striped. Both the door handles were on plus the rear spoiler. Now if you have a paper mask, and need to go through the "door handle area", this required the painters to "cut" the masks to fit. This is why all the "Factory" stripes are messed up in this area. The paper masks also created other problems for the painters. I have seen original paint cars where the stipes are up to 3/4" different, in the up/down dimension from side to side. If they started the masks too low on the one side, what happened when they got to the middle of the rear spoiler? It would have been slightly off center. So they started the next mask and this forced the stripe on the other rear quarter to be higher. I have talked to both the Gentleman that ran the second shift of Buick's paint shop, (at final assembly), as well as the gentleman that painted the majority of the production GSX's. In the beginning of the 70 GSX production, there were several different guys that striped the cars, but they were a PITA to stripe. Eventually one guy said he would do it, and painted the majority of the cars from then on. I know EXACTLY how the production cars were striped. I know how they were designed to be done, and how they were actually done. I am not going to go into that here, so lets not discuss it. OK, now back to the stripes on my car. I wanted the staggers in the stripes but Mark Reeves didn't want to do it. Now I live near Philadelphia, PA and the car was at Mark Reeves shop in Marietta Ga. We kept going back and forth about this over the phone, He said no one "F---S" up the stripes on these cars when they restore them, yeah well Duane does. It got to the point when I told him I was going to bring 2 gallons of lacquer thinner with me when I visited his shop, and if the staggers were not there I was going to pour them over my car. I got my staggers. Later we found out we were related, but that is another story. Duane
This sure turned out to be one hell of a thread!! Glad it got stickied How was most of this not mentioned here unless its known on the GSX owners mini forum.. To think it started from a GSX somewhat scammer jerk Brad one day when you have the patients to tell us about the seats.
