Aesthetic Perfection: 1967 Buick Riviera Walkaround and Drive

hi my name's adam this is my classic car channel where you can see some vintage original rare cars today i'm going to be spotlighting my 67 riviera this is a factory black car with white uh bucket seat interior so very rare combination no vinyl roof either the car still wears its original paint original interior has about 45 000 miles on it and when a lot of people think of the riviera they often think of the first generation from 63 to 65 which is also a beautiful vehicle or the boat tail years from 71 to 73 and i think this second generation riviera gets forgotten in the mix and yet to me it's one of the most beautiful looking cars ever designed um you know maybe worldwide certainly in terms of american vehicles as i walk around you can see the light just breaking on these various crease lines and just has some great lines on this car this vehicle was styled like this really for two years 66 and 67. 68 they redid the styling had a big front loop bumper really uh to kind of portray the air of safety from what i understand uh it had a big bumper made it look like it was very well protected but 66 and 67 rivieras are generally quite similar aside from a few details the 67 has this horizontal theme with a thick bar in the middle of the grill that you can see here the 66 does not 67 introduced this really nice riviera script denoting the name plate and the 66 has block lettering that spells riviera and block letters across the front and from a powertrain perspective the 66 has the buick nailhead 425 cubic inch v8 this has the first year of buick's then new 430 cubic inch v8 uh four-barrel engine with a quadrajet carburetor so some power train differences some badging differences minor styling differences but for all intents and purposes the 66 and 7 are quite similar so here's the seats the interior we'll spend a bit more time on as the video goes on this car has the standard wheel discs i do have a set of the turbine veins uh wheel discs which are actually interchangeable between the riviera and the corvette so if you've seen the corvette with those turbine vein wheel discs the river use the exact same ones just the centers would change out to have an r for rip year as opposed to the corvette checkered flags so this is a bucket seat car it also has the optional headrest car doesn't have too many options it does have an am radio it has a special order 2.73 to 1 rear end which was a taller rear end more for freeway gearing i think the standard was a 3.08 has air conditioning and that's about it these cars came standard in the bucket seats um but the cars came stand with power steering power brakes these are buicks aluminum fin brakes on here which are pretty remarkable so the outer brake drum is aluminum and it's got a cast iron liner on it uh where the shoes wear and this car stops fast these these were really good brakes for the time i never feel like in a panic stop situation that i have to worry even most of the old drum brakes were just fine if you panic stopped once and they faded after two or three rapid applications this vehicle really just doesn't have any fade because the aluminum dissipates the heat quickly so turning to the inside of the vehicle by the way this is before the era where gm made doors that sagged and uh kind of rattled when you close them this is a nice solid feel when you close it as opposed to the doors that came out starting in the early 70s on the full-size cars in particular but also the intermediates a unique gauge cluster with this rolling drum speedometer similar to what the toronado had but the toronado had a different ip different interior this is unique it's a little courtesy lamp there that you can see the hvac controls this is interesting if you want the defrost there's not really a position for defrost you just move this bottom lever to the right this top one is the temperature and you can see recirculation normal vent and heater there are three outlets this big center outlet and then one on either side a very large ashtray in keeping with the time and some wiper controls and pretty full gauge pod for the era most of these cars had idiot lights of this era and this one has a temperature gauge oil pressure ammeter so overall nice gauge pod interesting turn signals too i'll turn the key on here and you can see the right and the left here's the center console so nicely trimmed inside this latch is closed has the buick insignia with these little i think they're reindeer the buick logo got a little less detailed in the latter years than what it was in these as kind of a perforated vinyl headliner nice texture no passenger rear view mirror this is not the deluxe interior car so these door panels are the standard door panels the deluxe interior had more of a chrome theme and you'll see that on some rivieras but this is the standard interior it's quite nice all vinyl seats some lights in the c-pillar back there and a speaker in the middle if the car is so equipped let's take a look under the hood for a moment so all original engine bay aside from somebody a long time ago added the 70s era spark control whatever it is capacitive discharge ignition system supposedly to make i think your points more effective i've disconnected it i didn't notice any difference but i thought the box was pretty humorous there i do run all my vehicles somebody was asking do i run stock points or electronic ignition i run just the stock point setup i in all my cars that have it i find that it's reliable i don't have any issues with it if i do start to have some issues the car starts running bad as opposed to just dying and leaving me on the side of the road so i've had far more issues with electronic ignition over my lifetime than i have with points i've never been stranded by ignition system with points i've been stranded three or four times by electronic ignition so my personal preference this car does have what's called a switch pitch turbo hydramatic 400 transmission which was made from 65 to 67 only and for those who aren't familiar that's what this switch is here this is a kick down as well as a switch that activates the variable speed variable stall speed and the torque converter so if you're at a stop light or if you step on the pedal more than about two thirds of the way the stall speed and the transmission changes to a higher stall speed so you don't get idle creep when you're sitting at the stoplight and you get more power as the stall speed elevates so when you step on the car and you push the pedal down about two thirds of the way it seems like it's a downshift but it's actually not it's uh it's just increasing the stall speed of the torque converter and then if you step further it will kick down so only 65 to 7 only turbo hydramatic 400s and 425s which is the front-wheel drive transmission had that feature which i think is stellar so very popular among racers after that they just went to a i'll say an in-between stall speed that was optimal you know across all ranges of throttle as opposed to this two speed variable pitch converter buick v8s uh are for those who don't know in this era until about the mid to late 70s every gm division engineered its own v8 so you could have a chevrolet 350 pontiac 350 holes 350 buick 350 there was no cadillac for 350 but um each of those divisions their motors were 100 different now there were some shared components like distributors and carburetors and things like that but the physical design of the motor was different so that to me is a special thing about the gm cars of this era is you get a totally different engine depending upon the vehicle that you're in so this was buick's first year of the 430 4 barrel carburetor motor and in 67 and 68 this motor doesn't have hollow push rods which means that most v8s and most i guess most push rod engines they have hollow push rods and the oil circulates up through the push rod to lubricate the rocker arms this motor for the first two years does not have that so you want to make sure that when you start the vehicle that it runs quietly there's no ticks or knocks because if the person who owned it didn't change the oil the galleys that would lubricate the upper portion of the valve train could clog and create some issues this motor is perfectly silent thankfully but i just thought that was an interesting piece of trivia these buick v8s also have an aluminum timing cover and if you have to replace the water pump they're known for the bolts breaking off i highly recommend if you're going to have the water pump replaced to go to a shop that has an induction heating tool that can heat the bolts up which are ferrous metal and it won't heat up the surrounding aluminum and risk warping it there's a tool that i have called a venom miniductor it's somewhat expensive but pretty valuable in cases like this if you want to change a water pump you can't get a torch out here and heat the aluminum and everything else that's around it that just provides very localized heat on the bolts and allows you to get them out without breaking off so i found that very helpful this car still runs r12 it is still frigidly cold and as the name would say frigidaire back when general motors used to own frigidaire this is a six piston gm compressor an excellent system that was used up until oh the late 70s when they went to a radial style compressor but there are six little pistons in here three pointing this way three pointing that way that pump the refrigerant around and you can see that the charge here is uh for riviera four and a quarter pounds of refrigerant if you had a ford of this era that had the york two piston compressor they run about two and three quarter pounds two and a half two and three quarter pounds so i love my fords don't get me wrong all my uh ford friends but in my in my opinion the gm air conditioning systems of this era were better they had way more cooling capacity i mean this thing is a six piston compared to a two piston it's running four and a quarter pounds of refrigerant compared to two and a half 2.75 that's not to say that the fords didn't cool they did you just were operating the air conditioning on high more than this does i mean this car will freeze you out it was 90 degrees here today i was running around with the air conditioning on and i had it on just a medium fan setting it's a four-speed fan and i had it on the second speed um and i was just comfortable inside of a black car whereas my fords i would have that probably on high uh the whole time i was driving around this is the second year for the quadrijet four barrel excellent carburetor the only thing that i'm noticing is the ethanol fuel gets into a lot of the gasoline now the accelerator pumps tend to go bad and the nitrofill floats may get stuck and flood out and you can have some typical needle problems but generally these are very very reliable great power from the carburetors too you can see how the headlight system on this car operates they rotate downward when you turn the headlights on and it's an electric motor so i'll show you i'll turn it on here and you can watch so they rotate downward and they actually look really good down as well as up so a lot of the non-gm cars of the era the headlights let me turn the lights off and keep the doors down so you can see these headlights look pretty unfinished but this has a nice look to it even when the headlights are down this little spear went away in 68 for safety i would hate to be paid to be uh bumped by this car as a passerby uh that would this is not dull so the tip of that spear went away for safety in later years but it sure looks good let's go take a look at the trunk this car doesn't have a really large trunk does have the ventilation the flow through ventilation there that you'll see some rubber hoses the water collects and then runs down inside the uh rear fender wells original jack a decent amount of space i mean you could fit several sets of golf clubs in here it's just not very tall overall but not huge not small this is the spare tire well so you can see a spare tire in here double striped bias belted tire so the riviera was one of three kind of a trio of vehicles the eldorado the tornado and the riviera were similar vehicles the toronado and the el dorado were front-wheel drive the riviera was rear-wheel drive and the toronado and el dorado both had three quarter frames a stop really ahead of the rear wheel and the rear wheel the suspension is a mono leaf spring on either side the riviera has four full coils in all four corners and it has a full x-frame so i own an el dorado i've driven a toronado i will just say the riviera rides much much better than the toro and the aldo which really don't have a great ride and it's pretty boomy inside that monolid for your spring is not something that uh really to brag about i think it degrades the riding characteristics of the car certainly compared to this car like i said that has full coils they sold around 40 000 of these rivieras in 1967 so it was a popular car you can see why i mean it's hard to understand if somebody went to the showroom and test drove this car in 1967 what they would pick at uh if you were looking for a personal luxury car the car is smooth it's quiet it's good looking i can't imagine somebody's saying gosh this car is too smooth too quiet too good looking i don't want it and just really nicely detailed all around so let's take it for a brief drive here i'll start it up and you can hear the exhaust i've got factory-style dual exhaust with resonators on this which is what would have come on it that noise is just the headlight doors closing [Music] all right let's take it for a spin so this motor was 360 or 65 horsepower i'm not quite remembering how much to be honest one of the two but it's very powerful very peppy no lack of power i mean this thing just pulls like a freight train and it's got quite a bit of top end power too for a big motor it revs it likes to rev i had a 70 electra with a 455 and surprisingly that one liked to rev too that came stock with a 256 rear end and i remember that thing would kick down to second gear at 70 miles an hour and hold second gear to 90. i think first gear went to 50. so pretty amazing you can see this rolling drum speedometer here but just a joy to drive everything that i featured so far has been a ford vehicle which i love my fords of late 60s early 70s i do love the gms as well i have a few mopars but some of the gms to me before 71 kind of in that 65 to 70 range are really special especially 65 6 and 7 68 970 they started decontenting the interiors and making them look not as nice so they're not as not as nice as these earlier ones but the motors and the transmissions are just beautifully smooth the c6s and the fords are great transmissions they don't shift as smoothly as these turbo hydramatics do or the 727 chryslers you feel the shifts in any four transmission i've had in the air whether it's a c6 c4 fmx i've had many versions of all of them and you definitely feel the shifts in them these it's hard to detect sometimes when it's shifting it's just buttery smooth oh here we go that was about two-thirds throttle but this car really can get up and move quite well again compared to the el dorado and toronado counterparts the riviera i think has a lot better ride the engines across all three are different but i would say all excellent the transmissions are similar the turbo hydromatic 425 is effectively a 400 that it was split in half after the torque converter and has about an inch thick chain drive that drives the transmission and a final drive to drive the front wheels which interestingly was that sys that system the osmobile v8 with that transmission was used almost unaltered in the gmc motorhomes in the uh 70s so it was super over engineered for passenger car application but very very durable any case hope you enjoyed this video of my 67 riviera if you liked the video please subscribe to my youtube channel and i'll continue making more hope you enjoyed it one last look around the interior here's a little light switch to turn the light on if you want that's it so long everybody

Channel: Rare Classic Cars & Automotive History

Views: 306,522

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Id: iRF9vL12pMc

Length: 23min 57sec (1437 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021