This 1961 Buick Special "Skylark" is the latest interesting thing to pop up on my Facebook Marketplace feed. For sale in the hinterlands of the west side of Cleveland, Ohio with an asking price a mere $1,500, it's in pretty good shape for a, gulp, sixty-year old, non-muscle car that even in show room condition wouldn't get much attention at a car show. Amazing, then, that it's made it this far without either ending up in the shredder or at the bottom of Lake Erie.
Yeah. That's a thing up here. Some folks drive cars they don't want anymore out onto The Lake when it's frozen and leave them there. That's my crazy wife and the dog this past February about forty feet out from the shore when The Lake was frozen solid like iron. When the thaw comes, presto. No more car. Not sure why they do that but I guess there's a certain romanticism to it that calling a junk yard to haul away their old bomb just won't suffice. Pollution be damned, they can always look at the mighty lake and muse to those who might be quasi-interested, "you know, my dad's DeSoto is at the bottom of that lake...".
Back in the olden days, General Motors came out with four-compacts built on what they called the "Y-body" to compete with the import and AMC onslaught of smaller cars that finally gained sales traction in the U.S. in the mid to late 1950's. They started with the rear-engine Chevrolet Corvair in 1960 and followed up with similar but quite different iterations at Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick. Pontiac had their Tempest, which was almost as wonky as the Corvair, meanwhile Oldsmobile and Buick had far more conventional approaches with, receptively, the F-85 and Special. Skylark was a trim level of the Special for 1961 before becoming a separate model of it's own for '62 and beyond.
Knowing that I'm much the same way that I usually opt for either the longest way around the block, the most complicated or the most interesting to me, GM engineers couldn't leave well enough with eschewing the Corvair's rear-engine and the Tempest's rear-transaxle, complete with "rope-drive", and leaving the F-85 and Special to be simply small, front-engine, rear-wheel-drive designs. Nope. They had to go where GM had never gone before and develop a cast aluminum, small bore and stroke, V-8 engine.
Somewhat surprisingly, our '61 here comes with not one but two of those engines. Something tells me that one of these suckers, let's take a wild guess and say it's the one here still mounted in the car, is no longer running.
On paper, at least, if not theory, these "little" V-8's made sense. Seeing that Chevrolet's overhead-valve, inline six-cylinder was too long to fit in the short engine compartment of the Tempest, F-85 and Special, Buick built these little V-8's instead for them. Again, on paper, it works. And works quite well, actually. Incidentally, Pontiac "halved" their 389 cubic-inch V-8 for a 195 cubic-inch four that was the base engine in 1961-1963 Tempest's. Note to self, find one of those and blog on it as soon as possible.
Displacing all of 215 cubic-inches and making up to 215 brake-horsepower in the Oldsmobile F-85 "Jetfire" that had a turbocharger (!), the problem with the "215" was that, the early ones in particular, it had block-casting porosity issues that caused oil leaks. Another and more problem issue was that if vehicle owners used anti-freeze incompatible with aluminum, the cooling channels and radiators would clog causing overheating. What's more, and probably most importantly, building these engines was expensive and cut into profit margins.
Buick based a far more cost effective iron-block and head V-6 on the 215 for 1962 and the rest, as the cliche goes, was history. The "little" V-6, despite inherent teething and growing pains, going on to become known as GM's legendary if not deathless "3800" V-6. Meanwhile GM gave up on the 215 V-8 selling the tooling for it to Rover of England, which later became British Leyland, whom refined it and used it in various forms through the mid 1990's.
So, there's quite a bit of history to this Facebook Marketplace find. Perhaps the poster of the ad has just gotten sick of all the inherent issues with attempting to restore what it many regards is an automobile with as dated engineering as a typewriter. Have to applaud the effort even if it appears they've given up on it.
I like the design of these 1961 and 1962 Buick Specials and Skylarks, they look like little LeSabre's of this vintage, don't they? But in my opinion Buick ruined it for '63 before moving the entire line to GM's new for '64 and wholly conventional intermediate "A-body". Do I like this enough to call on it and finish the project? Oh, hell no. I don't even like enough to drop a small-block Chevy into it. That would make it a '61 Skylark with a Chevy V-8 and who'd care. Certainly would be cheaper and easier than fixing what's ever wrong with the Buick V-8 in this thing.
Certainly, if this was a '64 Special or Skylark in this shape it would have been gobbled up by now. As this is, who knows. Perhaps in the end it will end up at the bottom of The Lake. If you're interested, comment below and I'll try and dig up the ad.
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