1974 Buick Electra 225 Limited

[electra225]

I almost fell out when I saw this video. I owned the twin to this car, right down to the Stage 1 455 V-8. Mine had tan interior instead of brown, but the outside and the equipment on this was the same as mine. I ordered mine from Bob Catterson Buick in Indianapolis in late 1973. I got it in April of 1974. This was the prettiest Buick I ever owned, plush and quiet to a fault, but the biggest pile of genuine junk GM ever mounted on four wheels, and my last new Buick. It ran the Stage 1 455, but a well-tuned Pinto with a half-car head start would run off and hide from it. It had GM HEI ignition, which was used in millions of GM cars later on and was a good of a factory solid state ignition as they made, but it was problematic in the 1974 GM cars. The Turbo 400 trans went out three times by 50,000 miles when it was replaced with a junkyard transmission that ran flawlessly thereafter. The Firestone 500 radial tires blew the fender skirts off twice, the rocker panel moulding on the left side once. The VIR stuck and blew the condenser thru the grill, and the radiator into the fan on I-70 in Missouri. It got maybe 8 miles per gallon on a good day with no wind. The front fenders flopped so badly that those little monitor lights on the front fenders looked like they were six inches wide at night. It did have gorgeous paint, though. I didn't realize that GM could paint a car that nice. I thought the color of mine was Firemist Metallic, allegedly a Cadillac color, but that might have been a sales shpeel. There was a mechanic at our local Cities Service station who took charge of the car, felt sorry for me, but he sorted all the little issues that plagued it. He found the metering rods laying in the bowl of the carburetor, allegedly from the factory. He put 1975 HEI on it, cured those issues. This car had so many issues that even after many of them were sorted, we were so sick of it that I traded it for a new 1977 GMC1/2 ton pickup with a 454. Maybe the second best vehicle I ever owned. The '74 Limited was a huge disappointment from my '68 and '71 Limiteds. They were fantastic cars. I don't care what the common opinion seems to be, but Buick never built a 455 that would carry water for a 430.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If_7qUZlWA8