November 1984, I arrived in Phoenix, Arizona. The GS still was running well with 4.56 gears, a radical KB C-107 cam and a black vinyl interior along with the previously mentioned lack of air conditioning! Oh well, roll the windows down, right? I ended up renting a home in Phoenix. The red lacquer paint was starting to show it's age. Slightly dull and cracking. Here we go again. This time I didn't strip the entire body down to bare metal, reasoning that the car only had the one coat of paint on it at this time. I just went to bare metal on the horizontal surfaces where the cracking was most obvious and repaired the minor battle scars the car had acquired over the last few years.
Well, the bodywork went smooth until the car was just about ready to paint. I had the car backed into the garage. This garage had a two car wide door, but it was a one piece design as opposed to the more common sectional door. I had finished work for the evening, and not thinking, I grabbed the raised garage door by one corner and pulled down. Well, the hinge on that side had apparently decided it was though with it's life work of maintaining the door in the up position. The door came crashing down right on the front fender, putting a huge crease in the sheet metal. The fender could be repaired or replaced, luckily it didn't damage the hood which is much harder to find if you had to replace it. Back to the body work.
The car was eventually painted Ford red again with acrylic lacquer paint. About this time I met Mike Tomasewski, a fellow Buick fan who lived about 20 miles away. Through Mike, I continued experimenting with cams, intakes, headers and everything else that came down the line! At first Mike was just a distributor of sorts of Kenne-Bell equipment, but eventually started making his own components. Mike turned a hobby he started in his garage into one of the nations premier Buick performance parts suppliers, TA Performance.
We spent a lot of time at Speedworld Motorplex, the dragstrip north west of Phoenix and Firebird Raceway. Depending on the constantly changing combination, the car was still running in the low to mid 12 second range.
One thing that I did learn
over the years was how to make fiberglass body parts. Over the years not all of
the fiberglass parts I wanted were commercially available. So I decided to teach
myself fiberglass parts production! The first picture on the left, above,
shows the fiberglass 70 GS bumper I made. Below, the first two pictures from the
left show the rear bumper I made for Mike's TA Performance wagon racecar.
The last picture shows a hood I made for a friends 70 Dodge Charger ( a "few"
years ago 
) I also
made a trunk lid for the same car.
I won $50 for the best reaction time of a race one weekend! I had plenty of time to back out of it to ensure the win!
Well, here we are again, I've come full circle. The passage of time and the intense Arizona sun had taken it's toll on the GS's exterior again. It was 1993 and the Buick was sitting on the side of my house. I had become side tracked with a few other boat and car projects. A couple of years ago I decided to redo the GS again, this time stripping the car down even further than it's original Jersey days!
The motor was still in good shape, probably having not more than 10,000 miles on the current rebuild. The only major change was to put in a GS Club cam. As for the body, I pulled the entire front end sheet metal off as well as the front suspension. This time I decided to use chemical stripper instead of the grinder I used many years ago in New Jersey. All of the glass, interior and wiring was removed. The front frame and suspension components were sandblasted. The doors and trunklid were also removed. The bodywork was completed and multiple coats of primer were block sanded with increasingly finer sandpaper. The body is now ready for a fresh coat of red, but this time using a base coat clear coat system. More to come as time and money permit! I'll update this page as progress is made!
ON TO THE REBUILDING! CLICK
HERE
