bjburnout wrote:

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MC wrote:

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A couple of questions/comments:

- I was surprised to see the landau top on a '75 as I thought '76 was the first year for it (my Nova had it).

- Would the bumper filler panels have originally been body colour or were they silver on some cars as they are on this one?

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from the owner

The Landau top.

I called up various 1975 Buick Skylark sites on my computer & some of them showed Landau tops yet the 75 brochure does not show one as an option.

Bumper filler panels - When the previous owner brought the car home, the rear bumper was off & the rear filler panel had been removed. He found a replacement rear panel but he used fibreglass to mould it to the body & painted it the body colour when he painted the whole car.  A few years after I bought it, cracks began to show in the paint at the rear bumper filler panel seams because of the different expansion rates between the steel body & fibre glass rear panel. I located new rear filler panels, took them to a friends body shop & he restored the installation back to original. I chose to have the rear panels painted silver to match the front filler panels. I went back to my computer for 1975 Skylarks & found some had both front & rear in body colour, some had the front filler panels in silver but all the rears were body colour.

 

-- Edited by bjburnout on Friday 21st of July 2017 09:06:04 PM

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 Thanks for that.  It might have been a mid-year addition?  I hadn't recalled seeing any 1975's with it, but it's not something I would have paid a lot of attention to back in the day.

When I looked at the 1976 brochure:

http://www.oldcarbrochures.com/static/NA/Buick/1976_Buick/1976_Buick_Brochure/dirindex.html

Under Other Skylark Features it says you can get it "this year", which implies it's new for '76 but doesn't explicitly say it.  I'm guessing mid-year '75...

The bumper fillers must be the hardest thing to find for the shock-bumper cars.  I have seen many of them for sale with none, actually, so I'm assuming that they deteriorate and crack over time like the Grand Am front bumper/grille fascias from the mid seventies.  I was wondering about the silver fillers as I've seen some body colour and some silver in the past, but the vast majority I've seen have been body colour.

Another thing I remember from that era is that the back bumpers always rotted out around here.  They collected a lot of snow/salt/slush/mud and didn't last much more than 7 or 8 years in this climate out east.