57 Buick Special GMT900 AWD Frame swap

[Cobranut]

I think i am seeing mud tires in your future....

I was right!!!

ROTFLMAO!!! 

[etizz]

so finally got those wheels on, then had to wait another day to get it towed home.  sorry that the pics suck. my phone stopped charging so I'm using my oldest daughters old phone cuz new phone for me means less car parts buying lol.

[freeskier7791]

Love it with those tires and wheels!!  I think the ride height should stay as is

[etizz]

Yeah I'm happy with its "stance" , wasn't entirely sure until I finally got the wheels/tires on. ill try to get a picture in the daylight so its not so horrible looking lol.  so now my next step I believe ill be pulling the dash and trying to fit the pedals/steering column. and then wiring, and I may try to test start/move after that. probably going to rewire the whole car thru the escalade fusebox because 1957 fusebox with glass fuses/no relays lol. so that may be interesting and time consuming but in reality the oem buick wiring diagram was 1 page lol so mainly its lights, blower motor/switch, and some cig lighters lol that's it everything else will be thru the escalade wiring harness. hoping to have the column/pedals figured out this week is my goal.

[freeskier7791]

I bet you could just use and extend the cadillac wiring from the BCM if you have it.  Maybe you could even do some neat things with the programming.  Is that your buddies truck that pulled it?  thing looks sweet

[etizz]

yeah friend of mines truck, '14 high country lowered, fancy haha. then theres the other fancy blue one towing the escalade too.  and then you have me which this car will be my tow vehicle, I have a crappy 99 benz e300 turbo diesel as a daily, its rough lol. I'm new to BCM's and CAN, and E38 PCM's and apparently I thought it was a good idea to sell my LS foam block this week and start buying cheap turbo parts lol.  I have a condition and its called I don't know when to leave well enough alone, but life would be pretty boring if I did I think lol.

So I fit the pedals after a lot of trial an error, ended up having to mount my booster upside down to clear a sensor that would hit the hood hinge when that's bolted up. fun stuff. so pedals are located where theyre going to live. now I'll be working on fitting the steering column this weekend with the escalade factory dashboard brace. then ill have to make braces from it to the pedals to the firewall where nothing flexes, then I'm gonna try to wire what I need to try to hook the battery up and test things . still would need to plumb cooling/trans cooler before I could test drive it but we're getting there.

[etizz]

lets see progress has been way slower than I would like, but I found a few hours to fab up a steering column bar, and weld up all the square tube to strengthen it. going to add some plate and a few diagonal braces to it for max strength but overall its where I want it to be. its not the prettiest thing but it works.  also I got my steering shaft pieces to adapt what I have. got a 1" dd shaft and 1"dd ujoint cuz they didn't make a straight coupler of 1"dd which is weird. turns out having a ujoint there is too many bends in the system so I'm going to have to cutout the ujoint part and weld it together as my own diy coupler.  which when I do , that will clock the steering wheel back straight since the u joint was phased like 90 degrees so that's why the steering wheel is way off. still much to do but im slowly chipping away lol.

[digitalsolo]

Hey, all progress is good progress!

[etizz]

A few more pics of the steering column brace thing, keep in mind nothing was here before lol, kinda weird, there was originally a few small brackets that bolted the the firewall but theres a lot of open air behind these dashboards. I like my harbor freight welder but one complaint I do have is it doesn't like small spools that it comes with, seems to bind when feeding a lot especially as you run out. I couldn't count how many times I was fighting with that delaying my progress.  gonna pick up a large spool today cuz I still have plenty of welding to do lol.  I know my pics aren't the greatest but its better than nothing I guess lol. It was a constant cycle of weld, grind, test fit ,repeat. my turbo manifold will be here tomorrow as if I didn't have enough on my plate lol. then ill be out of town for most of this week into sunday BUT after that I wont have any crazy plans to delay progress more so hopefully I can get a routine going to get somewhere.


my work space lol, not much room around here but nothing new to me. still this picture doesn't capture how wild this thing looks with this stance lol I'm sure i'll like it even better once I get all the body panels back on.

[etizz]

not much update, got my new welding wire spool, working flawless so far what a difference lol. went out of town, got my ebay turbo manifold, so far I like it, need to tweak it, turbo sits right in front of the factory blower motor so down pipe hit, will upgrade to a later model blower motor so its not as large and should clear no problem.  drivers side hits the front driveshaft, plenty of room to go around it so ill get to that.
 
been welding more on my firewall brake booster panel thing, what a mess lol just been bolting it up and adding metal and then cleaning it up later, I believe I have all the "flanges" done where it will bolt up, just need to final test fit and trim and fill the gaps.   I'm making progress, that's a big hurdle to get over in the grand scheme so I'm trying what I can.

random info I was thinking about a wiper solution cuz A) the factory wipers sucked, and I had to remove them to make my brake pedal/steering column work. B) oem escalade wiper linkage and motor is just too large to fit anywhere feasible.  so I'm thinking about trying the oem escalade rear wiper assembly. its compact, works with the factory switch on the column, has a washer option. downside is it only has 1 speed and I may have to frankenstein a front wiper arm for it since I don't think theres a tension spring on the rears normally due to not combating the wind on the back of a vehicle. not sure but its a least a potential solution whereas I had nothing before that I could plan for. we'll see when the time comes.

[digitalsolo]

Everything is better with boost. 

I'm curious to see what you do for wipers;  that's on my "figure it out" for the Mustang.  I've seen a few dual electric setups where the wipers mount to the shafts directly.

[etizz]

OK so kinda back on to this car now that my saab thing is functioning with its ls pcm. just trying to get these things movable under their own power so I can justify all the work I'm doing.

so quick changeup, sold the turbo and the manifolds, didn't fit for my liking, and after fitting the inner/outer fenders on it was not going to work the way I want anyway.  still want to turbo but money was tight earlier so selling parts here and there helped me get other items to complete systems on the car.

so I bought a radiator/ trans cooler lines/ oil cooler lines/ oem electric fans and junkyarded some radiator support bushings/mounts. so that's a trimmed escalade support and offset 4 inches back with a 34inch radiator. had to trim the upper and lower hoses, and the reservoir location is still TBD (hence zipties lol) once I did that I was curious if the front end would even fit with all this up there so I started putting things back checking everything out, trimming things as necessary.
so heres a pic of fitting up the front end back on, again pardon the mess, its the way I work apparently and I cant do anything about it lol I never even realize how dirty it is until I look at pictures like these.




so the last thing I have to check is the front bumper. Its needing some serious "tucking" cuz right now it stuck completely out about a 10 inches where it should be. so I'm hoping to get it as close as possible without having to modify anything else. I got one side modified, going to cut the other side the same way so I can at least test fit before I finish the welding up all the 1/4" steel bar that is the "frame" of the front bumper lol. beefy. once that's done ill trim the sheet metal around the radiator so air actually can flow through it instead of being blocked by it . then I can hopefully get back to getting things progressing to being moveable again. phew.

[digitalsolo]

This thing should be a blast once it's all done.   I dig the look.

[tai-lun]

I second that, the AWD will be fun with that big body.

[etizz]

so this past holiday weekend I got a lot accomplished:
mounted front bumper (mostly, needs a few tweaks)
ran the wiring into the car
mounted the main fusebox in between fenders
mounted the pcm
hooked battery up and checked power ( no electrical fires happened lol)
added some ground wires that were missing.
was able to hook hptuners up and read the tune after adding said grounds
instrument cluster is working ( mostly, more on that later)
trimmed more sheet metal around the radiator for airflow
mocked up some turbo stuff



so I tried to see if it would crank over with the key after just plugging everything in, still need to finish all the mounting braces etc so things were just hanging lol.  anyway I can get the cluster to power on, sounds like fuel pump is priming, ive got a bunch of messages in the dash for obvious reasons. when I go to try to start it doesn't crank over at all. I can jump the starter relay at the fuse box and the starter engages that way.  I imagine it still has some kind of security lock on it not allowing it to start.  I unlocked pcm and flashed vats off and no change other than I don't have codes for lost communication with the body control module/fuel pump supply module, which didn't make any sense cuz I changed nothing on any of that wiring. so any GM CAN gurus feel free to chime in cuz I have no idea how that stuff works. worse case I can bypass the starter to run off a button or something but i'd really like to get all the systems to work like they would normally.  I have a friend that works at chevy that has access to a tech2 or something that I'm hoping can override some things to make my life easier but we'll see lol.

overall I'm making some serious headway I'm kind of engineering everything to a point that I can just do a little bit more and finish each thing out when I'm ready. still a lot to do overall but as far as functionality I think I'm getting close.