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Nice save, looks pretty solid for an Ohio car. Fortunately, the door glass is the same as a 1988-94 coupe

So it has been a long time since I posted here.... and Shawn ( @GnatGoSplat) probably thinks I’m crazy for starting this project, but... Yesterday I rescued my 1993 Cutlass Supreme Convertible from what used to be a lumber yard in Byhalia,OH where it had sat for almost exactly 11 years ( it was parked there in October, 2008 ). I am in a bit of damage/deterioration determination mode at the moment. When she was parked, the motor was partially disassembled, so obviously there is some work to be done under the hood. The drivers side window was broken at some point, so that will need to be replaced, and at this point I don’t know if any of the interior parts have damage that needs to be repaired or replaced due to the layer of dirt and dust and other debris I still need to clean out of the car. Getting her up on the trailer ( and back down again ) was fun... the passenger side rear wheel isn’t spinning. Surprisingly, all 4 tires took air, though the drivers side front would only hold it about an hour. Passenger side front was better. It took 12 hours before it went flat.... Next task is to look through the pile of parts ( and repair manuals ) I put in the trunk all those years ago... I need it clear so I can see if the top still works....

For a decade or so my wife and I have been owners of several vehicles from dead brands. (Geo Metro, Saturn SW2, Plymouth Grand Voyager SE and the one oddball because the brand is still in existence - 1985 F250) It's kind of fun in a way but finding parts gets more difficult every year. I was telling my wife maybe we need to find something that is still easy to find in the junkyards and was so popular that parts are still easy to come by new. Next thing I know a coworker puts his 1999 Buick Century Limited up for sale. Bingo! My first order of business then is to find out what vehicles have components in common with this one and what bolt-in swaps can be done for upgrades.

And in case you are wondering, here is the thread where I discussed the issues the car had before it was partly disassembled: Now the motor has been siding with both the cam carriers and the intake manifold off of it since 2005 ( there is another thread here: ) At this point, I am not inclined to put the motor back together without rebuilding it. I think that is the right thing to do for the old girl. I did get the trunk cleared out tonight, and the hood open. All the parts I removed from the motor were tucked inside the trunk.

Thanks. This was actually my daily driver from 1998-2002. I then supplemented her with another car and she did not see much winter road driving. She developed a ticking sound which I didn’t really have time to fix. Long ago I posted an audio file here of the noise she made. The license plates on her expired in 2004. She ended up in the lumber yard because I moved to Louisiana for 7.5 years. At least in the 11 years she was there, she was mostly under roof. ( you can actually see the line in the dirt on the hood where rain dripped off the roof edge ). The door glass is the least of my worries right now. Once I get her cleaned up, I may drop the top and leave it down most of the time, so I don’t really need the windows much ( not saying I won’t fix it, but there are bigger fish to fry... )

So excited to see another one getting saved! I just love the red color and like Manic said, looks really solid. Congrats and I think it's so cool bringing back W-Bodies from the dead. I saved two W's from definitely getting scrapped and I found them in the same situation as you. My 91 International sat in the original owner's back yard since 09. I saved it in Dec of 2015. I bought my 93 STE last year from the original owner's son. It's been sitting in his front yard in the CA desert since 2010. I saved it this past June. Nothing beats seeing W's on Uhaul trailers, LOL! I'm using way too many exclamation points but so excited to see another CS!

Update on the car: After driving it a month or two, it developed a unsafe "shimmy" or weird steering shift in the steering when making a hard left at speed. I did some online research and identified a few possible causes. Like usual, I didn't take it to a professional and tried to fix it myself. I thought it was probably related to something I'd replaced over the winter. Did I mention I've not a very good mechanic? But I am persistent. Anyway . . . So, I guessed it was the subframe mounts, as the car had 240k miles and the visible sides of the mounts looked bad. When the car was up on jackstands nothing felt loose, but of course I couldn't recreate the side-loads experienced on 45-mph sweepers. So I ordered a set of four subframe mounts, watched a couple youtube videos (there aren't many for this repair on first gen w-bodys) and got to work. First, I supported the engine with a jack and a block of wood and cracked loose the four mounting bolts for the subframe mounts. But I had to use a breaker bar to break loose the rear two mounts, and in doing so I broke the weld on the cage holding the hidden nut that is trapped inside two layers of the unibody by the drivers footwell. I did NOT realize this at the time. I spent a few hours removing the rusted, disintegrated remains of the original mounts. Initially I just used a hammer and chisel to remove most of the metal and rubber. But the metal parts of the mounts were wedged into the subframe and I couldn't pry them out. After awkwardly fighting it for hours, laying on my back with limited clearance, I ended up using my angle grinder and cutting at the stuck metal pieces. Finally I got it all removed, put the new pieces in place and tried to reassemble them. I couldn't get the parts to compress together, I fought it a while before realizing I hadn't removed all of the metal from the old mount, I thought it was metal from the subframe (I'm an idiot). I tried again to compress the mounts in place but I realized that the nut was spinning and I couldn't get to it to hold it in place! I was many many hours into the project at this point, spread out over weeks of time (vacations and other projects like my 1991 speedboat kept interrupting ) so I dejectedly gave up for a few weeks and left the car in the garage. Eventually I found a thread somewhere here describing how a guy had to cut through the floor to get to the nut. So, without knowing really what I was doing I cut through the carpet and insulation, cut and pried back a few-inch-square piece of floorboard (wow it was thin metal! I've never cut a floorboard before, I just assumed it would be thicker metal), and saw the busted cage around the nut. (see pic of floorboard hole, with broken nut cage removed) Even though the passenger side cage hadn't broken, I still cut through the floor on that side just to see for myself, I figured what the heck I'm already a bajillion hours into this project. It gets worse. (Did I mention I can make an easy project into a nightmare?). Since I still couldn't get the two subframe mount halves to compress together, I found out from a Youtube video that I needed a longer bolt. But the longer bolts I bought weren't threaded all the way like the bolts that came with the mounts, and when I finally got everything back together (yay?) I didn't realize that I had just tightened the nut down to the end of the threads and it wasn't compressing the rubber mount fully. So I drove it for a few days, but the steering was even worse because the whole subframe was shifting around. I didn't realize why and thought that I'd screwed up the steering rack when I lowered the subframe. Back in the garage it went. Also I didn't realize that when you replace subframe mounts then the alignment gets screwed up so my steering was off center even worse. And with the variable assist steering on my Oldsmobile it feels weird driving with the wheel a few degrees off because the progressive assist doesn't match the on-center steering. Anyway . . . I eventually realized that maybe I should check if the subframe was tightened properly. When I checked, I could tell the bolts didn't feel tight (because the rubber had compressed more) so I tried to tighten them, couldn't (because the nut was at the end of the threads), and then FINALLY realized what was up, added more washers to allow the bolt to draw up the subframe mounts properly, adjusted my tie-rods again to center the steering wheel, and now four months later it's fixed! I've driven for a couple hundred miles and it's driving better than it has in years. I need to patch up the holes in the floorboards, currently I just bent the metal flaps I cut back into place and loosely covered with the carpet and insulation I cut out. It's all hidden under my floormats for now, but I need to spray primer on the cut metal to slow the rusting and seal it up better for water and fire protection. Looking back on the project, I can see many places where I wasted time with the wrong tools, misdiagnosed issues, stupid decisions, and other things I didn't put into this already too-long post. I spent 50+ hours of my life, lost a summer of top-down cruising, and saved . . .a few hundred dollars of mechanic charges maybe? A smart mechanic could have done the whole project much more simply, in a couple hours on a lift with the right tools and expertise. I know that doesn't seem like it's worth it, but it's the principal of fixing it all myself and keeping the car forever. Anyway, that's my story of the summer of 2019 with my vert, on my back in the garage instead of out in the sunshine. Oh well, she's back on daily driver duty, just in time for the fall rainy season. I wonder what will break next. . .