2 Attachment(s)
Pro Touring 1970 Cutlass S "The Oldsmobeast"
Hello Everyone! I recently Joined the forum and wanted to make a build thread to introduce my 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass S, aka "The Oldsmobeast." The story of this car really starts out in the mid 80's, when my father was a teenager. He wanted to get an old muscle car to work on, so he saved up working odd jobs, and was able to buy an aspen green 1970 cutlass supreme convertible from his neighbor.
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After working on the car for a few years the day he got his license the '70 vert burned to the ground due to a cracked rubber fuel line, which was sadly caught on camera by a neighbor!
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Following the heartbreak of this incident, my dad was able to buy a '67 442 from someone in the town he grew up in, and still has the car to this day.
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When I entered my early teenage years, I wanted to follow in my father's footsteps and find an Oldsmobile of my own to work on. Being a young kid, I worked what odd jobs I could and saved every penny from birthday and Christmas to try to get some money together.. In late 2011 I had around $1100 saved up and stumbled across an astro blue 1970 Cutlass S on eBay, located around 45 minutes from me which was listed for $1500. I asked my parents to borrow the $400 difference, however they told me that since my birthday and Christmas were only a month away I should wait and would have the money then. To my dismay, the listing for the '70 disappeared two days after I had seen it. Heartbroken that I had missed out on that car, I decided to postpone my search for a car until after Christmas. Fast-forward to Christmas day, and I was excited to add a little money to my project car fund. After opening boxes of socks, a calendar, and small odds and ends, I finally made it to the last box I had to open, which was a small jewelry box. I immediately ripped it open, and did not find money, but a square and an oval key. My dad said that he had decided to give me our old 1977 GMC Sierra truck. Excited, I ran out back to try to open up the door to my new project. However, when neither key worked, I walked back out front and to my amazement, that astro blue 1970 Cutlass was sitting in our driveway.
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My dad had gone to look at the car the day after I showed him the ad, made a deal that day, and then hid it in our neighbor's garage. Our original plan was just to make it drivable, fix any structural rust, and create a car that I could cruise around in. We started by pulling the car off of the frame to fix the floor/trunk rust as well as clean up the frame. We also decided to replace the tired 350/th350 with a 330 we found online, and backed it up with a 2004r transmission.
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Following this I spray painted the car black to make it all one color, and would touch it up as we did metal work on various areas of the car. We went through the wiring to make sure the essentials functioned (lights, brake lights, turn signals, etc). and I was finally able to drive my car! I drove it like this for around a year.
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The car was a super reliable cruiser, however we still had more work to do to clean it up, so we decided to move onto fixing the rot in the quarters and rockers.
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Now that most of the metal work was done, I decided I wanted the car to have more power! So during senior year of High school I bought a 455 core, and swapped in a new rear end, which was a 3.73 posi. I slowly began to collect parts for the 455, and near the summer of 2016 I was finally able to put it in the car.
Now in college, I decided I wanted to focus on making the car look a little more complete, so turned our attention to the paint. I got an all fiberglass w-25 hood off of craigslist for around $150 (It had been cracked in half) which we combined with a steel hood to make a steel bottomed W-25 hood. Whenever I had free time I would drive home and sand on the car. after months of sanding and bodywork, she was finally ready to paint! We build a homemade paint booth in our driveway and decided to repaint the car in twilight blue with black stripes, as I preferred the look of that color over the factory astro blue. Around this time we also decided to do a pro touring build with the car, with the intent of racing it on road courses and autocrosses some day, so we added in a competition engineering half roll cage, corbeau cr1 seats, the UMI Performance cornermax kit, UMI tubular rear control arms, UMI sway bars, UMI rear lowering springs, and forgestar f14 wheels (18x10 rear and 18x8.5 front.)
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once the paint was complete I reassembled the car and decided that I just wanted to focus on driving it for a bit, and not worry about continuing to work on it. The car was around 80% done, however it still needed certain trim pieces and interior pieces to be complete. Around this time I swapped a th400 (on loan from my father's 67) to handle the torque of the now 463 BBO. I then cruised the car like this for around a year and a half, until an amazing opportunity came up. A journalist for the hot rod network reached out to me and said he wanted to feature my car in car craft magazine! I was excited for the opportunity, and realized that I now had to put the small missing pieces on the car. We spent the winter of 2018 wrapping up small misc. things that needed to be done on the car so that it would be ready for it's feature shoot, which also included adding a few new things like a holley digital dash and holley sniper fuel injection. The magazine shoot was done in march of 2019 and it was featured in the December 2019 issue of Car Craft Magazine!
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After the magazine shoot, the car remained unchanged for the next year and a half, as I focused on just enjoying the car and finishing college, which brings us to the summer of 2020. Once I finished college and started my first proper job out of school, I finally had the means to do the last few things I wanted to do to the car. These things included a t56 magnum transmission, Sparco racing seats, fully boxing the frame, an 18x11 squared wheel setup with 315 tires, and bigger wilwood brakes front and rear. We began the latest update of the car in December of 2020, and wrapped it up in June 2021!
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Unfortunately we faced a ton of issues with the oldsmobile 455 in the car, as it's really not suited for the sustained rpms on the road course and autocross. My winter plans for 2021 are an engine swap (currently having a dry sump ls7 built) as well as several small changes to help refine the car. I want to make the car as reliable as possible this offseason, so I can run a full season of events next year!
For those interested in following the build, I have an Instagram page (The_Oldsmobeast) as well as a YouTube channel (The Oldsmobeast) which both document the build of the car.
