Project Franken Riviera -64 Riviera T-type-
 

Hello Lateral-G,

Since I'm over here watching some other Riviera builds I should probably bring mine over as well. It's off the beaten path and I've been doing it for awhile so bear with me as I catch y'all up.

I'll start with the basic premise. I'm a Riviera guy after getting a '70 in college that I made a ton of rookie hot rodder mistakes on, spent too much money on the wrong things, but over all just loved the car. Owning a second generation got me exposed to the first generation so while I did own a '65 Grand Sport briefly it was beyond my ability to restore so I sold it and waited for a nice 64 or 65 to become available. I finally got my '64 in late 2006 and promptly did enough work to take it on two Hot Rod Power Tours, the last of which the water pump exploded (literally I had to pull pieces of the impeller disc out of the timing cover water passages with pliers) and that was really the functional end of the nailhead since I wasn't going to pay to rebuild it when I'd been slowly building a quasi-custom Buick Turbo6 in the garage to swap in eventually.

The car is a fairly high option '64 Riviera, it doesn't have the rear arm rest, 4 note horn, cruise, or auratronic eye headlight dimmer but it has power vent windows, the deluxe level interior, and a rear defroster which is kinda rare. It also came factory with a 3.23 posi which is nice. The engine is an '84 4.1L V6 block (3.965in vs. 3.800in bore on the 3.8L's) with a forged 3.4in crank, forged stock length rods, and custom Diamond forged pistons. Up top is a set of ported Champion CNC ported iron heads, T&D roller rockers, Comp 212/212 roller cam, and I ran out of money before I could afford a matching CNC intake so that's just a slightly customized stocker off of an '86 T-type. I'll go over what I did custom on the engine to both make it fit and to eliminate some weak spots in the classic Buick V6 design. Behind it I have a 4L80E and it's all controlled by a modified L67 (that's a Series II Supercharged 3800 Buick V6) EFI system where I hacked the transmission control like is common on the 4L60E to 4L80E control scheme by inverting the B solenoid output with a 5 pin relay.

I've got plans to update the car inside and out but life (most of that time I was active duty Air Force and I have a wife and two kids) and budget has made it a slow process. The goal is a car that doesn't keep someone from putting it back to stock if I need to sell it but still makes a strong attempt at driving like a much newer car. Particually taking advantage of 50+ years of suspension and tire improvements as well as various comfort features like heated seats, auto climate control, and the like.

Here's some pictures from when I bought it. I'm having some hard drive trouble currently so I can't get to most of my build pictures so I'll catch up over the next few days.

I like the engine plan!

Starting with the amazing East Bay Muscle Cars brown Riv build a few years back, plus now Charlie, yours and a few others on here, it certainly creates a Riv curiosity in a sea of Camaros...not a bad thing. :)

I'm digging the engine plan.

Very nice starter Riviera for your project. I fear my Dads Riviera will be just this side of a chicken coup as far as the trunk and floorboards go. Keep us updated! Dig the engine combo.

My floor boards and the trunk pan aren't super either. Side effect of the way Buick did the under floor bracing that just collects dirt which promotes rust. The trunk is just a bit weak by the rear body mounts, the floor boards are another story. The outboard seat mounts, which are on top of the stamped channel cross braces are rusted out on both sides of the car. The drivers side rear mount is rusted along the seams to the inner seat mount. I have a passengers side floor pan to splice in but the drivers side I've got to either fab from scratch or buy another chunk. As much as some people on the ROA board haven't treated members of this board very well. There are a lot over there who would be willing to help get a Riv back on the road. I know a guy here in the Livermore area that has something like 27 63-65 Rivieras of various states of repair. I'm going to ask him for a floor pan section for mine.

Really bad new, I've lost my hard drive with all of my pictures so I'll have to recover them from photobucket and other places so it'll be a bit longer before I can put more pictures up from the history.

Here's a recent picture of it's maiden voyage to a cruise in I put on at my church this last 4th of July. You can barely see the turbo behind the polished Al up pipe in there and I'll eventually get the front bumper back on.

Here's some pictures of what the worst of the floor looks like. Since that's the last thing I talked about for the car. It's gotten slightly worse as those pictures are from around 2009 and it's been in the garage virtually all of the time till this last 8 months. That's next months project because I need to mount my new seats, 97-99 Acura CL Premium seats since they have a power "walk through" where you flip the seat forward and it automatically moves to the full front travel then goes back when you flip it back all without involving a BCM.
http://images.gtcarlot.com/pictures/51938666.jpg
Not Premiums since it has a manual recline but elsewise the same.

Nice body and good choice on the seats.

Cool project, thanks for sharing. :)

Not ignoring y'all, just been out of town and I don't travel with my pictures so I'll catch back up sometime after I get enough sleep...

Teaser:

So I picked that teaser picture on purpose. It shows that bloody great big R4 compressor in there. Between that and the cut down 300 V8 oil pan I was using I had to locate the engine around 3in further forward than I wanted to for maximum set back to get the compressor to just barely clear the upper control arm cross shaft and the oil pan to fit between the cross member and the rear steer centerlink.

I saved up my money and bought a decent and well equipped RF-31 mill drill and without much planning took a spare accessory bracket and proceeded to modify it for a small Sanden compressor. I've not gotten to the point of fitting the AC again so I have no idea if it's enough compressor for the car with all it's glass but it's something. I did go through the trouble to put the same amount of bracing as factory to support that compressor. You can barely see it in the last picture since I was in the middle of doing the wiring for the L67 EFI system. I had to mill down a boss on the accessory bracket, spot face it for the lower mount on the compressor then I put a front strap like the 'Y' shaped bracket seen on the original compressor. The back of the compressor is supported by something that looks like a tree branch but it supports the outer end of the compressor. This thing shouldn't flex on me.

I'll get more into the engine oiling system since it's kinda trick sometime later today or this weekend.

Nice work...I see you have some skills there. :thumbsup::thumbsup:

Thanks for all the support

One of the big short comings of almost all Buick engines is the oiling system. The stock setup using steel spur gears riding in an aluminum housing with an aluminum thrust plate that tends to wear. The front cover oiling passages also have a lot of right angles in them so it's a torturous path from the pump to where it needs to go.
http://st.hotrod.com/uploads/sites/2...ming-cover.jpg
Combine this weakness with the fact that the stock oil pump and filter would run smack into the engine cross member I pretty much set out to fix both of those problems in one feel swoop. Now I'm not the first person to do this general idea, there are two others that took other Buick V6 front covers with a gerotor pump and adapted them but as far as I know I'm the only one that did it with a 3800 Series II/III pump which has the slight advantage of being internally located vs. the older pumps relied on the crank snout for the drive gear. However this is even less of a bolt on than the earlier setups they used since a 3800 has a balance shaft and a slightly different front bolt pattern for the timing cover. While it does use the same oil pickup location, the feed to the block is different so I had to change that. I ended up using the lower section of the 3800 cover and the upper section of an Indy Lites dry sump timing cover. I filled the oil return section of the pump up with marine JB weld and then machined a plate that housed the pressure regulator and allowed me to use an AN-10 fitting to route the oil to the external oil filter and then back into the side the of block where the old oil pressure sensor went.
At this point in my life I was stationed at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, OH and I had Ohio George Montgomery do the machine work. When he enlarged the passage for the oil supply he broke though into the water jacket above the oil gallery so he custom machined an insert that he locktited into place with a copper crush washer at the end and an epoxy blob over the top of the breach. He warned me to never tighten that fitting without a backer wrench less it start leaking.
For the upper section I didn't have my mill yet so I literally burned up (it caught on fire) a dremmel hogging out the underside of that dry sump cover and making a spacer bar to take up the space between the inside of the dry sump cover the and outside of the 3800 cover. I filled the rough spots with JB Weld again and then painted the inside with Gyptol and then used Indian Head Form-a-gasket to seal it up. No leaks believe it or not!

Here's a selection of pictures

Sorry for the oversized image from Hot Rod, I tried to get it smaller but no luck.

This solved the oil delivery problems and has generated ~75psi on start up and falls down to mid to high 20's hot. I did have to have an Al welder weld a piece of bar stock across the lower opening of the timing cover since the 14 bolt oil pan that the block uses is flat across the nose vs. the 20 bolt oil pan the cover is designed to work with is pointed so it would have leaked like a sieve. I think I also had to have a small bit of overlap on the side of the cover welded up so it wouldn't leak past the gasket that didn't quite overlap the hole. I've not had any oil leak problems from the pump, housing, or the line systems once I got rid of the oil cooler. The oil cooler proved to be more trouble than it was worth both plumbing and leaks wise so I eliminated it.

The problem I solved initially by using a cut down 300 V8 pan was oil capacity on the motor. The 300 was offered in an X-frame for 1964 which made it a hard pan to find but since a V6 is just 3/4 a V8 of whatever generation it overlapped with, it sorta bolts right on. I took the pan, cut the front two cylinders worth of pan out and welded the nose back on. The pan warped a bit when I did this and it sat the engine farther forward like I mentioned but it fit. I had to get it working since I was about to move from TN to CO (car kept the nailhead for the move to TN from OH) so I worked late at night to get it functional though it was barely able to make it on and off of a transporter for the trip.

Once I got to CO I used the V8 pan for awhile while I tracked down other problems and once I got it running decently I took the chance to swap from the SP400 (switch pitch 400) I was using before to getting the 4L80E installed and working. This meant it was time to permanently solve the oil pan and compressor issues and scoot that engine back. I've already covered the compressor solution. The oil pan I decided to cut the bottom out of a stock pan and weld up my own sump. I started by making the sump out of paper and folding it up and fitting it in the car and testing the steering and such to see if it cleared. I then bent it up using a combination of my hand brake, bending pliers, and even pieces of angle iron clamped to the section and the flange hammered over the top of it. I was again rushing to beat a move, this time to DC, so not a lot of pictures. I didn't have time to deal with seam leaks so I just coated all the seams with JB weld, lightly sanded the worst of the blobs off and painted it. No leaks! I did try to make a trapdoor sump but it didn't fit in the limited space between the centerlink and the cross member so I just kept the kick outs. At some point I'll pull the engine again to fix a persistent rear main seal drip and when I do, I'll add trap doors to the kickouts so oil doesn't slosh and get stuck in there. Right now the engine is as far back as it will fit with the 4L80E tailshaft and cooler fittings being the limiting factors for scooting it back any farther.

So a chance to reflect on where I'm headed with this car. Like most of us here, I want a car that has the visual and historical charm of an older car with something more modern in terms of power plant and ride quality. Chalk it up to improvements in tire technology as well as better understanding of how suspensions work together, there is something definitely to be gained. While you can get a little bit there by using good tires, new bushings, and newer alignment settings; it won't get me far enough there.

My plan is to do as much as I can for the suspension and brakes while keeping the frame side all GM so someone can bolt stock stuff back. That isn't stopping me from planning to replace the lower frame bushing with a spherical bearing or enlarging the frame hole for the brake reaction rod to put a ball joint in there. I've started to design via CAD a new spindle that helps invert the camber curve and reduce the aweful scrub radius. There isn't a whole lot of room for a wider track but I'll see what I can do there. Plan is to use Jeep WK1 SRT8 front hubs on a custom 3/4in steel plate spindle. Ball joint mounts will also be steel but bolted on. Hopefully I can quicken the steering ratio up a bit and eek out a bit more steering angle in the process. Most of the parts will be adjustable as to allow me to play with the settings as time allows. I know I'm going coil overs, it's just a a question of steel coils or air springs. Air would make me cut the frame but give me so much more real time adjustment in ride height and compliance. I do plan on keeping stock body mounts though to damp down the NVH, it is still a Riviera after all.

One big source of parts I see is the now 10yrs old category of UHP SUV. Stuff like the Cayenne, Grand Cherokee SRT8, and Q7 all are as heavy or heavier (I estimate the Riviera is now ~4000lbs). I plan on getting the Cayenne/Q7/Touareg SUV brakes and depending on if I spring for custom wheels at the same time, I might redrill the rotors for 5x5in but more likely I'll pickup a set of wheels from the same SUV family and redrill the hubs to 5x130mm. I did check, there isn't enough room to put a 1/2-20 wheel stud through the 14mm clearance hole in the rotor. It's close but doesn't quite fit.

This will be a blast. My first swap in 1997 was an '87 RX-7 with Buick GN engine/trans. 2670lbs with around 400hp was a good time.

So what I'm up to now is working on replacing the rusty pieces of the floor and fitting those Acura CL seats into the car. The passengers side of the floor is going to be relatively easy comparatively since I have a whole piece of a parts car for that side. The drivers side is going to be far harder unless I can get another section from a parts car as its far more rusted out.

There is a relatively easy way to mount the seats in the car using reinforcing plates under the floor a little bent metal stand in the back but it puts the seat at full back and full down pretty much right at the close limit of comfort to the steering wheel and pedals as well as my head only a hands thickness from the headliner. Now I'm 6'2" and only 175lbs so I'm tall but thin so it might work but I'd rather have more flexibility in there. There's a hump in the floor, picture 1, (and the cross floor bracing underneath that I didn't get a picture of) that pushes that side of the seat up 1.25in off of the rest of the floor section. Additionally the seats use a 45º mounting tab, picture 2, that eats up more space. Those mounts are riveted onto the seat tracks so I've not come up with a good way to get them off as I can't even figure out how to get to the back sides of them without taking the whole slide mechanism apart which is more rivets. Not something I want to mess with.
There's nothing under that bump other than the floor bracing so I'm so now I'm debating how much hackery to otherwise good floor I want to undertake. Cutting the bump, or at least a section of it, out would let me drop the seat about an inch and scoot it back about the same. Just wondering how worth it would be...

Last picture is a set of 2002 Eldorado front seats I'm working to attach to stock frames and get in the back of the car because I've had them for something like 8yrs and have finally given up trying to bypass the memory module and the aftermarket seat cover supply has dried up so a DIY redye will wear less in the back seat.

You know... just looking at the picture of the underside of the seats, I could remove that bolt and use it as the front mount after either cutting the front angle off or drilling out that rivet and removing the whole plate. Just means that I'd have to remove that bolt from under the car vs. from inside. Seems like a better idea than cutting the good section of the floor up.

Love the buckets in the rear.

Been working on fixing the floors and installing the Acura buckets. They're mixed together since I don't want to repair the floors only to cut things out or restore complicated features that aren't used anymore.

First thing I did was get a spot weld cutter and start drilling out the spot welds on the passengers side between the under floor braces and the floor itself. Other than some large concentrations of welds near the seat mounts that went pretty smoothly as long as I didn't get too aggressive too quickly with the cutter and have it skip out of the center punch on the weld. Got both bad sections of the floor out in about 2hrs of work with other guys standing around talking about stupid stuff we've done in cars as part of a guys group that meets in my garage on Thursdays.

Over the few days after that I've been working on mounting the drivers side seat since I need it first to bleed the brakes. Y'all saw my first attempt at mounting the seat and it ended up too far forward and too high. After a major screw up where I drilled a full set of mounting holes 1.25in too over and ended up off center from the steering wheel I regrouped and came up with a new mount plan that gets me seated pretty much exactly where I want. I've got maybe 0.75in of rearward travel from comfortable for me and even at full up on the seat my head doesn't hit the headliner unless I put the seat back full upright. Quite happy. Need to get some 0.25 plate to be happy with the mount strength but the basic design is intact and even uses the original mounting points for the front. The rear I'll have to make a new version of that bent metal bracket but it should be more than strong enough.

Continued working on the floor of the car, mainly on the passengers side. Since I paid a fair bit of money for it and there are no good repos, I've very carefully taken apart the passengers side donor section of floor by drilling out the spot welds and the like. This has left me with a lot of good donor sheet metal but it's been time consuming. I finally got the replacement section of inner rocker in the car and spliced in the new section of under floor bracing but when I was cleaning up the welds under the car I managed to get a metal grinder spark/frag in my eye past my safety goggles. I've been recovering from that for almost a week now and it was not fun having them dig a splinter out of my eye with a hypodermic needle!

Passengers side under floor structure is 90% done. Need to redo the last spot welds on the underside of the bracing and patch a small section of the second brace that rusted out. Then it's weld the seat mount plate on and then the floor over it. I'm guessing I've got another 4-5hrs left on the passengers side depending on how long it take to stitch weld the floor back in to keep it from warping. Then it's seat mounts and final paint to wrap that up.

The drivers side will be easier since I know what I'm doing better and have already taken the donor apart, but harder since I have no drivers donor so I'll be fabbing the floor out of sections of the passenger side and flat sheet. Have to get done by the end of the month so I can take the car to see my students from the auto maintenance class I taught on the last day of school.

FINALLY got the passengers floor all rebuilt, primed, and welded in! Need to grind the welds down and apply seam sealer to finish that side out till I go back and build the seat mounts.


In other news I got a hold of a large section of drivers side floor plan, it has a rust hole in it but it has most of the more complex shapes so I don't have try to fab those up from 16Ga sheet.

Well things have been well and truly stalled since Memorial day when I hit my thumb with a hammer trying to chisel out the rusty drivers side inner rocker and broke it. What didn't help is that right when it was healing up enough to work with again I was out of town for 3 weeks on a business trip so nothing's been happening.

I'm hoping tonight to start cleaning up the spot weld locations from the existing under floor bits so I can put the new seat mount in.

Now what I've been upto this week:

Been on the road a lot and while I did get the rest of the passengers side welded in, I'm not happy with it so I'll be taking it back out and redoing the structural bits of the welding.

Drivers side is mostly in with welds I'm happy with. Just need to wrap up the seat mount for that side's CL seat and I can start grinding it smooth.

Sigh... at least my wife has been patient and I've been cleaning up my shed slowly so I can move my work out there and have a chance to work without disturbing her sleep as our bedroom is right next to the garage and she's a light sleeper.

If at any point you're concerned that someone will become aware of the repairs in your floorpan, or their authenticity/provenance, just go to a car show. Watch how nobody will stress his/her beer belly nearly enough to examine the underside of your car. Hack away. Just make it as awesome as you need it in the best way you know how.

At what point in history did "experts" decide that automobile assembly welds needed to be more visually appealing than ____ (insert favorite proper noun here)? The more you take one of these old cars apart, especially with a useful tool like an air chisel, you realize that nearly anything a half-competent person would do with a MIG welder, a modicum of skill, and some nice, clean steel would be better . . .

I agree with you, I can deal with ugly using a grinder and hiding it under the carpet but this is structurally insufficient.

One of the seat mounts where I thought I had good penetration on the drivers side popped a weld when I used it to form a missing piece of the floor pan. The passengers side I'm far more suspicious of to begin with so it's getting new welds. The spot welds floor to bracing might be good but I've got to get them out of the way to get to the seat mounts again.

So I ended up fixing the problems on the passengers side by using a combo of the spot weld cutter and a step drill to reweld the seat mounts back down to the underfloor bracing. Follow that up with lots of grinding and then welding in the thin spots and gaps and I think I've got that side done. Just need to finish up the toeboard area and it's complete.
The divers side needs some more grinding as my disk started throwing chunks and I didn't have any new ones. This weekend I should be able to finish it up and maybe get started on the seat mount brackets.

After I'm done with the welding and grinding I'll take a rust/paint eater wheel to the whole area then prep and paint it with Eastwood rust encapsulator primer top and bottom. Then seam seal it, paint it white (body colour), and the bottom is getting under coating. The inside of the car needs to be cleaned out really well and some wiring work done to improve the routing and organization as well as bring power in for the power and heated seats. Power will probably run off of the original power supply from the fuse box but the heat will need fresh power off of the underdash power point I added specifically for stuff like this.

Well grinding is 99% done, but ran out of gas for the welder when finishing up a small patch I forgot.

Tonight I'll prep the toe panel to prime and this weekend I'll seam it and paint it.

I really don't like wearing gloves for working on cars because they snag, slip, and make my hands extra sweaty.... However I'm never stepping near seam sealer again without them! That mess took 2hrs of worrying it off of my fingers before I went to bed.

Anyway, passengers side is done minus having to weld on a seat mount bracket. I'll just grind the paint off of the section I need access to when I do and repaint it then.

Local welding shop is out of gas so I'll have to go back tomorrow or Saturday morning. Means I'm pretty much stalled on the floor.

This weekend I'll wrap it up and move on to seat brackets and clean up.