BARNFIND BUICK GRAND NATIONAL - Will it Run and Drive??

hey mook what's up we're reviving that yep i don't even know what that is ladies and gentlemen welcome to a very special episode of junkyard diggs this episode is special because it's been in the making for six years now i have been keeping this an absolute secret and trying to hunt it down and work on it for six years and the day has finally come today from the barn we're going to pull a buick grand national so this here is an 86 buick grand national that's been off the road for a number of years now uh we're with the owner don hi there who has graciously let us uh take this car from him and get it going and we're gonna bring it back so he can have his car back on the road a little bit of public service there i it i can't watch this thing rust away any longer it needs to be out there ripping tires apart probably hasn't been driven much in the last 15 years wow i took the work probably three four years ago but run out of gas and put gas in it and lift it back home and parked it in the shed the bodies body's seen better days but that's not so much what we're worried about we're more so worried about what's under this foot that right there is it turbo charged gm v6 i'm literally shaking right now i'm so excited yes you guys don't understand i have been chasing this car since before my youtube channel ever started i've been trying to buy it from him for years and it took me a couple years to convince the family to let me come take it and fix it for them and give it back that's exactly what we're gonna do now granted this is a very special car so we are not at all going to do our normal revival procedures and try to get this thing running here we are going to pull it out put it on the trailer take it out of the shop and go through it appropriately and very carefully to make sure nothing gets messed up or hurt because a it's not our car and b it's a very special automobile both to the family and to the car community all right real quick before we start the video give me 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have to take that thing outside all the time and slipping these suckers on real quick and going out in the wet grass every morning has made life a breeze no more wet socks no more damp feet all day you can take these suckers through any puddle river or mud hole you want and you're going to come out dry on the other side the best part is these don't feel like your typical waterproof shoe material these shoes are made from dimetex a dual climate knit which keeps you cool in the summer and warm in the winter these vessy shoes are my go-to set of shoes by the door you can check these out in the link below and use the code junkyard to get 25 off your own pair of bessie shoes all right back to the video we've got a grand national save this thing is absolutely covered in dust i can't even can't even see it well they don't have a lot of special stuff inside do they this is that's a buick regal with special seats and a boost gauge that is all this is earlier i was able to sneak a shot of dawn uh telling some stories of racing this thing so i'll play that now show you how much this guy really does i appreciate this car and why i bought it from my youngest daughter that she turned 16. a lot of kids in school we had in the castles and the queue up few of the guys had corvettes and mustangs and i borrowed this thing and they thought that i'd be crazy when they were looking out the lot and they said i wonder who's got the fastest car she goes yeah i wonder when they seen that she had this one because whoever had it's got big uh nozzles in it yep and competition headers okay i think it's got a hooker or chromatic headers or some damn thing on it did it have a upgraded turbo too i put a bigger one on it than what was on it so it's got exhaust injectors turbo no i raised the bet with it when i first got it i wasn't aiming for the girls you know goddess radio my god you need a better stereo system you know that usually goes so i want uh i think it's cyclone down there and i'm putting a stereo while then i went back up on the main drive on dump avenue heading south and behind me here comes a white vet right up so what what do they do when they come right up behind you yep slow down right up behind you where you can't see the license plate slow down right up by about ten times and we went out west on the four laner i gave her hell with hell he went right by you could hear them big side pipes beating on the car he had a 67 wet 427 dry power wow and we once we got about 90 then i spooled up because i have it on yeah guys got to be careful i turn it up to 20 pounds of boost holy hell it's only supposed to have like 11 13 pounds something like that because there used to be a gauge in there you could set it by now i don't even think that gauge works but then once we got going i passed it about 1995 we raced through and watched like two dumbasses you know on the highway with patrons by ames we wouldn't race it out then enough to get out of the way you got to curve down and go through a bridge well you had to slow down a little yeah and the speed diamond was blinking 85 so i was only 185 got down straight away then i thought let's go back into town we went up on one of the big ramps so you go on old 20 low 30 back through to town but i pulled up there then i pulled on the overpass by the overpass i parked and he parked right behind me and the older guy than me had a little bushy beard and he gets down we got gambling he restored that vet took seven or eight years wow he found it and had it oh god a beautiful white with a red white interior you know and holy cow when he looked at the hood up it was all engine big old 427 in that long air cleaner with a tripod under it and lift this one up the turbocharger is sitting there in this little bitty v6 and he looks in there and held your motor out he goes i found a starter yeah otherwise they quit driving that god and maybe that probably 15 years or so stacy used to drive it yeah yeah it's probably been 50 it sat by the barn so the wine blew down yeah it's been sitting for over 15 years other than that short little trip i thought i needed it was a lot of fun to drive i bet to all of our foreign viewers or even those in america who may not understand exactly the significance of the grand national i would highly suggest taking a moment to check out my buddies over at donut media they have an excellent video that will bring you up to speed on the buick grand national and explain to you why it is such a significant piece of american history it's fast it's black and just like my dad it only stuck around for three years it's the buick grand national with introductions done we hooked up the winch and pulled the car out of the barn and onto the path for a second shot at life [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it's finally happening we're finally rescuing that grand national yeah six years has come to this let's go give this thing a bath and get it done we'll wash the car too you're smelly all right we're done it's restored take it back yeah [Music] [Music] [Applause] uh [Music] content way worse looking now it's clean this thing is it needs a full restoration but i'm not going to do that until i can someday maybe hopefully own it or find one that i can own now it's probably a good time to say if anyone has one of these they like to sell or know of one's sitting somewhere hit us up junkyard digs one at gmail.com after the initial rinse we got the soap and t-shirts out and gave the car a good scrubbing this of course showed all the issues with our body so we decided this was a good time to have dad come in and show you guys a few tips about spotting flaws in bodywork and paint all right dad what do you see i don't know what do you want to hear give us the story on this car let's see how we're all locating down here you know i can put my small finger between it something's definitely happened to the front of this car and because the other side is identical to it i would say the whole front of this car has been hit hard because of these here and again i don't know if the camera will show that it does it's actually raised here there was and i'm not saying this is the issue but we had some red caps it was a bad idea but we didn't know it at the time and you it just smeared it on and you let it dry you didn't cure it enough you didn't catalyze it and then you sanded it wet sand and we thought that was awesome but what happens when you put the you put your paint well the reducer and the paint and the clear and all that would actually lift that stuff make it rise it was something that went a couple years but it was not good look at your hinges up there's there been some issues on both doors look for that stuff what's all the blue like oily looking and these two big black spots i have no idea honestly this is what you don't see when stuff's covered in dust you get it home and you're like oh it's a basket case it's a pile of stuff you know what it might actually be i'm just just thinking he's the guy walked beside the car and bumped it day after day or whatever and he walked around the mirror and he's just taking this off oh yeah so something's also the whole car has been painted but something's happened to this door even after let's say perspective accident this white color here here is kind of a yellow oh it's called k200 you mean yeah this so a lot of the things are going on here that's a lot of is that filler mud plastic bondo yeah yeah see the this door's been repaired but that's like either a silver or a light blue up here where the paint's coming off this and all my years i've never seen anybody just just right over the stickers so hey i bet if this has been a replace door this is a different vin this probably says regal or something this isn't a door from an 80 this car is an 86 i have a theory of something i may have noticed this the bottom half of this door matches that quarter panel because they're both shiny and they have a clear coat but nothing else on the car has a clear coat so you think it's been one of the last accidents to this corner or something you got side swipe maybe it's been painted from here down let's feel the line you can feel that line all the way well you can see it so this this has been either cleared down whether they clear coated or something and then that whatever that is and what happens with the fed is the temperature changes that's where this part of the top of the car and the quarter panel meet and it's welded right here and then they filled this with lead while lead moves over hot days cold days well paint can't move so that's what happens like we talked about on the gold's mobile the was it the trunk or the hood one or maybe both i don't know the hazing is when they put their primer or sealer well it wouldn't had sealer at that time but the primer was it changed and shrunk where the paint can't do that they applied it to too soon yeah but this stuff years and every car you see with lead fill you can go to my 76 vector and you'll see the lead so you're thinking front end collision i wouldn't bet maybe a side swipe or something that this this door and quarter panel was at least halfer painted the whole car has been repainted one time but yeah parker international what we even think of them today it's had a hard life this is definitely the roughest grand national i've ever seen in my life well now that we know to dig into the uh bodywork would be an absolute rotisserie job and take years and tons and tons and tons of money we could ignore all of that and just go straight to the mechanical side and put this thing back on the road well now that our dream's been crushed let's get this thing down to ames and start turning wrenches it might look like but it's going to whistle all right so here we are the ukraine national is in ames trailered it down no problems brought into the shop parked right here haven't touched it now being that this is a very unique uh rare car i am going to be very cautious about what we're about to do uh i'm going to pop up the hood check all of our fluids make sure the motor turns over by hand just fine drop a battery in listen for a fuel pump if we have one we're going to try to flush the entire contents of the tank get fresh gas in it maybe do a filter change even and then finally the key now i'm you have to confirm any of this but if you'll recall this car had supposedly an oversized turbo uh aftermarket exhaust system and upgraded injectors i don't know what color the injectors are supposed to be they are indeed red oh yeah and it does indeed have hooker supercob headers here's our honestly sizable single turbo our intercoolers right down here front and center charge pipe goes right up and into the intake manifold right there this has electronic ignition it is distributorless some crazy brake stuff going on here looks like it's got a grenade attached to it apparently of german design at that down here we have our what looks to be like a hydro boost setup but electric and the owner had said there's something wrong with a switch or something to do with that and that's what that in the seat is oh man this engine bay is a nightmare really hoping that i just hit the key and it magically goes and everything works and then i just do some maintenance stuff and hand it back over all right let's get this thing cleaned up oil level is spot on it smells good i don't smell any gas in it it needs changed mr sir trans is full smells good i think he said he hasn't driven 150 miles in 15 years so i'm sure stuff's been sitting and not gonna be happy about it even though it may run i'm sure we'll have a lot of systems that are not working properly at the same time i'm going to be very meticulous with this car because it's a turbocharged 3.8 it's a 3.8 that just has a turbo on it so it's pretty much bulletproof it's probably had a far worse done to it in life than just what i'm about to do which is stopping it actually spins perfect i'm going to take our intake pipe off the turbo make sure there's nothing in that thing no mice poop or whatever that would suck into our turbo there's a couple turds i'm gonna get this air filter apart and we'll make sure that it's clean that's disgusting wow that is full of crap down there can't say i've ever seen this one before here's your regular air intake and someone did like this 1 8 inch hoe was just like rtv right there a little extra airflow into this into this intake this filter is not looking good i'll see what i need to get this cleaned up probably just kind of get a new one i'm gonna wipe all that out and our air intake should be good to go all right everything's cleaned out inside i took our k n filter over to the air compressor and blew it out really well the problem with that hose that they put on is that it goes right down next to the ground so it picks up a lot of moisture off the road that gets stuffed in here and this just turns into a big greasy grimy mess it also has the potential to hydro lock the engine if they went through a puddle or something or even enough rain that's why the intakes are so high on most cars if you have a crown vic and you've ever driven through a puddle you know that pain they have a really low intake that you can take off preferably move higher uh drive through a puddle and has the high potential to lock up ask luke that's what happened to his unfortunately rest in peace the k9 car all right our air intake is back on it's time to get a battery in this thing see if we have a fuel pump well the bungee cords on the brake pedal are a good sign oh we got seven gallons of gas supposedly something tells me our oil pressure gauge is not going to be joining us for the party although the light behind it oh wait i turned the key off there we go slowly coming back to life mook me too what hey do you want to go back by the tank and listen for a fuel pump for me ready nothing nothing we have a fuel readout seven gallons i don't know if it's just froze in the middle or if it's actually got seven gallons of fuel let's see if at least cranks how about that all right crank it down here we go [Music] it does in fact crank so that's good at least something works wow look at that belt [Music] that's scary part going underneath it's not scary because of the bendpak lift i entirely trust that my life it's scary because i'm afraid of what i'm gonna see under this car all right here we are underneath the grand national things are looking better than i anticipated so far uh tank was good trump's got some soft spots right here starting up but not nearly as bad as i thought it would be uh these g bodies like to rust out above the wheel up here that looks pretty decent in the frame floorboard center section is not bad but here on the edges it's it's toast in fact we have oh wait what's this it's just like a brake line that's been re-ran right here yeah so someone's already redone the brakes once on this car oh that's gonna be a loud exhaust system wow so this sumbitch is gonna be straight piped out of the turbo also a very leaky engine oh there's a little mini fan for the intercooler look at that little guy and here's where the intercooler breathe there's probably supposed to be something to complete this whole ducting so it doesn't breathe up it breathes forward but uh i think he said that he hit a raccoon 120 and it kind of took care of that mufflers are gone they are no longer with us i'm sure we'll have to replace all these rubber lines well there's our fuel lines follow them back ascending unit appears to be on top here i'll play around with this we will be back okay so i've put the car back down because i've been doing some research and i found out a few things so far i'm pretty surprised by the amount of information available on forums and stuff that is known about these cars which is pretty convenient for my case i thought it was gonna be a nightmare to find information but we got a plethora of knowledge on the internet right here behind the alternator there's a female spade plug this is the fuel pump prime wire what you're supposed to be able to do is unplug the wire for the hood light and plug it in right here and prime the fuel pump i did not have any power to that wire whatever wire that is right there so i'm just going to do it manually see if i can get that fuel pump to move any fuel i've removed our cap and schrader valve from our fuel rail and i will now put power to that plug and we'll see what happens ready good let me see if i can find the fuel pump relay okay i've been playing with these relays the contacts are really gummy but they are indeed working this one the black plug is our air conditioning i can actually uh close that and watch the clutch close so not only does that work but impressively the ac clutch works go ahead and turn the key move ran for about two seconds so that is our fuel pump relay and the relay is working so at this point we've tested our relay input and we've tested our prime wire we have ourselves a bad fuel pump which is what i expected but it's going to cross everything off the list before i drop a tank i'm leaving if we're dropping a tank i'm dropping a tank bye the hell is this thing turn the key back on i don't know what the hell that thing is it's wired into this and that it's probably a chip if i had to guess some aftermarket tuning chip thingy so since the car estimates this to have somewhere between approximately precisely six to seven gallons i put the forklift under the tank so when i drop it it doesn't crush me that's that whole like agent wisdom thing kicking in finally you see kids you don't need fancy equipment to get stuff done this makes life a lot easier now i'm going to take this tank out in the yard and pressure wash it so we get a nice clean tank to reinstall things have gotten done last night i went through and sucked all the fuel out of this tank with a fuel pump and then today i got the pressure washer out and went through and took my time and made sure to kind of visualize where i was and hit every inch of the tank that i can get to and as you can see it is nice and clean in there that looks honestly brand new so essentially what you want to do like i just said suck all the fuel out get your pressure washer blow every inch of that thing out the best you can slosh it back and forth dump what you can out and get the big chunks out and then get your uh shop back set on wet fact find whatever corner of the tank is most accessible uh be aware of any baffles there's one in here that goes like this so i made sure to slosh fluid this way to get all the sediment out of that corner into this one where there's no baffles and i can reach the shop vac and then stick that down there and suck all that water out do that a few times until everything's clean and then give it one big final rinse out and dump everything out and as you can see this is all the stuff that came out of the bottom corner of the tank that the shop vac was able to scoop out so now we have a nice clean rust free tank to put our new pump in a new filter and everything so that we're not just going to ruin everything in front of that tank right away let's go ahead and put our new pump in and get it strapped back up into the car and see if this thing will run man talk about it easier said than done cleaned up our sending unit making sure that our fuel level center unit is working properly i have it totally disassembled now as you can see there's corrosion all over this so i'm going to try to get this cleaned up put our sweeper arm back in which i've already cleaned up i've already cleaned up the rear step bar here once all that's back together we'll take one final reading make sure this is at least working enough and put it all back together right milk yeah all right so that took way too long and i really hope it's gonna work when it gets submerged in gasoline not exactly a bulletproof solution but it is operable as you can see the higher our float goes the higher our resistance goes because this little copper arm travels across that rheostat band right there so without functioning we can go ahead and put our new pump in and get this all installed all right in goes our fully rebuilt sending unit new pump new sleeve clean contacts on the rheostat and just like that you can't tell that it did anything all right we'll get this back in the car and fill it with fuel so when it comes to this generation of buick and gym in general they were still a full-frame car but they were a small frame car it wasn't such a big beefy frame anymore and they're actually integral with the body that where the body helps stiffen the frame and the frame helps stiff the body with that being said i have installed our tank and it's finished but in doing so i wiggled it at the end to make sure it was tight and that rust all of myself and uh notice something body mounts in this car except for the very front ones are completely gone i'm glad i didn't buy this car and i'm just working on it it might not have ever actually been hit up front it might just be that instead of the nose drooping the rest of the car fell behind it so luke i don't know if we've had a booger scope this episode are you booger scope deprived i'm not but the people are kevin don't you lie to me all right get a couple gallons in this thing and see if we get fuel pressure up front finally gas in the tank new fuel pump la de da let's hit this prime wire and see if we get some fuel i still have the schrader valve out of the fuel rail and it's running in this bucket so we can flush all the old out of the system why yeah there's nothing happening you just want to know a fun fact i have never in my life installed the tank and left it for more than five minutes i always have to take it back out because i forget something or the wires come out of the connectors or something stupid every time everything's hooked up now let's try this again it's not really the flow i was hoping to see it's supposed to be like 40 psi and it could be that when it builds resistance it builds pressure but we'll see that's goofy we've gone through our intake system we know that's all clear we have a new battery we're putting a fuel pump in i flushed all the fuel that was in the lines out and then ran it for a little while longer to get all the air through the return to quick crackling all that's left now is to hit the key and see if this 3.8 liters of boosted v6 comes to life here we go [Music] yeah i wondered about that [Music] that's definitely not all six but let's run it the island i can't tell [Music] so i was starting to doubt i would see the day or i would get to see this car run let's do it again that's a lot better already just like that what happened is it probably figured out what it wanted to do then waited for an ignition off cycle and then readjusted the computer for the next condition on cycle that's running better i doubt that moved but i just wanted to see for the hell of it looks like we got a brake light which was a known problem so that's still there um nothing else seems happy happy as it can be have to sit for that long well maybe we go on a little cruise and see if our transmission works all right so turns out this thing just chills here oh yeah that'll probably do it i think we have a wire missing from that terminal oh hey a wire looking underneath the dash here it's just just freaking wires everywhere so i'm gonna have my work cut out for me when it comes to figuring out what all that is and figuring out why none of it probably works i'll see if i can get this hooked up and see if we get our uh oil gauge to work properly then we'll go for a ride i'll move yeah all right moment of truth hey it didn't go to a thousand let's see how much pressure we actually have damn that's pretty healthy well with that i think we're safe to go for a drive shall we this thing is just disgusting inside cigarette smoke and poop everywhere like this is a this is a mouse house back here in the headliner i am driving a grand national how's it feel like the diesel buick this i don't feel like this should be fast those brakes sucked so the guy said he disconnected the stock uh lights or something on the dash for the turbo power literally says turbo power right here and uh it's hooked up to some adjustable controller on a knob supposedly i haven't found a knob yet but we do have a boost gauge down here so let's keep an eye on that all right here turbo oh the brakes suck no brakes straight to the pump for the good stuff nice that's awesome wish us luck you got seat guys that was matt he's at a shop nearby that's cool good guy hi matt his dad bought the corvair by the way it's sold but emailing me it's like just it's just like driving any 86 regal with a bad exhaust that's all it sounds like right now it's nothing too special i will say though it drives pretty good for i haven't sat that long i thought we'd be shaking all over the place by now so you really must have actually moved it around oh that's full breaks that's all i got it's like all my leg can do wow i hear a turbo all right we're gonna stop and put gas in this thing and then go for a little cruise and oh hey it's it's blinking e it must have started working so i think there's just a couple spots on the sweep where something's not quite right but either way we're out of gas so we're gonna go get some and then head out on the highway and get some i left my debit card in the shop let's hope we got enough fuel to make it back i'm not too comfortable uh driving around with the quality of brakes we have right now of course they're old and rusted from sitting so they're not very good brakes but on top of that we have no power brakes because this is a turbo car before the days of hydro boost they have an electric motor on the bottom of the brakes down there that acts as your boost and supposedly this switch is bad well the owner of the car gave us the switch so i'm going to switch this out and see if we have brakes for our test drive here because that would be really nice my leg is getting very tired all right now with the old in with the new and up with our hopes that it works i have my doubts if i had to guess it's that big rusty dc starter sized electric motor down there that's bad and it's going to cost big dollars to replace during that little break i took the liberty of installing a boost cage this is a vacuum gauge for tuning um it also does fuel pressure and pressure is pressure so if we have air pressure we will see above zero i have no idea if this boost cage down here actually works i hear the turbo spooling i don't feel anything really happening so this will give us a better idea [Music] do we have breaks nope nothing's different oh boy that's gonna be a fun one to diagnose all right either way let's head out to the highway and see if this thing will make any boost i really doubt it check engine light the car knows something's wrong with it so that's a start i can now ask it what's wrong with it and it'll tell me the one of like 987 things oh never mind the check engine light went off okay we're back to not knowing what's wrong better fixed itself hold on your nuts here we go all right ready ready oh wow holy son of a let's turn around and do it again just run a little better after that must have blown some cobwebs out all right there's how you fix fuel injection all right can we boost launch this all right here's our gauge anything past that big yellow dot is boost that thing runs up top it's got to get up top to run but once it's there that is impressive ah that's fun i freaking love turbo so we got to put a turbo on something i only saw four psi still so we've got some reading to do to see what they're supposed to make i'm sure we've got a thousand vacuum links that are in turn boost leaks that need fixed so we'll take her back to the shop and go through everything real well we know the transmission works great really really crisp shift in the second squeaked them again the turbo does spool up so our wastegates and everything must be working it's worth putting more time into this car which is exactly what we're gonna do in episode two which means that's the conclusion of this right here being episode one we'll see you guys next week on junkyard digs i don't know if it'll be this car next week but it'll be something this might take a couple weeks to get ready for the next episode so make sure you subscribe right here to junkyard dig subscriber drinker mook and all of our friends we'll see you next time peace i mean it's it's still not fast in any means like my pots body would take this to town and it's stopped but is it fun we'll see you guys next week you

Channel: Junkyard Digs

Views: 1,053,141

Rating: 4.9271545 out of 5

Keywords: abandoned, revival, first, start, first start, run, drive, and, will, it, can, we, junkyard, digs, mook, BUICK, buick, grand, national, 1986, turbo, barn, find, barnfind

Id: GfX3jtpXAbE

Length: 40min 27sec (2427 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/GenericModerator2020]

Dad took the wind out their sails pretty quick. That thing is a POS.