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What they liked the best: The brakes. What folks complain about the most on this site: The brakes. I've said it before, I'll say it again: The biggest problem with Gen 1 brakes is not the brakes per se, it's the brake booster.

"Automatic shoulder belts"

Gotta love that quality 80s GM fit and finish! And that Regal is very oddly equipped. Bench seat, manual locks and windows, no rear reading lights.....but it has alloy wheels. Then there is this: That cluster must be from a pre-production vehicle, as the tach was never red like that on any of the production ones. My old 88 Regal was a November 87 build, and the tach was green like the rest of the cluster.

What I used for bushings is simple rubber vibration isolator pad material (the pad was approx 12" square), up here we have a *Princess Auto* hardware/automotive supply store, Harbor Freight *might* have something similar, using my table saw I cut the bushings to the same basic shape as the original molded bushing glued to the leaf & removed the material in the inner section to make the *pocket*. One has to do them in two pieces (upper & lower). One can *fine tune* the installed height of the new spring by adjusting the upper bushings thickness, but both bushings have to be no thicker than necessary to allow the spring to go into place & tighten up the lower mounting retainer to let it bottom against the stop. Seeing as the blank leaves are 3" wide (that's wider than the glas leaf in the centre section at the mounting points) I used my 5" angle grinder with a flap wheel to notch small recesses into the edges of the steel where the pads will go to allow the mounting bolts to slide up either side of the leaves up into the subframe member. All of this wasn't difficult, it just took time & patience. If you've never removed the rear leaf without the special spring compressor there is a way to get it out without to much fuss.

This is the formula I used to get the basics for for I wanted....in hindsight it is a bit too stiff, on the highway the springrate is great, car does NOT float, corners reallly well, but where potholes are concerned its a bit harsh. My thinking now that it's been 2 years since I installed it the springrate could be dropped to perhaps 280lbs per inch. The shop owner who fabbed this up did it from the original *high arc* leaf. He used regular *shallow* arc leaves (blank leaves are all arced to a basic curve) to start with, cut them to the length as per the formula, then put each one thru the *hammer* to together match what the ride height the car is at when the glas leaf was in place with the cars weight on it. Of course I had him reduce the arc as the car sits approx 1.7" lower. That means you have to get under the car to measure the curve of the glas leaf when it is under the vehicle weight. Do so from the ends of the leaf to the centre section. I just used a long straight edge, laid it up under the spring ends & took a measurement in the centre. Since I was doing all the *bull work* I had to install, test the ride height, uninstall, go back a couple of times to have him *fine tune* the arc to get all where I wanted it. One has to fab up their own rubber bushings for this.......not hard to do, just takes time cutting them to fit. *Note* to do this the exhaust has to be out of the way.

When I first saw this I was wondering why this logo was placed on the door handle.

I saw that as well. From what I have found, the original air date of that episode was the week of October 7th, 1987. Highly likely that those are pre-production Cutlasses that were filmed. The Regal footage is likely a production model since they were the first to go on sale in October. That Regal digital dash footage has to be from a pre-production car though. Either that, or GM made a production change extremely early in the product run to change the tach from red/orange to green.

Never seen that olds logo on the b pillar like that, and on the SL too

Nothing really. Nothing of that sort is absolutely necessary for a manual swap. All that is necessary is to get rid of the trans stuff so you don't have a constant 6+ error codes and MIL light. Even that isn't really necessary as you can drive fine with no tune changes as long as the PCM is wired to think it's in D at all times. I'm going to leave fueling and timing up to a ZZP remote tune once I switch over to E85, no sense in messing with it now. Other than that, I think the F23 speed sensor is slightly off from the 4T65E as it would read 70 when I was going 73-74, so I adjusted that to match GPS speed. On a side note, I have been looking into extending the clutch master cylinder rod about 1" behind the clutch pedal as the pedal hits the firewall before it's fully pressed, so it might only be 90% released each time which I hope isn't causing extra wear.