I have joined this board because I have a huge H-body project on my hands; a broken down 1976(I believe it is a '76. I need to double-check this.) Buick Skyhawk with an automatic transmission and Astroroof option.
This is a long story so bear with me.
When I was very little, my parents had 3 vehicles. We had a truck, a sedan, and this plum/magenta-colored Skyhawk with an Astroroof. I liked the Skyhawk the best out of the three vehicles.
The Skyhawk had some kind of minor issue, but for whatever reason my dad didn't want to mess around with it despite knowing how to fix it, so he parked it here and it has sat.
And sat.
And sat..
For over 20 years at this point.
When I eyeball the car, the exterior doesn't have anything worse than small bits of surface rust in some places(I am not in one of the states where cars normally rust away to nothing, thankfully!). The frame and all of that doesn't appear to be corroded or rusted out. The interior upholstery is bad of course(The dash and steering wheel and all that stuff looks salvageable-to-good at least.) as I would expect it to be. The outside trims and other pieces are pretty much all there; the louvres for the back window need to be bolted back on but the piece itself is there. The Astroroof has a small leak in its interior trim somewhere in the back; it isn't huge, needs fixing of course but it hasn't poured buckets through.
I'm relatively new to working on cars and I want to learn by stripping this poor neglected car apart as much as I possibly can, fixing/replacing everything and put it back together.
I don't mind that it will take a long, long time to do all of this properly. I understand the scope of it; literally every single thing on it could potentially be completely bad and need work. I'm okay with that.
I want to restore this car because I love it, it deserves better than rotting to nothing and I want to learn how to tear down and fix a car so I don't have to always be in a position where I eternally depend on a mechanic to repair every single thing, or other people to fix stuff like that for me, especially given the fact that I don't have a ton of money on my hands(This is why I have to SLOWLY restore the Skyhawk instead of ordering everything at once and jumping right into it.). I do have access to various tools and other items I would need, other people around who know more about cars than I do to serve as other sets of hands to help out and space to work, so I want to give this a shot.
It seems to me that a good place to begin would be cleaning every single bit of it(outside, inside, whatever can be reached under the hood) and pulling out the bad interior portions.
Once I get into the nitty-gritty I may(Hey, let's be realistic and say PROBABLY, come on, let's not be delusional here!
) get down into the engine block and discover the block is ruined somehow; that would change the plan from working with the pre-existing engine into dropping a working engine from a similar car into it.I'm posting this thread to keep track of the project, and get a sort of gameplan going, brainstorm about it with people who already know a lot about this stuff.
I don't have any pics of the car yet. I will get some soon when I get over this nasty head cold I have! I should have more info about the car then too.
I'm hoping to get some pics of the Skyhawk in the next couple of days.
