by cammerjeff » Sun Jul 19, 2015 2:22 pm
Well we took our 78 Catalina Safari to our local POCI annual car show yesterday. And met a Retired GM interior Designer and after looking over our wagon he asked if I would be interested in Dealer Edition of the Pontiac Products Manual for 1978? I said sure and he said he would return in a few minutes with it. Well 30 minutes later he was back with it and would not take any cash for it, so I convinced him to let me buy him lunch. Great Guy. He worked at the Warren Tech center for 30 years, and just before he retired they were throwing out a lot of the old copies of manuals they had kept for years so he took a lot of stuff he could carry home. This manual has all the Distribution Bulletins up to 3-1-78, along with the marketing ideas of the time.
Things I found odd, in this manual the Sunbird is referred to as a "S" Type, I have never seen that before. And that the 305 V-8 was not available on the sunbird at the start of the Model year, and that the options availability was Undetermined as of 7-19-77. And the engine chart does not show a V-8 available for the Sunbird Safari wagon. So this is some more evidence that there were no Factory 1978 Sunbird V-8 wagons built.
If anyone is interested I will post more pages from it when I have more time. And to think I wasn't going to go to this Show! As I got off of work at 3:45am Saturday morning and only got about an hour of sleep before making the hour drive to the show. Good day, saw a lot of nice Pontiac's and bought a set of 1978 Michigan Bicentenial Plates with 78 Tags on them so I can register the Wagon as a Classic.
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Jeff R
1971 Catalina Freeway Enforcer
77 Astre Formula, some day soon powered by a 215 Buick V-8
1973 4-speed Lemans Safari STOCK!!!!! 1978 Catalina Safari
2006 Mallet Solstice, 6.0 LS2, 6-speed manual
2009 Solstice Coupe, 2.4, 5-speed Manual