Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat is a common demand heard from pirates, hobos, or this season's political candidate de jure, this being Halloween. Today's Nice Price or Crack Pipe Buick Roadmaster has a 6-speed conversion that's pretty trick, and which should make driving it a treat, but is its price a little too scary?
Station wagons are literally named. Their original functions being to transport guests and their baggage from train stations to near-by fancy-shmancy (and most likely haunted) hotels. In post-war America, the form evolved into the Suburban commando vehicle, proving invaluable for moving mass quantities of groceries, little league spazoids, or entire families on summer vacations.
They became so ubiquitous a sight in our nation's bedroom communities that not owning one could mark you as suspect, creepy, and potentially un-American. Your family would be the ones giving out fruit on Halloween instead of packaged candy - fruit that other parents would snatch from their children's trick or treat bags because they are sure you had laced it with LSD in your communist plot to overthrow the cul-de-sac. Isn't that right, tovarishch?
Like undesirable neighbors the Roadmaster Estate, along with all its big longroof brethren, suffered an untimely death, in their case at the hands or sales of Sport Utility Vehicles. A few however, did manage to escape the massacre.
This 1996 Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon looks a little Frankensteinian, and in fact could potentially be considered a Camaro disguised as a road whale, due to its fuelie LT1 and T-56 floor shift. Elephantine and black as Satan's soul, this Roadmaster looks like something Michael Myers might jack in order to get back to his home town so he could off promiscuous teens. Cue the creepy music.
Keeping the car off the worm-infested earth, the Buick rides on a set of five spoke alloy wheels off of a Chevy Impala SS. The seller says that the car comes with not a hockey mask, but instead a full front clip off of that be-headed Chevy. Out under the load floor - which is big enough to stack dozen's of victims - is an upgraded 4.11 posi rear end, while the front end is claimed to have been rebuilt out of fresh parts.
The LT1 that was the car's original heart has been ripped out, and replaced by a later version. The factory engine was good for 260-brake horsemen of the apocalypse, but there's no word whether the new one is any stronger. The T-56 six speed is made possible by an F2B kit, which runs about $500 not including the gearbox. The seller claims that everything is sorted out, and that the car is a blast to drive, but then again, everybody kept telling Jamie Lee Curtis that everything would be okay, and see how that turned out.
On the down side, the seller says the Buick needs new door panels on the driver's side as the old ones are no good. He doesn't say if that's because someone, or something, tried to claw its way out through them, but that's the most likely reason. He does say that he has a new molded carpet pan for the car, so as to replace the blood-stained and brain spattered one worn out one there now.
Overall, it's both highly creepy and intriguingly desirable, sort of like that supposedly empty house down the block that everyone dared you brother to go into, and now it's been almost all night and he hasn't come back. All you can think of is how on earth you're going to tell mom and dad, and whether you'll get his room if their worst fears become realized.
But then, it's unlikely that buying this car would result in anyone's untimely demise. The seller even lays claim to getting 27-30 miles to the gallon in it, making the likelihood of becoming stranded on a deserted rural road - the very same one in fact that is supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a hitchhiker killed there many years ago in a hit and run, and who is said to this very day to be searching for his killer and will take to hell anyone else unfortunate to be stopped there as well - that clearly won't happen with this car.
The biggest scare in fact may be this Roadmaster's price, which is $3,000, or more than you might expect for something that resembles more than anything else, a hearse. But you'll have to take into account all the work that has gone into this beast, and the fact that instead of the brain from a psychotic killer, it has a drivetrain from a crazy Camaro.
So, what do you think about $3,000 for this Roadmaster, is that a price that would jack your lantern? Or, is that a price that dooms this Buick for all eternity? Buh-hah-hah-hah-hah!
You decide!
St Louis Craigslist or go here if the ad mysteriously disappears.
H/T to the handleless Padraic for the hookup!
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