Welcome to the inside of my head
C'mon in...wipe your feet
By cyber-wizard
A friend of mine once told me that it’s always the little details that make a car stand out. I try not to think of any aspect of cleaning and repairing a car as being too small to pay attention to. The interior construction on GM’s B-Body cars from the 90′s really is poor. The plastic pieces wear and crack something terrible. I’m not entirely sure just how it happens but even the dash emblems wear off after a while. The logo on the passenger side of my dash was looking pretty bare and it’s one of the many little things that I know I’ll feel better about after getting it fixed.
After some digging around online for the best method of repairing silver plastic trim in cars I came up empty. Once I stopped looking for it, I discovered some guys chatting about the very same thing over at stationwagonforums.com. Lo and behold, it seems that several folks had run into the same issue that I had and solved it cheaply and easily. The answer was…a silver Sharpie marker. The silver coloured markers work very well for re-doing the silver plastic parts on the interior of cars. The marker isn’t a replacement for chrome but for something as simple as the Roadmaster badge on my dash it worked perfectly. It seemed pretty silly but I was really quite surprised at how well it worked. Sharpie’s are permanent markers so it should last a while, and if it doesn’t it takes nothing to simply repeat the process. You can see below that the difference is quite dramatic.
By cyber-wizard
I’ve spent a fair amount of time working on the Eagle Alloy rims that I purchased back in February. I tried a few different polishes and methods of getting a shine back onto those uncoated aluminum rims. Numerous attempts later I found a number of small black specks on the aluminum that were extremely resistant to everything I tried to do. I few minutes spent online gave me a half dozen different methods of polishing aluminum. Most of the solutions I found seemed to involve some pretty abrasive methods. Since my rims weren’t in horrible shape that felt like a lot of overkill. I figured I would try my own less destructive methods and see what happened. As long as I didn’t go too overboard, I presumed that I could easily recover from any harm that I might do. You can see from the picture at left that these things really needed some work. The whole point of buying these was to have some shiny on the wagon. In the state they were in when I got them…well, this just won’t do.
I’m happy to say that the operation was a success and here’s how I did it. I started out with several different polishes like Mothers Chrome Polish and NeverDull but neither knocked me out. In any case none of them addressed the black specks on the surface of the aluminum. It turned out that the black specks were actually the beginning of some pitting in the metal. This meant I had no choice but to remove a layer 
of aluminum to get a good working surface before polishing it again. I tried a plastic dish scrubber that I liberated from the kitchen but it was leaving far too many scratches. I didn’t want to make things that much worse before I worked at making them better. After a bit of trial and error I settled on some 2000 grit wet/dry sandpaper and I wet sanded the surface of all four rims. This made them hazy, as would be expected, but at least they were clean. I did use the plastic scrubber on the inside surfaces to remove the brake dust from in there but kept with the wet sanding for anything that’s typically visible when they are on the car. Due to a bit of impatience I did each wheel to completion before moving on to the next. I think I would have lost it if I had sanded the surface of all of them before starting the polishing process and seeing some sort of progress. With the sanding done I broke out my tub of Blue Magic Metal Polish Cream. I love this stuff and use it on any shiny metal on the car. A bit of rubbing with a soft cloth works the paste into a black smudgy goop that lets you know it’s working. From there I use a second soft cloth to wipe off the excess before polishing with yet another soft cloth. The beauty of Blue Magic is that it leaves a bit of a coating on the surface to project from water spots so while I do have an aluminum protector I may not need it. After a few hours bent over a table or leaning against the wall with a tire in my lap, I wound up with the pictures that can be seen here. I’m extremely pleased with the results and couldn’t be happier. They aren’t perfect, but they were used when I got them and now that I know what needs doing, I can keep them looking great. Repeating the polishing process now that they’re as clean as they are will only make them better. The wagon always turned a few heads when I drove it around, but now that many more people stare at it when I drive by. I poured sweat and tears into making these look good and it was well worth the effort.
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By cyber-wizard
At long last we’re getting weather good enough for me to spend time outside on the wagon. I wheeled the wagon out a couple of weeks ago to get started on reinstalling all of the interior parts. Pretty much all of the interior parts were sitting in a pile in the cargo area with the exception of the seats and the carpet. a couple of hours later all was right in my world again as the interior was put back the way it should be. I still need to reinstall the old blue door panel on the drivers side but it’s a small portion overall and the rest of the wagon looks like a functional vehicle again.
When putting the wagon back into the garage again I noticed several streaks on the driveway and the garage. It seems that the rust on the top of the front frame forks decided to eat it’s way through one of my brake lines and every push on the pedal caused a stream of brake fluid to squirt across the driveway. A quick trip to my mechanic gave me firm brakes and a fresh layer of undercoating on the front frame forks and my wagon is back in business. Not the best way to start the wagon season but progress is progress.
By cyber-wizard
I’ve been trying to decide since I bought the wagon just what I wanted to put on there for rims. I really love the factory aluminum alloy wheels that the Roadmaster came with. They suit the car, and really look great with a set of whitewalls. I have no disappointment at all with the factory look. As you can see with a good cleaning the factory rims and whitewalls are a nice look.
However…That 280hp LT1 V8 puts the mid-90′s B-Body wagons right smack in the musclecar range. Buick torque is legendary and with that engine driving it these cars are downright mean on the highway. It’s often said that Buick Roadmaster wagons are for people who want to be able to do a 12 second quarter-mile and haul sheets of plywood while doing it. These are likely to be the last station wagons of their kind. They’re huge and I just can’t imagine their like ever gracing our roads again. The last true North American sleeper wagon.
All that rambling aside, the musclecar association with these wagons makes me want to give it a little tougher look. I pondered going with the factory rims from the ’94-’96 Chev Impala SS sedans. These are a great looking rim for the Impala and they really lend themselves well. A member over at StationWagonForums.com we know as “81×11″ has put the Impala SS rims on his Buick and, as can be seen below, there’s no denying that it’s a great look. 
For me, a big part of the joy of such a large car is the smooth, floaty ride. While I like the look of the 17″ rims of the Impala, the Roadmaster was originally equipped with 15″ wheels. The means a lot more rubber between the rim and the road. I was concerned that moving up to a 17″ rim might take away from the smoothness of my ride so I decided to stay with a 15″ rim and opted for shiny instead.
I managed to locate a set of very lightly used Eagle Alloy Series 111 rims in a polished ">
aluminum finish. An uncoated aluminum rim can make for a pretty dramatic increase in maintenance but the beauty of these is that they can be pretty easily brought back to a factory shine with just a bit of elbow grease. No need to send them out for recoating or polishing. Just buff them up at home. I set to work on these the other day, but I think I’ll still have a fair ways to go to get them as clean as I think the Roadmaster deserves. The rims were regularly washed by the previous owner but not polished or buffed and there are a fair number of the ever-present asphalt flecks on the surface. I’ll have to get all of the asphalt off before I can really get started with polishing but with even an hour or two of work, these are already starting to look good. 
The wheel on the left has been washed and I began polishing it with a metal creme. The wheel on the right hasn’t been touched yet, it’s exactly as it was when I purchased it.
I plan on getting these as shiny as they day they were made. Stay tuned for more details and as many pics as I remember to take.
By cyber-wizard
The Roadmaster’s door panels are really in very rough shape. It appears that a previous owner, at some point, needed access to the inside of the door panels and had no clue whatsoever how to get the interior panels off. I suspect that somebody was trying to diagnose the power door lock problem that it had when I got it. In any case, the door trim mounting clips are destroyed, even the slots on the trim panels that the clips mount into are broken. Some ham-handed boob even pried off the arm-rests, destroying the mounting assemblies. They rectified this by driving trim screws through the arm-rest into whatever plastic they could find. A common issue with these mid-90′s B-Body cars are the state of these poorly made plastic interior panels. The faux woodgrain often pops off on them and the leading edge of the panel pretty much always cracks and splits from the vibration of the door opening and closing as well as the leading edge meeting the side of the dash pad when closed. As you can see at some point a previous tinkerer opted to continue the woodgrain theme on my driver’s door panel to fix the crack.
Needless to say, this is unacceptable and I can’t leave it like this. I expected door panels to be difficult to find so I began hunting from day one. It’s been over a year of searching and I’ve finally found suitable replacements. Fortunately, the interior door trim panels for Roadmaster sedans and wagons are interchangable which gives me a much wider selection of parts to choose from. Finding rear door panels for a wagon will be a greater challenge but one step at a time.
Months of searching revealed many door panels that were either as damaged as my own, or the seller priced them with the apparent intent to pad his retirement by selling them. At long last I located a pair of panels at Plazek Auto Recyclers in Caistor Centre, Ontario. The Plazek’s boast the largest recycling yard in Canada and I’m tempted to believe them. Their 100 acre yard is a sight to behold. It’s large enough that there are several employees with trucks tasked with shuttling customers out to their desired vehicle and back. It would take more time than provided in a day to walk the yard, which incidentally is not allowed. All customers are chauffered into the yard and back out again. While I’m accustomed to prowling wrecking yards, truth be told, this is fast becoming a rarity. Smaller yards still allow Pick-N-Pull while most larger ones seem to opt for an inventory system that lets them move parts on eBay more easily. Plazek seems to have discovered a middle ground. Parts can be ordered, and paid for directly on their website or customers can show up and have the inventory checked at the front desk. Plazek will even pull parts from the cars once they are paid for and have them waiting for you when you arrive.
Owing to my love for road trips, I opted to ignore my geeky, online ordering tendencies and drive out there. I had first confirmed that the door panels I wanted where there but didn’t reserve them and just drove on out. The staff were friendly and took me right to a ’95 Roadmaster sedan who’s front end had been damaged. This was an empty husk of a beast with the LT1 powerplant having already been removed and much of it’s guts strewn about the interior and surrounding grounds. I was pleased to find two intact door panels, the drivers side having the ever-so-common crack on the leading edge. I this case the crack is repairable. One door panel was laying loose on the ground and will need a bit of cleaning but overall they are recoverable. Not only was I permitted to keep all door-panel related accessories, including all of the speakers, lights, and switch assemblies that are usually parted out separately. Even the typically broken door hand inserts were in good shape and each panel included the Concert Sound II tweeter inserts which haven’t been present on any panel I’ve previously located. As an added bonus I was given all of it at a 1/3rd discount in exchange for taking both panels rather than just one.
The primary hurdle with these panels is not the cleaning, or the beginnings of a crack in the plastic, but in the colour. My ’94 Roadmaster has a Medium Adriatic Blue interior and this ’95 had the much less impressively named Grey interior. Make no mistake, these panels are filthy and slightly worn, but all of that is easily remedied with some soap, water, and elbow grease and polishing compound. The more fiddly part will be in using some vinyl dye from SEM Products to recolour the panels and try to reclaim the carpet inserts from my existing panels for reinstallation onto the replacements once they are the correct colour again. This is a project that I hope to tackle as soon as the weather outside gets agreeable. Stay tuned!
By cyber-wizard
Now here’s a nifty little item we’ll all want in our garages. Phoenix Systems, the manufacturers of those oh-so-cool brake bleeding systems have done it again. These little beauties are brake fluid test strips. Designed to work just like a PH strip for testing water, the BrakeStrips help to diagnose the brake fluid sitting quietly in your master cylinder. BrakeStrip ID will help to identify just which type of fluid your car is currently equipped with while the BrakeStrip Copper system will help to identify just how much copper is currently present in your fluid and help you to judge when you should replace it.
For the collector car market as well as daily drivers this could very well be a money saver as it takes the guesswork out of when to swap out your brake fluid. A quick dip of the BrakeStrip ID system will also help you figure out just what type of fluid your new toy’s previous owner had in there.
The BrakeStrip Copper system comes in packages of 2, 25, or 100, ranging in price from $9.99 to $67.99.
The BrakeStrip ID system currently comes only in packages of 100 and will set you back $69.99.
By cyber-wizard
It was a pretty hectic summer in the Wiz’s garage. Almost every repair that I undertook on the Roadmaster became either more involved or just plain took longer than expected. I lost a lot of time due to the body shop having kept the car for two months to finish 8 hours worth of work. The car being away for so long gave me much more time to work on the seat frames and make more attempts at getting the carpet clean but it would have been nicer to get it all back together in time to drive it for a while before winter set in. In my neighbourhood I can only park a car on the street overnight during certain months of the year in order to allow for snow plowing. Since the garage has been full of everything that came out of the Roadmaster, the wagon has sat in the driveway and I’ve been parking the Pontiac out on the street. This isn’t an ideal situation but it was temporary and working well. Unfortunately as of November 1st, I can’t leave a car on the street overnight anymore. My plan was to have all of the Roadmaster’s interior parts reinstalled to free up garage space for a car again by that cutoff date. Needless to say, that didn’t work out so well.
I did manage to get my carpeting put back into place and the seats reinstalled. While none of this has come out perfect, I’m really quite pleased to look at how much nicer everything is after all of the work that was completed. Given how inexpensive replacement carpeting is for cars, I’m thinking that I’ll give up trying to get this carpet clean again. It’s probably 60% better than it was but new carpet will look so much better. That will be the first project tackled in the spring.
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
AFTER
BEFORE
Here we have the inevitable lone french fry found underneath every seat, lending credence to the theory that much of McD’s food may once have been bred for sentience causing them to seek out dark places to hide.
AFTER
I snapped this photo before reinstalling the mounting bracket covers but it still looks one heck of a lot better.
BEFORE
AFTER
I’m especially proud of the seat frames. It was a significant amount of work to get the frames back to a semblance of normal but it was really rewarding and loads of fun.
This is where I ran out of time. I reinstalled the seats and had to pile the rest of the interior parts in the cargo area of the wagon in order to get it into the garage for the winter. There it will stay until this white crap is off the ground and I can work outside for long periods without risk of frostbite.
By cyber-wizard
When I got the Roadmaster it was painfully apparent that something would have to be done about the carpeting. There had been two previous owners and neither were too concerned about the state of the carpets. The carpeting was covered with thin vinyl floor mats that moved easily, and really just allowed water to run off and soak through to the underpad. The end result was 16 years worth of ground-in dirt and salt stains. I really couldn’t leave it like this.
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If you’ll recall, back in July, I undertook the removal of the seats and interior trim in order to get the carpeting out for cleaning and get a rust coating on the floor. Pretty much all of that went horribly awry but I have found some good things to say about some of the methods that I used for cleaning.
I started out thinking that my Bissell Little Green Deep Cleaner would make short work of my carpet problems. While I’ve used my Little Green before with great success, that wasn’t entirely true in this case. 
I vacuumed the carpet thoroughly with a ShopVac to get all of the leaves, loose dirt, and the inevitable french fries collected up. Needless to say, the carpet still didn’t look much better so I filled the Little Green cleaning reservoir with water and cleaning solution, sprayed down the area I opted to start in and moved on to another task. I came back a few minutes later and proceeded to suction out all of the water and, I hoped, the dirt as well. The collection tank in the Little Green was almost black. It looked as though I had mixed up a shovelful of topsoil in the tank before starting. This was good, I knew I’d be done in no time! I moved on and did the rest of the carpet and put it out in the sun to dry. A short time later I investigated my work and saw little improvement. That wasn’t really unexpected so I repeated the process, and I repeated the process, and I repeated the process again. Each time the reservoir was coming out a thick brown or black in colour with all of the sludge that was being drawn out of the carpet, but it certainly didn’t look any cleaner.
Eventually, I ran out of Little Green cleaner and since I was so reluctant to keep buying it for what appeared to be a never-ending task, I wanted some cheaper options. To the Internet!! Online I discovered a common alternative to the cleaning solutions required by deep cleaners. Laundry detergent. A simple mix of a small amount of Tide along with some Vinegar (to prevent it from foaming up like a washing machine in a 60′s sitcom) is all that was required to let me keep on cleaning. This new concoction didn’t have any greater impact than what I had been using, but it wasn’t any worse either. I continued on with my Tide-mix, interspersing my attempts with scrubbing the carpet with a foaming automotive carpet cleaner, as well as another product designed to remove rust stains from fabrics. After a while I switched to using nothing more than clear water in the Little Green to prevent myself from getting more detergent into my carpet than I could ever hope to get out. Throughout the entire process (27 cleaning attempts over many days) the Little Green ">
reservoir continued to fill with water that was well discoloured by what was coming out of my carpet. But the carpet still didn’t look new. As unlikely as it seems, I harboured some hope that I would be able to restore the carpet to a nearly new looking state. 
After a while, I discovered a new product that allowed me to grant my Little Green a much deserved rest. Resolve Deep Cleaner. Resolve Deep Clean is a moist powder that gets sprinkled on the carpet and then worked in with a brush. After a brief period of time, during which Resolve binds to the dirt deep in the fibres, it can be vacuumed out again taking the dirt with it. I’m here to tell you…I think this stuff is Magic! Bear in mind that my carpeting is filthy. I’ve cleaned it 27 times using various methods, I’m now resigned to the fact that it will not come as clean as I want, and I’m planning on replacing it next year now anyway. With all of that said, while Resolve didn’t give me the clean I was looking for, that’s really only due to my unreasonable expectations. Resolve provided amazing results on some of the areas that were showing little to no improvement from my various water-based methods. The door sills where shoes drip and drop the most gunk get mighty messy. You can see in the attached picture 
that Resolve worked wonders there. The area inside the red box was cleaned with Resolve while the area slightly to the right of it was subjected only to the previous 27 cleaning attempts. The line between the previously cleaned and newly cleaned areas is clearly visible.
My interior project got derailed for a number of reasons I’ve no need to go into here, and never really got back on track in time to get the wagon put away for winter. With the Roadmaster in the driveway I’ve been parking my Pontiac on the street at night which my local municipality allows during summer months. That luxury will disappear as of midnight October 31st. This means that the wagon has to be completely reassembled or at least a sufficient amount of my interior has to be placed inside the wagon to allow me to get it into the garage. Because of this, I’ve only recently managed to get working on my interior again. Rest assured that a good portion of my interior is now back in place and anything that could wait until spring is labeled and piled neatly in the Roadmaster’s cargo area. As this post has been about my carpet adventures, I can hardly depart without some final photos of the carpeting now that it’s reinstalled. Obviously, it’s not perfect but it does look a great deal better than it did and I had a considerable amount of fun working on it. When it comes right down to it, working on a car is supposed to be fun.
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By cyber-wizard
At long last the Roadmaster is back home where it belongs. After two months in the body shop it’s good to see 18 feet of woodgrain in my driveway again.
The body shop had a fair amount of trouble getting the floor pan coating to adhere properly. It’s cracking and peeling off even now but after sending it back three times I just don’t think it’s worthwhile fighting over it any more.
I posted a few weeks back about the rust that had rotted through the roofline underneath the drivers side rubber seal. It was pretty bad. See that post here. The roofline has been repaired with a fresh piece of metal and painted. The repair wouldn’t be mistaken for factory sheet metal but it doesn’t look too bad. I suspect I’ll be using a different body shop for future repairs but even after all of the hassles the bill was quite low and I have the wagon back. That’s what really matters.
The first order of business was to get the roof rack reinstalled to cover up the holes in the roof and stop the car from holding water. Stay tuned for details of that repair.
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