the seats were made for traveling, drive in movies and dating

This thread brings back a lot of memories . My Dad was a Buick man for many years .

Parents had a 69 Wildcat, with a 430 4 barrel. Man what a night my girl (now my wife of 43 years) and I had in that for the Jr/Sr prom!!!

We dusted the local doctor's son and his cheerleader girlfriend. HA HA

That car would haul ass.

quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
sigmonkey ,
if you could spend $2500.00for parts, and put a new suspension built with todays technology, would you go ahead and do it ?

to achieve far superior handling abilities

Yes. I did that.

Complete UMI tube suspension front and rear. Larger sway bars front and rear.
With added support tubes in the rear, and new coils, shocks etc.
News Strange Dana 60 rear.
Wilwood disc brakes all around, 11" brake booster, dual master cylinder and all new stainless brake lines.
New close ratio steering gearbox, (2.5 turns, lock to lock)
I also pulled and completely rebuilt the steering mast.

The Skylark convertible and the GS have fully boxed frames, so the ride is pretty stable now. It drives like a newer car.

? ? ? ? ? ?
your what hurts?

When the Buick Wildcat is not fast enough, you strap two wildcats together to start something that is really fast.

The AG330 start cart was developed exclusively for the Lockheed SR-71's Pratt & Whitney J58 turbojet engines. The cart used two Buick Wildcat V-8 racing engines, each of 425 cubic inch displacement. Together the engines produced over 600 horsepower and were tied to a common gear box to deliver torque through the starter drive shaft to the J-58s. The aircraft engines had to be run up to at least 3,200 rpm for ignition.

the motors on the ground had a drive shaft that ran to the two jet engines?

quote:

Originally posted by kimber1911:
Lockheed SR-71/J58 AG330 Start Cart

And how the 'bird sounded when it started.

The Nailheads had a differential that tied the two engines to a common PTO shaft that was vertical going up from the start cart, and engaged in the bottom of the J-58 gearbox. Then "green juice" (it wasn't green, but the flame produced was) squirted in the burner can and when it ignited, the flame propagated from the rear of the engine to the combustion section and then lit off, the engine and RPM would climb to sustain engine operation. (JP-7 was hard to get lit).

So, the Buicks having a combined torque of about 900 ft lbs at about 3000 RPM could get the J-58s to the RPM quickly and keep them there until stable operation.

Essentially, the engine being started from the rear going forward created similar condition to an engine stagnation and the the turbine section got hot pretty fast, so you wanted to get to "idle" as soon as you could.

Nailheads are pretty danged loud with no mufflers and wound up just a little bit. I forgot my ear plugs when I did the break in start and ran it for 40 minutes at 2000 RPM with open exhaust.

so the 71 could only land where they could get restarted again.

I wonder how many bases had start carts ?
4? maybe 5 ? in the world

Nice, never knew about the start carts and the 425's.

quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
if gas were back down at 59 cents a gallon , would we see a huge demand for these cars again?

I would be interested even with today's gas prices! Today's cars are just too damn small for comfort.
In today's world I would suspect the fuel economy would be addressed, same as they did with trucks.

quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
so the 71 could only land where they could get restarted again.

Nope. They could land anywhere.

Taking off again -- that's a different question.

There were a few times MAC got fragged in the middle of the night.

But then, for the MAC weenies, wasn't nuthin' new...