`72 Buick Skylark 455 Pro-Touring project

[cray1801]

Hello, my name is Craig and I live in Raleigh, NC. This is my first post here on Lateral-G. This IS great place to learn and share on my journey during the transformation of my `72 Skylark. I have had lots of fun with this car... I am the third owner and have owned it since 2000. At first it was a nice 350/350 car, but I knew I could change that

I've always enjoyed a little drag racing so I figured this would be a fun platform for it. With a little tinkering it ran 14.2's with the factory setup and 3.42 gears. But the plan all along (of course) was to drop in a 455 BBB. I found one in TN and had a friend bring it to NC. It had been recently rebuilt, but as things go I found there were more issues that needed addressing. I finally got it all back together and dropped it in, along with a new stall converter. I had a bit of fun with it, ran some low 13's on street radials but soon thereafter...I ballooned the "affordable" torque converter. Of course this pushed the crank forward resulting in more repairs. At this point I decided to drop in a 400 trans. and much better converter another rebuild...but then... my daughter informed me that she would have to attend summer class to graduate (...so much for my planning schedule . Anyways, with no money left for the project and several months to wait my friend and I decided to build a flow bench from scratch. He had an old article on how to do it and 8 vacuum motors!

We got it built and calibrated with much help from the guys on Speed Talk. But this was just the beginning of the learning curve, in the quest to port my own heads. I made several Pitot tubes, measuring devices and slowly worked my way through porting each runner and chamber. Then re-porting the ones I did earlier, because they did not flow as well as the last one... I raised the intakes & exhaust port roof and filled the intake floors, you name it I tried it. I don't know how many hours it took me but I'm sure I could not afforded to pay someone to sit there and watch me do it for them. I even flowed the carb. intake and head all assembled after all that. I would not do it again, but quite the learning experience none the less.

Anyways after putting it all together added some drag radials and I hit the streets. This thing was much faster than it looked and sounded great. Just what I wanted. A couple years past and my friend (flow bench guy) threatened to buy a barn find Chevelle in his hometown where he grew up and build it to "stomp my grandma green Buick". Well it was no threat...he dragged it home did a frame off, added a 670hp race motor (I know since I went with him to the dyno), suspension and all. Endless **** talking between friends continued. I asked "What the hell! Why does it take all that to out run a stock headed grandma green Buick!?". Oh, he was determined alright, even after he saw the small nitrous kit (I added it just two weeks before he would be ready to run) he was still over the top confident. I'm telling you we really had lots of fun during the course of this developing story. We raced maybe (8) times over the next three months, sometimes he won and sometimes I won, but he never ran faster than my best time. We were at the Hot Rod Power Tour in Charlotte, NC in 2014. We had a blast running high 10's and low 11's.

Since then he sold the car and I've since decided to change directions and make this thing handle... and stop. Stay tuned, I'll start a build thread to show the progress in the coming weeks. Cheers!

[cray1801]

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