1986 Buick T-type build

[Turbobuick]

There are not a lot of G-body builds on here and even less turbo Buick's. I thought I would post up a thread on my T-type that I have been working on since 2005 and is still a project in process. This car and I have a lot of history and if there is interest I can start at the beginning and post pics of the entire build up till today. I initially bought the car as a roller and I planned to put an extra motor I had in to make a "nice driver" out of. As most you can appreciate it just snow balled from there to a complete frame off resto-mod build.

The car was pretty much rust free and while the paint looked rough it was actually a really clean 86 T-type that is a well optioned and pretty rare. They only made 1921 1986 T-type's built and this one is actually a Canadian model making it even rarer and it is technically an import lol! The climate control is in Celcius and the speedo in KM, the emission tag is also for Canada and the front bumper has the lightweight bumper supports and not a full crash bar. EDIT: Actually it is really rare only 175 1986 T-types were exported to Canada, 441 Grand Nationals

Here is a pic of the car as it sits today. It obviously has some suspension work and has a 3.8 Stage 2 Alum GN1 head motor that should make somewhere around 700 hp at the tires.

[Streetbu]

Gorgeous G body!

[Big Dawg]

That is a nice T-Type for sure. Can't wait to see more pictures....

[Turbobuick]

Gorgeous G body!

Thanks, it wasn't always that nice! I am going to post pics that go back 17 years at this point and were all taken with ****ty cell phones so please excuse the quality.

I picked the car up in 2005 as a winter project to build a nice "driver" and use a motor and parts I had laying around at the time. At the time I was racing an 8 sec 87 GN and wanted something more tame for the street and that wasn't all black. While 87 GNs can be rare to see at the track these days, back then we were racing a lot of Buick events where the staging lanes were nothing but a sea of black Buicks!

A friend of mine who was another Buick guy had this car he picked up somewhere in his travels as a towing and recovery business. Someone had broken the passenger window and it had some front bumper damage but the car was really clean, rust free and complete. My buddy wanted the motor and trans out of the car for another project of his so he sold me the roller for a good price.

[Turbobuick]

My original plan was to put the motor I had laying around and to build a stock appearing 10 second street car that was a total sleeper. I had a really nice girdled 109 stroker motor with a killer set of ported iron heads and a billet roller cam and a stock appearing 66mm turbo. I had a nice 200r4 built, used a stock rearend with some other hand me down drag suspension parts from my 87 GN.


As I mentioned earlier the car is pretty rare. It is a Canadian model that was well optioned with digital climate control, t-tops, twilight centennial, concert sound, factory carpeted trunk, pw, pdl, pwr seat etc. The only options it didn't have were the digital dash and of all things Posi traction!
,
The car was really clean but the paint was in really bad shape. With the exception of one really small rust spot on the passenger rear quarter the sheetmetal was pretty much rust free and pretty straight. A little history I had on the car was that it was purchased by a local College kid who used it as a daily driver. The car can from a dealer Dennis Kirban who is known for selling nice clean cars. While the car was clean the paint was in bad shape, someone had rattle can painted the lower half and the factory upper part was faded and checked. I decided to repaint the car and started stripping it down.

[Turbobuick]

I took the car to a friends shop to be painted who had done a bunch of work for me in the past and actually painted my GN which turned out really well. I wasn't looking to make a show car out of it just something nice to drive. The factory paint had to be stripped so I had the entire body media blasted before dropping it off.



I don't know what happened but I think my friend was in a hurry to get the car out of his shop and had his inexperienced son working on it at the time. The body work was really bad he had missed a bunch of dents there were sanding scratches and lines in it everywhere and it was a mess. I was pretty disgusted with the car when another friend of mine offered to fix it and repaint the car. This was April of 2008 and buy this time I decided to go all in and pull the body off the frame to really do it right.

[Turbobuick]

Once the body and frame were separated my buddy put the body on another frame he had to do the body work and I took the chassis home to redo and prep. I stripped it down had it blasted and sprayed with GM frame paint. I redid the suspension with factory parts and was still trying to keep the car as factory appearing as possible. I ordered all new SS fuel and brake lines new body bushings etc. The suspension and frame were really clean with minimal pitting.

I decided to use a set of early two piece Pontiac GTA wheels for the GNX look. I found a really nice set in charcoal grey which I thought would look really good on the car. The BS on the GTA wheels are 4.5" for the fronts and 5.5" for the rears. To make them work on the Buick most guys would use 4 fronts. Since these wheels were grey and not the more common black I decided to try and make them work with these elaborate custom spacers I had made. In short they worked but I was not happy with them and this turned into a a long process in which I spent a really stupid amount of money on these wheels. I ended up purchasing two more front wheels and sent them out to be re-finished in which they machined the lips and I left the clear coat off to polish them. When I mounted them on the car I didnt realize the Bell tech drop spindle tie rod rubbed with a 4.5" BS. So I sent out the extra set of rears to be refinished and had them cut apart and done with a 4" BS to clear the tie rods. I now have 6 wheels for the car and are the wheels on the car today. I should have just gone aftermarket but you have to remember this was 2008 and there were not a as many wheel choices out there like there are today and pro-touring was just starting to become popular. It may still be a future upgrade as 16" tires are not easy to come by these days.

[Turbobuick]

While I was working on the chassis my buddy was redoing the body work



Finally in summer of 2009 it was time to put the body back on the frame and bring it home

[Turbobuick]

Note the size of my house garage/shop in 2009. At the time, I was also heavily into racing my 87 GN which in November of 2009 had run a best ET of 8.14 and mph of 174mph and was still a street car and at the time we were running the fastest with production style heads. I did mange to get T-type somewhat back together and actually had it running in November of 2009 but it was far from done. It was amazing I had time to even work on it since that fall we were racing almost every weekend in four different states trying to get the GN in the 7s. We were at MIR for World Cup, a track rental in Pittsburgh, again in Edgewater for testing and out in Atco NJ for another Buick track rental in early December!. The video is me and Ray testing at Edgewater back then
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEBa...st=LL&index=26



The T-type often took a back seat to that car and I certainly didn't have enough room to keep both at my house at the same time. Plus once winter set in it was time to get our regular cars into the garage so project were put into storage or I would drop one of them off at my best friend Ray's shop in the fall to get some work done and wouldn't pick it up till spring lol! In the spring of 2010 I sold my 87 GN in order to finish a project I already had underway. I was having 25.3 chassis drag radial Buick GN built at a chassis shop. My GN had WAY more motor than suspension and Chassis and I only had a 8.50 cert for the cage in the car.

By spring of 2010 I had the T-type back together and on the road. I was trying to tune the car with alcohol injection and pump gas and gave up on that after my first HG issue and was sorting out the bugs on the car. The front bumper fillers were painted separately from the rest of the car and did not match at all but I had them refinished over the following winter.

[Streetbu]

Wow, great back story. Gorgeous GN too did the Cutlass in the video wreck right at the end?

[Turbobuick]

Wow, great back story. Gorgeous GN too did the Cutlass in the video wreck right at the end?

Thanks, the back story actually gets better lol! I am actually putting together next post and may get it up tonight or tom am.

A little preview: I bought the 87 GN back last April and it is under going an update now and I am registered for the Midwest Drags drag in June which is a drag and drive event. I am also registered for the NE Musclecar Challenge in Sept with the T-type and planning to finally get it on the track for some open track days this year.

YES the Cutlass made an off track excursion at 160mph!! That was it's maiden pass and only full pass. The rear brakes locked up in the shut down and he went sideways and off the track. How he didnt flip it is beyond me we think the chute saved him. I think it was a bad residual valve or something like that. It was a lot of mess but not a lot of damage he was extraordinarily lucky that day! I was on the return road and saw the entire thing unfold and it was unnerving as I was watching him then looking at the passenger door as the car was completely sideways. Ray is my best friend and we have been racing together for close to 20 years now.

[Turbobuick]

I took the car to the Buick Nats in 2012 and it ran on the track. It went 11.00@122 on a pump gas Cam 2 mix on total street tune. I was pretty happy with that and as far as I was concerned at the time the car was pretty much done to that point. I was still working on the Drag Radial car I was building but starting to have issues with the chassis shop who now had the car for close to 4 years.

Soon after the NATs a deal presented itself to trade the T-type to a friend of mine who had built a Twin Turbo 25.5 87 GN. The car was a high end build with the best parts you could buy but was poorly executed and never fully sorted out. It had a 1500hp Alum TA block S2 heads twin 70mm turbos with a Jerry Bickle 4 link back half and 25.5 chassis and was worth significantly more money than my T-type. The car was complete and running but it was also a total mess at the same time.



After getting the car I started to go through the car to try and get it ready to actually take it to the track. I had to update the chassis get it certified put new seat in that fit me plus a few other small issues. The more I dug into this car the deeper the rabbit hole appeared to be. It started with the wiring in the car but when we put the car on the dyno and tried to run the car under power it became apparent that to sort this car out it was completely coming apart. At the time I was so far into building my drag radial car that tackling a new project like this one would have been insane and probably landed me in divorce court lol! I pulled the motor and a guy in MI wanted to buy the roller for a build he was doing and made me a really good offer on the roller so I let it go. In hind sight I should have kept and finished that car but hindsight is always 20/20.

It was late 2013 and I tore the TT GN apart to sell it off and I am trying to get the drag radial car finished. A little Buick motor porn: the first pic is both the TT GN motor with Stage 2 heads and the motor on the left in the pic is the motor I built for the drag radial car which made close to 1400hp in my 87 GN which I sold in 2010. The TT Stage 2 motor sorted out would be a 1500hp motor. The other two pics are the Motor I build for the drag radial car with production style heads and a custom belt drive set up I was mocking up at the time.



Here are a few pics of my Drag Radial car at the chassis shop.

[Turbobuick]

The chassis shop that was building my drag radial car shut down in 2014. The guy took the car to his home shop to finish it and had the car for 7 years at this point. I finally got it back in 2015. I then took it to a body shop in which it sat untouched for another year and that is the point I had enough and decided to get out of racing all together. I parted the car out and sold the roller to a one friend and the motor to another and I was done. I even sold my enclosed trailer and was completely out of the racing business and for the first time since 1989 did not own a Turbo Buick. That didn't last long lol!

The guy I traded the T-type to has a very large car collection consisting of mostly Corvettes and a few Buicks. He had purchased a top flight 63 split window and needed the space in his garage for the new vette and made me an offer to buy back my T-type I could not refuse. This was two whole days after I got rid of the drag radial car! Anyway he was in a hurry and delivered the car to me and to my surprise when he dropped the car off it was in EXACTLY the same condition it was when it left. He never drove it or registered the car it just sat in storage with the rest of his collection. The pics are from the day it returned and a few weeks later when I decided to try a different wheel tire combo which I didnt care for.

The guy, I sold the drag radial roller to, who is also a really good friend, finished the car and raced it very successfully with a Buick V6 combo very similar to the one I ran and built for the car. Here is video of him setting a record for one of the fastest production style head cars ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEiZ...ist=LL&index=5

Next posts will start to bring things up to date. I had a bunch of really big plans for the T-type when I got it back but it mostly sat till 2018.

[Turbobuick]

I am going fast fwd on the build from 2018 to present there is a longer thread on it on Garage Journal if anyone is interested. Brief run down of suspension build is Ride Tech front UCA/LCA with 1.5" Muscle bar and Viking DA Warrior CO all around with 550#/125# springs, rear sway is UMI .75" bar.

Brakes are Baer SS4s it the front and stock drums in the rear for now but will be getting the Baer rear disc when I get a chance to put them on. Rims are modified 16 two piece GM GTA's with polished lips I have 6 of them two with Toyo 275/45 DR and four with 245/50 front and 255/50 rear Toyo R888s for the track and autox.

Motor is a 3.8 Stage 2 offcenter 4 bolt block with 9.5:1 CR JE pistons, 6" Oliver billet rods 4340 forged 3.625 crank, alum GN1r 14 bolt Heads ported stock intake TA headers with stock style WG 3" downpipe. Billet journal bearing 6768 PTE turbo with whoa-fully inadequate GN1 stock location IC. Radiator is a Champion with dual spal fans and internal Oil/Trans cooler and I also run a secondary ext trans cooler. Trans is a fully build billet 200r4 from Janis transmission running a 10.5" Non-LU Bradco TQ converter. Drivetrain is Dennys 3.5" Alum shaft with 1350 Ujoints billet yokes and built 30spline 8.5" rear with Moser Axles.

Now the pics:

[TUBED]

Nice ride. How did the M&H drag radials early on in the build perform? I see that you've since changed to Toyo's

[XLexusTech]

I love this.. Ive wanted a well build GN or T-Type for street use for a LONG time .. Someday

[Hemi8]

Your tale of TB ownership sounds like mine. In Feb. 2022 I had my 86 GN at a dyno shop putting the finishing touches on the WOT tune with the new, smaller BW EFR turbos and it slammed into the cooling fans after it broke loose from the dyno. Its been in the bodyshop for 7 months, luckily it only hurt the header panel, bumper, hood, didn't hurt any engine parts. But man, to have my prize possession I carefully pieced together over 7 years smashed by a reputable shop was like a shot to the nads. Oh well, they are almost finished with it, accidents happen, people F'up, part of life. Your build looks great, love that suspension setup.

Mike