What is one of your dream cars? Seriously, what's a car that you literally dream about owning? For me, it's always been a Buick Grand National ever since I was a little kid. I've dreamed of owning one of these cars and cruising it around on those hot summer nights where you go from random parking lot to random parking lot talking to random strangers about their dream cars and even after buying the thing I still dream about it and I told you guys that when I bought it a few months ago, I would work on it all winter long and have it finished and ready to cruise by. Spring And guess what? spring is almost over! my Buick is almost done and by the end of this video, my dream of having a cherry Buick Grand National will come true. It all started in a storage unit with a car that hadn't been on the road in 10 years.

After inspecting the Grand National I handed over the full asking price of Sixteen thousand dollars because that's a steal for one of these cars with a clean title, no rust and in running condition. Now it didn't run for long. Okay, and we died and literally didn't make it out of the parking lot and took about eight hours in an auto parts store parking lot to get it going again. But the GN got us home and I immediately got to work fixing everything including an engine knock which turned out to be worn out connecting rod bearings from an improperly assembled forged engine.

Yes, I Discovered this car had a forged engine. I Also found fully ported cylinder heads, a built transmission, and much more so I Treated the car with even more new parts and rebuilt its entire steering and suspension. Now the GN was almost mechanically complete except the front end was sitting too high from new Factory coil springs. and because tangible end coils are the only ones you can safely cut I measured and trimmed off about three quarters of a coil.

Now the formula for determining ride height is easy for every inch of a drop on the car, you caught a half inch of coil height out. So now I have the perfect ride height. I Also swapped out the big drag race videos for GN Wheels and tires more suited for the street and the car looks pretty from about 10 feet away. The reality is that although this car was fully painted at some point, it's black, heavily scratched, and in desperate need of a full cosmetic restoration.

It's time to turn this 80s classic into a total showstopper and give it some protection. So I can really rack up the miles without worrying about a thing foreign. Good to see you here she is. She's a beauty.

that's right. looks pretty good, right? Yeah, she's a little dirty, but it's kind of a 10-footer Oh yes, I See, All right? we're taking a look, but uh, obviously we're gonna wash it first. we'll get it and then we'll take a closer look at it. but I'm seeing some chips right away.

Uh, on here if we want to do some paint protection film on the front bumper to prevent that from happening again. we can touch these up, paint, correct this front end and then get some ppf on it and then we can. Okay, day one. Rock Chips! Yeah, All right.

Well, this is going to be a ton of work. We'll probably have about 50 hours of Labor into this. So before we get started. I Got your present? There you are sir.

You get a Grand National poster and I'm ripping this open for you because this is like not like paper. This is like almost like a vinyl. It's vinyl. Yeah, you can get it.

You can hang it up without a frame and get it dirty and wash it. That's awesome. It's pretty cool. and then you get your own legit street cars.

Grand National Shirts Hell Yeah! Thank you man. That's awesome. All right. We have Andreas starting with the prep work on the car and he's washing up our brand new aluminum wheels.

So we're spraying an iron decontamination product to remove any ferrous metals from the braking system or rail dust. This is to make sure we get all this off. We don't want anything in the polishing pads when we're actually polishing the paint that could cause any like micro scratches. So this is going to make sure it's super flat, super clean.

We're gonna use a clay bar too. At the same time, this stuff smells super bad too. Yeah, it means it's working. Yes, exactly.

So we're actually going to spray this on, let it sit for a couple minutes, use a clay Mitch and a clay pad here and this is going to remove any other contaminants. uh, maybe tar. Maybe sap anything that's sitting on the paint. It'll be perfectly smooth after this.

So go ahead. I Mean you can almost feel it, especially when you have that glove on. You can feel like all the little bumps and everything. Oh yeah, so that may be a piece of tar sitting there.

but go ahead and grab this and you can basically wash the car and decontaminate at the same time. I've come ready to work guys. All right I Am so excited to get this thing on the road at 75 degrees like this whole week. this GN will be ready for the weekend! Wow, this is a huge difference, especially right over here.

All right, we gotta rinse this guy off. Yeah, you got it there. We go now. we're ready to go.

So you definitely want to wash the clay mitt every so often, especially on a car that hasn't been paint corrected or really cleaned very well in the last 10 years. Otherwise, you're just rubbing all that garbage right into the clear foreign. T Much left for me to do with Jason's rocket that he's using to dry my car up. That thing is pretty sweet.

Jason What did these lights just do to my car? Well, they're the the Truth Serum lights. Yeah. I think so. This is horrible.

You know it looks a lot worse when you get it under these lights. but so now we can notice a couple things. The first thing I noticed is some solvent pop on the hood and what? I'm afraid of if we put Ppf over it, you're gonna see that you can feel those. Jason Um, what's Happening Here I'm just lightly dry sanding some of these.

You kind of see it better a little bit. So now you see all these areas like this like that's what the film would almost look like over that. So we're just gonna try to flatten them by sanding it. This is just a dry sandpaper here for most most people are used to like wet sanding, right? Is there an advantage or disadvantage thing either? Well uh, the material.

So wet sanding is nice because the water all the residue that we're we're getting up here. You can see it's dusty here with wet sanding. That water will wash away that material which is nice. So dry sanding paper doesn't last as long.

but it's easier because you don't have to get all the water and it's not as messy. So in small sections like this. I Just like using dry sandpaper, it's also A for me. it's A very light.

it's great. I Trust you. I'm just seeing this like like what color is my car now Yeah oh that's pretty cool though. I'm a professional analyst.

It's called a slow pen, flows paint out and then we can just fill this chip in. We can kind of add a little extra paint and blob it in there. Let it dry and I'll do a couple layers. This is why I want the paint protection film.

Yeah, that one looks fresh so we can touch that one up. I Bought it with that one. Yeah, you just tattoo yourself with it. Yeah, it does.

It does. Look at this work. he just touched himself up. it's disappearing in front of our eyes.

Okay, wow, we're gonna let that touch up dry a little bit. I Want to do a couple layers of it so we'll just wait I think in the meantime we see we do a test month. Yeah, see how good we can make it so we stand in the spot. Got some of this solvent pop flattened out.

We're gonna use our rupez machine with a compounding pad so this is kind of the more aggressive step of it. So we're gonna do two steps. one is getting the bigger defects out, some of these water marks and all the scratches and then we'll polish it with a less aggressive step and that's where we'll get all of our Shine from. I'm gonna say all the little bumps are gone I Don't see any of them at all in here anymore, so really be able toe once we polish it out.

Foreign? That's nice. That's really nice. So there's a couple deeper scratches there so we'll hit that just one more time. Just on a concentrate on the center here, but on the outside we've got some scratches still from the Sandpaper but a little but like the hold on we went from this all the way to this.

it's already looking a hundred times better. So being that we're putting paint protection film over this, we don't need to be perfect. you know? I'm just doing a test spot so we can do it for the rest of the car, right? Um, but that looks pretty damn good, huh? That looks really good. Remove most of that solvent pop so it's nice and flat.

You're not going to see that through the film now. You know. This car came in every color as long as it was black, right? Yeah, this is the best color. It's the best color ever.

This is so cool now. I Know we have a ton of work to do but I'm getting a little hungry me too man. Yeah! I Think we should order some food. We got the best app in the world.

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It's awesome. Check it out down below right now Jason's doing a little bit more touch up on the hood to remove the solvent pops. They're kind of a little all over the place, especially on the hood, but the rest of the car looks good and this is just one of those extra steps that these guys do to make their paint correction work just perfect. All right.

So I'm going to follow Jason around as he's sanding the hood and I'll use the coarse compounding pad. All right, let's see how I did Okay, that works. something else that's not proper on this. Grand National is the white outline here in the front bumper.

So this plastic section here was most likely replaced when they painted the car and they stopped making the one for the Grand National so you could only get one for a normal Regal that has the white and what's nice is it just chips right off. So once we take this off, that's the only difference and it'll look like a proper Grand National Again, Oh, this is it. Here's the ticket I Figured it out. just kind of gotta flick it off.

Okay, cool. I Got this. I got this unlock I Can do this. So we just finished up with the hood as far as the course compound stage so that got out all of the large scratches and all of the little solvent pops.

Yeah, so we leveled everything so it's nice and flat. Now technically we could put Ppap over and it'd just be fine, but we'll hit it with a quick polish. Be done with it, bring it into the Ppf room. We are back in the clean room and E-man is going to take care of the Ppf on the hood.

And right now we discovered that we can remove this piece of trim pretty easily and that'll help us wrap the hood. Cool. Nice. Yeah, we'll be able to wrap all the way around this.

Edge Now all right. so the main reason for taking that piece off is underneath. here is a bunch of contaminants, right? So removing this piece allows us to clean this and then it allows the film to fully wrap underneath it. That way we get a really clean install and we're not battling that little the back end of this.

So I'm gonna do an IPA wipe down and that is to remove all of the polishing and compounding oils that are left behind that'll allow the film to adhere to the body panel a lot better. This is our slip solution. We're going to be using Johnson and Johnson's Baby Shampoo and water to get this film on the car. Thank you! So we are using Optical Defense.

It is an eight mils thick film. It's self-healing it has a very hydrophobic top coat that beads water amazingly, and we can scratch this up and heat it up and watch it all melt away, right? Oh yeah, yeah, that's right. Of course we're gonna do this. and then in an hour we're going to scratch it all up and we're going to make that disappear.

We put Ppf on a bunch of my cars and I get so nervous with the scratching part, but you know it works every time. It's so weird. we're literally scratching this up. We heat it and it melts away.

Foreign. This will go down perfect right now. So I think we're good on this back stretch. You want to grab this? Oh yeah, look at that.

We're just making love to your part right now. The car appreciates that about this. Hood bulge right here guys. Some iconic.

It's one of my favorite. It's freaking. It's subtle but mean you love it I Hate it because I gotta work around it. True, true.

But no. it makes the car pop. especially once we get the three eight turbo badges on there. It's all nice so you don't have to spray any alcohol in there or anything, right? Not right now.

Right now we're just allowing the adhesive to do all the work for us. We will be spraying the alcohol well, the IPA mixture on the edges and that's to make sure that we dry up all the soap. so the film actually makes perfect contact with the body and it grabs it perfectly. I Wonder where they got the idea for the Silverado Hood bulge from the Buick Grand National Of course.

Optical Defense is a film that we've been working on for the last two years. We've been testing films left and right, trying to figure out the right adhesive, trying to figure out the right top coat that goes with the film. We're really trying to figure out how to make this is the best film. A for the consumer and the installers.

For installers. How do we make it where it goes down easy and they're not fighting the film consumer. How do we make it the clearest And how do we make it visually as beautiful and as close to paint as possible? We're going to be wrapping a quarter inch of this film into the seam so we can visually hide the ppf we're going about quarter inch down and that should give us plenty of room to wrap the hood. Production: The front bumper on the Grand National is a little intricate so they have to do it in pieces.

the first one being this Center section here which will tie in here and then they'll have to do two separate pieces on each side. All right, the hood ppf is all done. You just have to put this little piece of trim back on or this really long piece of trim. It's tidy, tightest fitting.

GN trim piece ever. Hey, like a glove? Perfect. So yeah, we were able to get this on with the Ppf. These aren't screwed in and normally on the Grand Nationals they kind of rattle this perfect.

This is what the hood in the front bumper look like with Ppf. it. well I mean you can't even tell it's on and that's the point. So as you saw, they wrapped all of the edges so it's it's completely invisible.

and Jason how long is this good for? basically forever, right? Uh yeah. I mean it depends on like everything. like how does it live but uh, 10-year warranty on it. 10-year guarantee.

but usually five to seven years. We tell people that'd be probably be on a daily driver. Yes, yeah. like this thing.

Yeah, if you're not driving it much, it's gonna last a long time. All right. I Said that I Wasn't nervous about scratching the hood after the Ppf, but now I'm nervous again. Ah, so after many many washes and touching, you have scratches.

Oh my gosh, look at that so bad. That's what. basically your car was before and now I could just drive out into the Sun and fix this. Basically right? Uh, you could.

or we got our heat gun here. All right. get out. just melting away.

This is so crazy every time. I See it I Don't even believe it. That's nuts Everyone dude like how do you not get Ppf on a nice car like magic? Seriously, that is insane I Don't recommend scratching your own car. but I mean it is kind of fun with this stuff right now.

Jason is sanding down the color that we applied to the fender so I will get it nice and flat. Is this scratch going bye-bye or what? so far looking good Moment of Truth Moment of Truth Moment of Truth from head on. you can't even tell where the scratch is like it was right there. You got to hit it at a certain angle and get up close to see it.

Not bad, not bad. You just got to look at the car from the right angle. All right. We are ready to take some wheels off and get to polishing.

Although they look really good. I mean a lot of guys leave them with this natural aluminum look but I want to see what we can do with it? Oh look at these cute little baby breaks. they're so small now. I Did learn you could put S10 spindles on a Grand National and then bolt up some larger breaks although they're not that much bigger.

so I don't know if it's worth it. Well, something I learned about these wheels is that they do have a clear coat over them. so unfortunately I'm not going to be able to buff these into Chrome but we can still clean them up and see how shiny they'll become. and I'm just gonna do that by hand using a little bit of metal polish and just kind of buff it in there like this.

Then after I'm done, we'll definitely put it up against one of the other wheels and see if we made any difference at all. I'm all done with the wheel polish on this one and it's definitely shinier. It's definitely still not Chrome though it's polished aluminum. I Think it looks really good and here's how it compares to when I haven't done yet so you can kind of see, especially right in there.

It's a little deeper and it's more dull on this one. So I'm going to go around finish up the rest of them and you know what? the contrast with the black inlays? these don't really need to be. Chrome I Really do like the way they look right now so I don't know. We'll get these back on the car with some tire shine and see see what she looks like.

in order to make these essentially look like Chrome we would have to strip all of the clear coat off and then polish them. It could take a really, really long time to do. It's kind of tedious work so I'm not not sure if it's worth it. We're gonna get through polishing the rest of the car and the first step is moving this.

Grand National badge actually removing it so we can polish it and then moving it. So we're just using a little bit of fishing line and it's just held on with some 3M double-sided tape or whatever brand double-sided tape they use. And this way we don't have to risk damaging the badge by sticking a plastic wedge in here to pry it off this literal fishing line that we're using here. All right.

cool. Now we just have to get all that off while we're removing badges. We're going to go ahead and remove these as well. Uh, they're way off.

They're only supposed to be about four inches from this body line and they're about six right now. Luckily, these are all in really good shape. All hands on deck here for buffing out the car. We're gonna try and do this all in about an 8-10 hour day with three guys and then Jason's hopping in on this later too.

So I'm gonna try and get this scratch out right here. All right, All right, let's see, we got should be a pretty good before and after for the whole area. Oh, that's gone all right. So we went from this all the way to this like glass and that's only one stage that scratch is totally gone.

Let's keep this going. This is so satisfying on a black car. Oscar and Emilio are working on the roof right now and Emilio just finished up this side. Check out the difference.

Keep in mind this is only step one. Look at that. Look at all the scratches over here and then glass scratch glass. it just disappears.

Hello there. I don't even need a mirror anymore to look at myself now Emilio and Oscar and the crew here at Chicago Auto Pros are the real pros. but I just finished this door I don't think I did half bad. It took me like an hour and a half and actually I'm not even done because we have to get the worst part.

Uh, which is underneath the door handle where fingernails are always scratching and then I have to do the top section of the door. But let's let's see what we can do with this now. Wait, oh you shoved that? You're gonna get a bunch of Polish in here so all you need to do is ah, rub it in a little bit so you're not just shoving a bunch of Polish into that. Keyhole thanks Jason and then be careful with this Edge because that's all you're going to burn them.

Okay now, I'm really scared I'll put little to no pressure on that. Lots of pressure on me. Supposed to see gray and white underneath the black. I'm just kidding.

Just kidding. All right. I am putting like no pressure on this whatsoever. I'm so afraid of burning edges.

This is gonna be kind of tough too. Let's see. how did I do here just on the first pass? Uh, okay. not the best I didn't Oh what is this? This looks like a dental tool or something.

Wow. okay wait. oh, this is battery powered. Yeah, Rupez! Ah, Rupe is my favorite.

Someone taught me this trick once I don't remember who you take this. You just kind of rub it in there so it doesn't get in the keyhole. This is so nice. This is unreal dude.

So you can use that for. like up here too with these little parts that are hard to get to. Yeah. I mean I could even use it on this guy too, right? Yep, absolutely that's paint.

Jason Where would a feller get one of these things? Carsupplieswarehouse.com That's right. if you're gonna mess something up, it's gonna be these ridges. Yeah, that's where the heat builds up and everything too. Yeah, I'm putting no pressure basically on this.

Another option is to use your finger and get in there. Okay, um, sometimes I'll do that just to get the heavier scratches out and then I'll use this to polish it out. Oh, okay, you know, so that's a option. two.

Put a little bit on the towel and just we have to make those noises. Yeah, you do like you're a polisher. All right. Ready here we go.

Back in my day we didn't have those fuzzy tools this fused muscle. Oh wow, yeah. I didn't think that was gonna do much. Yeah sweet.

And Jason's gonna see how good he can get this. There were just a few little deeper scratches stuck in there. That's that's good dude. that's like 90 95.

I'm just gonna cut my nails down to nothing from now on and just be very careful. just just my pinky like you can't open it with me. This is an old American car. it's all.

Steel Good job, That's awesome! Yeah cool now. I Just got to do this top section here and this door is good. All right. Oscar's surprising us with a tape line over here.

Nice dude, good eye man that does look great I Love tape lines. You know we got to have a bunch of tape lines in one of my detail videos. Look at the difference a little polishing can do guys. I Highly recommend you get into buffing and polishing your car.

It's one of the most satisfying things you can do and it's relaxing. I Mean it takes a lot of time to do it right, but I've I've learned basically everything from the guys at Chicago Auto Pros and it's really elevated my game as far as maintaining the Cosmetics of my cars. I never used to do any of this stuff, still works. This might take a little bit more time.

Yeah, maybe the safer route to go though. Yeah, and this is uh and this is an adhesive remover? Yeah, rapid remover. adhesive remover? Yeah, the last thing I want to do is melt the texture? Yeah I can definitely sit there for an hour and do that. I just got done removing all of the white pin striping from the rear bumper.

Uh, it only took me about 30 minutes. not too bad and it's looking a lot more GN like now. I've gotten the driver's side door looking pretty good. So this is after the first stage with the heavier cut compound to remove all of the large scratches.

and I'm really really happy with this. So all I have left to do on this door is this mirror you can see with this whole door used to look like and I get to use my new favorite little tool I Love the fact that it's battery operated as well. Yeah we can get all in here. all right.

Let's see we got. oh this little mirror's looking good. This is the most aerodynamic part of the Grand National look at this. They put a lot of effort into these mirrors or they just stole them off of some other GM product at the time.

who knows on the mirror. We went from this all the way to this and once we do the final polish and the ceramic coating and we're doing two layers of ceramic coating after that, this is going to look even better even though honestly I'd be pretty happy with the way it is now. We're almost done with the compound stage cars looking amazing and after that first step, what you want to see is consistent hazing like this. It's going to go away during the polishing step.

And so we found the worst part of the Grand National on the trunk lid to do a before and after of both steps, we're going to compound and polish, peel the tape back and see what she looks like. Let's do it. Oscar's like I don't have time for your experiment. We have work to do getting a little spoiler, so we'll probably see a before and after on that too.

Wow! Big difference after one pass with the compound, so we're gonna hit it one more time with the compound. We've been doing this on every panel. We go over it two or three times because some areas are worse than others. See what Oscar's got over here? Love this! Grand National Little lift spoiler here.

When a car is this heavily swirled, it's almost like a different color because the light shines off of it. It kind of gives it like a gray weird look after step two of stage one. I Guess Beautiful. It's polishing time now, but how does it get to this point? I Don't understand it on a car like this.

are they just running it through scratch and shines left and right? So Jason switched over to a foam pad with a fine compound. so you can tell here the haze is totally gone. Look at the difference. I mean it's it's a different color.

It it is like I don't even know what to say. The whole car is going to look like this and even better once we get the ceramic coating on. It's almost like it's thicker on this side, like we've exfoliated and actually removed a layer. I mean I know we did, man.

I Wish you guys could see this in person. It is Wild! This is definitely the most extreme change that we've done on this channel and we've worked with some pretty bad paints. Jeez, the swirls are so deep it's mesmerizing. I'm gonna take out the bezels around the headlights right now.

Just four little screws plug here. Hey, look at that. We always find insects when we're working on these old cars. Look at this.

It looks like it's from the 80s. Eat it. I'm not eating it. It does look delicious I Haven't eaten today so it's looking good.

We'll have to give it a proper burial though. I'm just kidding, we don't have time for that. You know we can't leave these bezels looking like this, so we need to restore them with. C4 What's great about this is it restores it and it protects it so it's a ceramic coating too.

First, we're going to spray it down with the panel wipe. make sure it's clean. There's no oils or any dirt on it. Foreign.

Just with cleaning, this thing looks amazing. It's time for the good stuff. Let's see out of here. Beautiful look at the before and after here.

I mean even after cleaning, it's pretty dull and when you don't see that this actually looked good I don't even understand why now. Wow! Trim restoration's got to be one of the most satisfying, fun things to do on a car. car is going to look too good after this. Wow, it's almost as beautiful as you.

Jason Oh look, it's so sweet. We're on to polishing now and this will go a little bit quicker than the compound cutting, which is nice because it's been about seven hours today of just buffing and we I mean realistically still have a few more hours to go before we get to the ceramic coating. He's all done with the fender. me dude.

Oscar Good job man that looks awesome! I Seriously cannot believe this is my car. This is just many years of dust and dirt. I'll clean that up real quick. not that anyone can see this, but why not while we're in there, right? I'll do this side as well and then going back in with our practically brand new bezel.

Oh man. Next, we're gonna clean up the wheel wells just using a general Degreaser this is plastic too, so we'll be able to coat it, make it look pretty Should we clean up my new control arms? I think so one. I use rubbing alcohol on this as well so it's all degreased and now we're just using a vinyl and rubber conditioner that should make it look pretty good. I'll just kind of wipe this stuff in there.

Oh yeah, the fender liner used to look like this and now it looks like this. much better. like I said that new Silverado sounds pretty sweet. look at that.

They corrected and did Ppf work on it. Just just amazing. Really like that color. We are moving on to the glass.

so this glass has a ton of water spots and it just doesn't clean away with normal glass cleaner. All right. So this is just normal glass cleaner and it doesn't really do a whole lot. I've tried this I thought for sure I'd be able to get water spots off of my glass.

look at that, they're still there. It looks so bad. makes the car just look old. I mean it is kind of old, but you know what I mean G4 Nanotech glass polish.

So we're actually buffing this with like a Yeah machine. the Pad everything. geez these are etches into the glass so the only way to remove them is to polish them out. What's the difference between glass specific polish and normal polish we're using on the car? It's a little more aggressive and this is unique because it actually has a little bit of an acid base in it to neutralize the water spots.

So kind of unique. Now we got the tape line going. We got to do it. It's already looking so much better.

Look at that you can see right through it, you know? I Gotta have one dad joke in the video I Love this 80s GM qualities pushing on the glasses. Wow. So if you guys ever have water spots on your glass that you can't get out and you think you're going crazy, you're not. They need to be buffed out.

even buffing out the legit street car sticker, look at that. Let's get ceramic coated! I'm working on getting a double-sided tape off of the badges and this is pretty satisfying. I've been soaking these all day with some adhesive remover. otherwise this stuff is very hard to remove and it's coming off like butter.

Look at that. Emblems are all cleaned up and I just got a new dash pad for this. It came in the mail and my father-in-law was nice enough to go drive it over here. and he came with a can of spray paint because apparently you have to paint these.

I'm replacing it because it's all cracked up. but you can see here that it's a much lighter gray on the Grand National So Jason said his go-to spray painting Booth areas in between two shipping containers. All right, there's that lighter. Grand National gray.

So I'll do a few light coats. This is going to be our first base coat coat number two going on, so this one's a little bit thicker. You can really see the color transformation, although it's pretty dark in between two gigantic shipping containers, so maybe you can't I don't know. After three coats, our dash pad is done.

So this is going on tomorrow and we're also going to be doing some interior restoration work. and I can't wait to show you this really cool retro looking radio. It's day three. paint correction is all done.

So this is just a prep spray because we have some 3.8 liter turbo decals to put on what I'm going to call the power bulge. This is what I'm going off pictures on the internet of where this goes and it looks to be very centered. So I think this corner here. So this corner here and then centered up and down and it's about four.

Yeah, maybe a little bit over to the right. Okay, yeah, I think this is the ticket right here. I Hate doing decals. this is so nerve-wracking All right.

let's piss off. Made In Canada This has been sitting in the trunk of this car for probably 10 years or however long ago they did the paint job. Now it's hard to get the up and down. It's like impossible to see.

That looks pretty good, right? Yeah, Should I do this right? Did I do this right? Okay, all right. yes, this is so cool. I Love when they put the type of fuel injection right in a badge. That was like back in the day when they would put ABS on the back like it was that important that would require his abs.

every car Spiel injected. it really needed this. It was missing. it was missing and according to my measurements, we're good.

All right. I'm making it permanent now I don't know why I'm making weird noises Here we go. Okay, All right, All right, All right, let's do the other side. There are two of them.

All right. Do a little measurement Here it is that's about eight, eight, and seven eighths inch right to this part of the O do eight and seven and seven eighths. Okay, so our o will go right there and then we'll measure to the very end of the three. So eighteen and three quarter team and three quarter.

Okay, okay here we go. Final Wipe. Let's take this off so we can really get a good idea. All right.

pushing it down, just locked in, the power bulge is now complete. 3.8 liter turbo badges are done. The fender badges are pretty easy. I've put our double-sided tape on the back I Found the measurements online and I've already measured this out.

We have four and three quarters from this body line to this corner of the tape and it goes right to this point and then it's four inches to this body line so we just tweak it down a little right there. that's perfect. and then for the inner cooled, it's just a 1 8 Gap and it's centered right into those Corners So we'll eyeball this. I Think we can get it pretty good? There we go.

All right. I'll do the other side and our decals are all done in the front. so driver side GN badges on hood is done. Passenger side is done.

We're missing an antenna so I got this nice little stubby I actually took it off the turbo Trans Am but I'll get a new one for it. We'll restore this right now. Look at that all right. Looks good.

about four and a quarter one inch and that measurement goes right to the point here of the turbo six. so it's just a matter of getting it perfectly level. I'm a pro. What can I say? We no longer have the GN badge over here and we also removed the intercooler it's not supposed to be in the back and let's get our cleaned up wheels on.

It's gonna look so good. there we go and she's on the ground again. I Was also missing the factory air dams underneath the car. that's why you could see the air filter.

So I just installed those. These are Factory reproduction pieces. Hang on, hang on. They force you to run a front plate on these cars.

They drill the holes right into the factory bumper so we got to put something on here that looks good. All right guys, let me know what you think that or do We just run with the LSC GN in the front I don't know this or that. All right. we're in the clean room for the ceramic coating before we apply that.

I'm just going to go ahead and shine up these tires. No. I Love my tire Shine! So I'm not spraying it right on the tire because I don't want to get anything on the paint or the other cars. It's so good right now.

Oscar's applying the first coat of ceramic coating and he's using the Crystal Serum Light by G-technic This is one of the Brand's Chicago Auto Pros uses quite often. I think pretty much everyone we've coated here we've used this. You can see a big difference as it's wet and that'll go away as it dries, but it does bring out even more of the gloss from the paint, which is really neat and it's still very beneficial, even if you have the Ppf like we do in the front end. I'm going to go with LSC GN with the metal Chicago Auto Pros plate I Think this looks a lot better than this.

When you get up close to this, it's just a really bad print. It's really cheap and flimsy. It looked good when I ordered it on eBay but it also came creased. so yeah.

I Love the Illinois antique plate too. It looks good. The guys are ceramic coating the roof right now. Yeah I think this looks great.

First coat of the ceramic coating is done and we are moving on to what is this. This is Xov5. It's actually brand new and this is a topper for the CSL It's going to add a little more gloss, a little more hydrophobics, and just make it look just a little bit better. I Didn't think it could ever look any better.

I mean even after the first stage of buffing, I'm like yeah, I'm good and then like four other processes later we have what looks to be a brand new Buick Grand National You gotta feel this. Try this. it's you can just feel how slick it is so just use that. use that spot right up there.

Do you feel how like yeah? This just seems like the right thing to do right now. Okay, um, cool your natural I Like to just give it a nice wipe and then just let it sit for another second but all that solvent evaporate out of there leaving just the coating behind I Wish you saw this current person when we got it out of the storage unit. Sit in there for like 10 years. I mean you basically saw what it looked like when it came in I didn't touch any of the paint really.

but I just I Can't believe this is the same car as the one I dug out of the storage unit. this is insane. kind of at that too. Nice point now.

Yeah, like I want to put a ton of miles on this car and I still will but it's scary now. like this is so crazy. All right. Well at this point, uh I just have to finish up the interior and then we're done with this car.

We're gonna do the final reveal outside. I Have to finish up the interior while this cures for a little bit. but I'm I don't even know what to say while the ceramic coating is still drying. Let's do some interior work.

We have new floor mats, the new dash pad, and overall the interior on this car is in excellent condition. The carpets were already replaced, this needs to be vacuumed out basically and we're getting rid of these. Well, this is going to be fun. We have about six of these screws.

Okay, this one's kind of loose. I'm getting lucky on this one. All right. One screw down.

Oh, this is going to stink. I think I have it broken loose. if I drop one of these in here, it's all over. I Found a way better way to do this.

This has a little magnet in there. Oh yeah, nice. Oh the screws are out so we can remove this entire thing. Now there we go.

a little piece over here. check out my new radio from Retro Sound. I have always wanted one of these I installed this last week but basically this radio looks like a factory GM 80s radio but the guts are all modern. So I have Bluetooth audio I ran a microphone in here so I can talk on the phone as well and this pumps out like 50 000 times more watts than the factory radio so it can sound good as well.

I'll leave you guys a link down below but if you have an older car, this is the way to go. and I have all new speakers from Retro Sound as well so you know we got to do a while. You're in there. I have a brand new Dash speaker to replace this old crusty thing.

Just two easy connectors and she's going right back in. This dash pad was either replaced and not painted or it's Sun faded. Oh no, you can see it's got the lighter gray on the inside. This is what it's supposed to look like and it's not supposed to be all all broken other speakers in and not that you're ever going to see this, but I've cleaned it all up and now we can go back together.

It's gonna be sweet, all right. I'll get the screws in, all right. I'm not going to throw these out. We'll use these on some maybe the off-road Ml.

They're not bad mats, but yeah, the carpets are practically new. They just need a cleaning. Used to look like this and now it looks like this and now it looks like this. I Love these mats.

They're specifically meant for the Grand National They match the carpet really nicely. I Love the Turbo 6 logo. It's so clean. Here's what it looks like on the passenger side and wait till we take the seat covers off.

I've already wiped the dash down. Next, we're going to clean up this door panel. It's got fabric on the top so when you rest your arm on it, it just gets a little dirty. And for this, I'm just using a multi-purpose interior cleaner that'll help remove these stains, agitate them with this.

Oh yeah, it's gonna look good and then we'll just wipe this guy down. Soak all this up. Here's what it looked like before and here is what she looks like now: I Found the little cap here, but some of the Chrome did peel off so I'll have to see if they still make this part right here. but I Cleaned up the passenger side door panel as well.

This one's in pretty much mint condition. She's a beaut. It's almost final reveal time people. I'm taking the seat covers off.

These seats are brand new I Love these seat covers too because sometimes I work on cars and I get dirty when I ended up leaving the gray sun visor so I replaced the headliner I did it in Black it's supposed to be Gray from the factory but I kind of like the contrast. The whole car is black and gray in the interior. It makes sense I think it should have been a black headliner from the factory. One of my favorite parts of the Interior is the original patina sticker.

Look at how cool this is. They give you this information right here on your sun visor and the oil and filter change every 7. 500 Miles back in 86. That's weird.

Okay let me show you the interior and then I'll I'll show you the exterior. it's it's uh, it's a lot. It's a lot to take in here. It is inside all cleaned up.

brand new seat covers, brand new cushions, brand new carpets, floor mats, headliner. we have the new dash pad the new radio with Bluetooth it's got an AUX Jack as well. It's got all sorts of cool features I Love it! but I cleaned up the center console. All of this was a little grimy.

We have our gray and black GM seat belt buckles. Uh, this interior just screams 1980s and this car is about as stripped down as you can get. It doesn't even have cruise control. The only option this car has is air conditioning.

Here is the back seats. This is back in the day where there was an ashtray everywhere but an absolute beautiful place to be. It's a comfortable car to drive. It's like going back in time.

I have a gigantic smile on my face every time I Step foot inside of this car. it's it's a childhood dream. I Just here's the view from the back seat. Just a classic 85 mile an hour Speedo It's ridiculous.

This is also one of my kids favorite cars as well, which is kind of crazy. They'd never seen a crank window before. it's kind of cool, but they always ask me to drop them off to school in this car. So I think I'm doing a pretty good job when I bought my Buick Grand National out of a storage unit in Wisconsin it had been sitting for at least 10 years and it looked like this and so today I'm proud to show you guys my finished Buick Grand National and I Know this is a little cliche but words cannot describe how I feel about this car.

I Cannot believe this is mine! I'm going to be driving home in this car in a few minutes. It's insane to me the transformation that we have done over the last few months. This car had a rod knock, the entire suspension was falling apart. It ran horribly.

It would die out all the time and mechanically now it is fully sorted and and cosmetically. Just yeah. look at the paint on this thing I've done a few paint correction ceramic Coatings here at Chicago Auto Pros. this was by far the most challenging for all of us.

The guys put in in insane amount of work and effort and they truly are the best in the business. Look at this paint, look at the lines. The Styling of this car will never die and I am so happy that I get to own this for the rest of my life now. I know this isn't a fancy Lamborghini or a Ferrari this car was only sixteen thousand dollars.

but the amount of joy that what I feel with this car honestly it's it's Priceless To me it's just I. Guess what I'm trying to say is that you don't necessarily need to spend a ton of money on your dream car. Your dream car could be something cheap and it could mean the world to you no matter what anyone says. And for me, the the Buick Grand National this is I'm just I'm just speechless.

This is so so cool. I'm so happy with the way that this build has gone that I'm just honestly I'm running out of words here. so I'm just gonna just I gotta show you more of the car. We did so much.

You got it. You gotta see every angle of this thing to truly appreciate what is going on here. I am I mean the body, the paint something I did off camera was play around with the body lines on the hood. They were all off and the hood was raised up in the back so that is all fixed as well.

I adjusted the front and rear bumper. These are nice steel bumpers and they have adjustments as well. so I spent a lot of time doing that. It's just kind of tedious work and I wanted to get it done before we did the paint correction so I wouldn't have to mess with it later.

but all the lines here are absolutely perfect now in the fit and finish. I Mean it's like a it's better than brand new. These cars had single stage paint from the factory so they didn't look nearly as shiny as this one does. I didn't notice it as much until I fixed them but you can really tell the difference with where the badges were.

they were way way off. obviously the trunk one was with that corrected with the 3.8 SFI turbo on the hood and the proper wheels and honestly the proper tires. I put those gigantic drag radials on and those are cool if you're gonna go racing. but I think this wheel and tire setup with this stance.

it's just spot on and it's a little nerve-wracking cutting coils because it's a ton of work to do I made my measurements and I would have done it over and over again. but I got it on the first try and I think I think the ride height is just perfect I got it aligned. Everything thing is all within spec. it's just it's ready to cruise.

Oh and hang on, hang on hang on! I cleaned up the engine compartment so it looked really bad when we first got this car and then I cleaned it up a little so this is what it looked like when I got to Chicago Auto Pros and this is what it looks like after. So I degreased everything and I used a water-based dressing so that it's not all goopy. Nothing's Gonna stick but it just gives it that shine. it gives it that proper Sheen like it came from the factory with a few little add-ons and I think the engine compartment just looks really, really nice.

I'm I'm really happy with this I know I had to touch the door handle to open it I know I wish you would just stop touching it. he's like the mechanic from Seinfeld that cares more about Jerry's car than he does. although I care a lot about this car but thank you Jason This is a dream come true. Like completing this car with you guys and the amount of work that you guys put in and the quality and everything! I've brought all of my big you know ceramic coating, paint protection you know jobs to.

Chicago Auto Pros because they are the best in the world. We make dreams come true. Yeah I mean seriously, this is a real dream like yeah this car I mean I was excited to own the car but it's like one of those show like hundred thousand dollar looking Grand Nationals you know it's so crazy I just I can't believe where it came from to now like ah I'm speechless but thank you thank you seriously man! I Really appreciate it. yeah um I'm obviously going to leave all their stuff linked down below.

They get cars shipped over here from like all over the country so if you want the best, bring it to. Chicago Pros Go enjoy it but just don't touch it anymore I know I know I'm having a hard time with that I had to show the folks all right guys. Um I'm gonna drive this car now I'm gonna drive it home and I am done with the project Although Our project's really ever done I mean it's yeah. I mean it's mechanically sorted cosmetically, it's all done.

but I might eventually do more performance mods because I like that kind of stuff. but uh, but for this year, that's it I think I'm gonna drive this thing to the Woodward Dream Cruise I'm going to take it all around. cruises in Chicago all spring and summer and I'm gonna live out my childhood fantasy of driving to Buick Grand National that looks brand new. so thank you guys so much for watching the video.

If you haven't already, give it a big thumbs up. Share the video with your friends. subscribe. if you haven't already, check out Chicago Auto Pros their links and Social Media stuff will be down below.

They make amazing videos as well. With that, have an awesome day! I'll see all of you in the next video. foreign, otherwise you're just rubbing. otherwise I swear there's some in there.

There we go I have to open it. so the front bumper on the ground, the front bumper on the Grand National is a little in that your legs out of my b-roll you're like just from your knee. it's just leg. get some wheels off.

Okay, that's not gonna do it. And the vintex and the vintag sticker and the Vintage sticker line? all right we went hi Max it's okay. wow big wow, Big difference with wow I was also missing these air dams underneath the car. that's why you could see I was also missing these I was also um, a couple two, three times.

Okay, um foreign, foreign.