The Humble Beginnings of Buick's Awesome 3.8L / 3800 V6 Engine: 1962 Buick Special V6

many individuals in car circles are huge fans of Buick's 3.8 liter 3800 V6 engine that was produced through 2008. after that time period the Buick 3.8 liter engine was sunset in favor of a double overhead cam 3.6 Liter V6 engine the GM employed in many different vehicles that unfortunately was not only more expensive to service but also more failure prone than these relatively bulletproof Buick 3.8 liter engines the Buick 3800 had a great reputation for reliability durability and for being cheap to service it also provided good power and very good fuel economy and achieving 30 miles per gallon or more in a full-size vehicle equipped with one of these engines was not out of the question and in fact was often a frequent occurrence and while many of us are familiar with the Buick 3800 engines particularly the series one two and three engines that were produced in the 1990s through the 2000s the Buick 3.8 liter engine has an interesting history all to its own that dates back to 1962. it's a particularly strange history in that the engine was developed by General Motors before being sold to Kaiser Jeep for a period of time and then being bought back by General Motors after the fuel crisis to find itself under the hood of many many different Vehicles over quite a few decades let's explore a bit of the history of this Buick V6 and go back to where it all began in the early 1960s to understand why the Buick V6 was conceived one has to go back to the 1961 model year when GM introduced its so-called senior compact lineup the Pontiac Tempest the Oldsmobile f-85 and the Buick special as well as the top of the line Skylark the Oldsmobile f-85 and Buick special came standard with an all-new aluminum block 215 cubic inch V8 under hood Oldsmobile called this engine the Rockette no not the dancers and Buick called it the fireball which was a name that interestingly it had employed for a number of years and its previous straight eight engines The Tempest also offered the 215 cubic inch V8 as an option but came standard with half of a 389 V8 under hood Pontiac so-called trophy or Indianapolis 194.5 cubic inch four-cylinder engine this Trio vehicles from Buick Oldsmobile and Pontiac were known as senior compacts because they were a bit larger than the corvera that Chevrolet had introduced in 1960. that Corvair wrote atop 108 inch wheelbase and these vehicles rode atop 112 inch wheelbase you got a little bit more room and overall length and you also got a different engine the Corvair being powered by a horizontally opposed air-cooled six-cylinder engine and the buickles Pontiac car is being powered by the 215 cubic inch aluminum V8 or as mentioned pontiac's trophy four-cylinder engine so if Buick's version of the senior compact was introduced with a 215 cubic inch V8 in 1961. why in the world would Buick introduce an all-new cast iron V6 engine to go under hood of the special in 1962 just one year later well the answer comes because Buick's general manager at the time Ed rollert wanted a lower price alternative to the Buick special to be introduced for the 1962 model year quite simply roller thought that the Buick specials base price was simply too high to compete in the marketplace more specifically Buick's lowest price senior compact in 1961 debuted at a base price of 2 330 dollars this was about a four hundred dollar premium over Ford's Falcon and about a 375 dollar premium over Plymouth Valiant and both of these cars came with six cylinder engines versus the Buicks V8 roller simply thought that he needed a lower base price vehicle to compete with the Falcon and the Valiant and test Buick's engineering team with coming up with a lower cost cheaper solution to shoehorn under the hood of the little special while to this point numerous American automobile companies have been producing six cylinder engines for some time there really wasn't a V6 that was produced on mass by the American automobile companies before 1962. most six-cylinder engines were instead in-line configurations and often if you got the eight cylinder you got an inline eight cylinder engine or in the case of later years of V8 there just wasn't a reason to have a V6 engine because the inline six-cylinder engines were extremely smooth and they fit under the hood of the full-size American cars that have been produced to that point but with Buick senior Compact and inline six-cylinder engine just wasn't going to fit and so in order to have a six cylinder engine a new V6 had to be devised the task of thus developing a low-cost six-cylinder engine to fit under hood of the Buick special fell to Buick powertrain engineer cliff studecker and the team around him first idea that they had was to lock two cylinders off of the 215 cubic inch V8 to create a V6 however the team knew instantly that there was going to be one principal issue with this design and that was that a 90 degree V6 is going to have uneven firing pulses and the engine would have some pronounced shake to it in order to quell some of the shake the team evaluated a number of different firing intervals and did so by taking one of the aluminum V8s and just leaving the front cylinders empty putting in a different crankshaft and camshaft as well as an intake manifold and trying to evaluate different scenarios the firing interval they found that proved best for the engine was a cylinder firing every 150 and 90 degrees for each crankshaft throw they also decided upon a firing order of 165432 for the engine which enabled the cylinders to fire on Alternate Banks thus helping smooth at least some of the vibration from what was otherwise going to be a rough engine Buick Engineers also decided to make the V6 a little bit larger than it would have been if they had just simply lopped off two cylinders from the 215 cubic H6 they board the cylinders to 3.625 inches from 3.5 inches and enlarge the stroke from 2.8 inches to 3.2 inches giving this first debut 1962 Buick V6 a displacement of 198 cubic inches horsepower is actually quite respectable at the time at 135 this was just 20 less than the V8 that was standard in the Buick special it also enabled the engine to move the special from 0 to 60 in about 12 to 13 seconds while this certainly sounds slow by modern day standards for the time it actually was quite competitive and in fact a little bit faster than the Falcon and the Valiant with the standard engine as the Falcons most powerful engine for 1962 was 101 horsepower 170 cubic inch inline six cylinder the Valiant however was offered with Chrysler's famous slant 6 225 cubic inch engine it was rated at a top rating of 145 horsepower no matter the Valiant slightly topped the Buick special in terms of horsepower this little Buick V6 that was introduced for 1962 made quite a splash and in fact the 1962 Buick special was named Motor Trends Car of the Year Buick advertised the special as having V6 or VA power under hood you could effectively pick what engine you wanted the key question was then whether or not Ed Raleigh's strategy of bringing a lower priced Buick special to Market in 1962 actually worked and the answer is it most certainly did well the V8 models as an example the Skylark the top of the line special got a price increase for 1962. the Skylark for example in Coupe form went for a base price of 2621 to 2787 Dollars the base specials got a price decrease for example the coupe was now priced at two thousand three hundred and four dollars compared to two thousand three hundred and thirty dollars in 1961. perhaps as a result of the new pricing strategy and the six cylinder engine production of the special coupled with its Skylark variant increased from about 87 000 units in 1961 to 154 000 units in 1962. of those 154 000 units in 1962 almost 60 000 were equipped with Buick's new fireball V6 given the success that this move created it's a wonder that other American automobile companies hadn't replicated it by this point more specifically why had none of them gone and produced a V6 engine and stuck with inline six-cylinder engines there's a couple reasons one of which was as previously mentioned the inline six cylinder engines fit under the hood of many American vehicles at the time and were extremely smooth they also were very familiar to the buying public and they were cheaper to produce in a number of cases than a V6 engine because they only have one cylinder head and one set of exhaust manifolds thus it really was the necessity of an inline six-cylinder engine not fitting under hood in the Buick special that forced Buick Engineers to come up with their V6 in the first place in the years that followed many different Buick v6s would be found under the hood of various General Motors vehicles and the engine would get Turbo charging supercharging and a balance shaft in 1988 as it was renamed the 3800 V6 but it all started back in 1962 with the desire of Buick general manager Ed rollert to have a lower priced Buick special and Buick Engineers Rose to the occasion strangely enough while the V6 was initially very successful commercially by 1967 Buicks equipped with the V6 had dropped to under 20 000 units and GM decided to sell the tooling for the engine the Kaiser Jeep who put it under hood as the so-called dauntless V6 until the 1971 model year after the OPEC Embargo of 1973 and the oil crisis GM later decided that it needed yet again a fuel-efficient engine and bought back the tooling from Kaiser Jeep and began installing it yet again in their vehicles GM also sold the tooling for the 215 cubic inch aluminum V8 to Rover and it became an engine that powered Rovers for many years even into the 2000s so GM devised a number of different engines that it sold to the Kaiser Jeep Corporation as well as Rover and bought one of them back and the other one became a very famous engine in British Automotive History hope you enjoyed this Spotlight on the 1962 Buick Fireball V6 if you did be sure to like comment subscribe and check out the video thumbnails at bottom left and right for some suggestions for you thanks again for watching

Channel: Rare Classic Cars & Automotive History

Views: 69,439

Keywords:

Id: QLrcn1hQU3Y

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 27 2023