This page is actually about a year old, but I've only done a few things to the car. Because of the ISP change, I thought I'd put this up to have something at the new site.
The 2001 Gem City Rocket's show got a bit damp. Due to that, attendance was not what we had hoped. I brought the '70 out to show it to some people and because it is a blast to drive! This is one of those times when cars look better in the rain. In the comment area of the dash card, I put; "This is not a show car, it's a survivor of the '70s street race wars!".
I heard stories of this car when I started cruising Woodman Drive in my first Olds, a '70 442 ragtop. My ragtop was black with gold pinstripes. Some people told me of a guy in Xenia that had a car just like it and I was even mistaken for the guy. I eventually met Marc and found that he had a '70 Cutlass that was black with gold '72 style H/O stripes. It was a 350 4-speed car. We got to know each other and eventually both ended up in the Gem City Rockets. I'll get back to why Marc is significant to this story.
I'm not using last names because I didn't ask anyone to put their names on the web. Jeff had a friend named Scott in school. In '77, this car came to Ohio from Florida. A slight problem developed - it had a cracked block. I am assuming it didn't have anti-freeze in it. Scott's dad ran a garage and the car was left there with a cracked block. The title was obtained by a mechanic's lein. Scott's parents drove the car and Jeff said he remembered going to the Belmont Auto Drive-In with Scott and his parents. Jeff said the rear window defogger made a lot of noise. It still does, but I got another one at the swap meet in Lansing, so it will be fixed soon. At that time, the car had been repainted. It was originally a Platinum car with black stripes. The stripes became elaborate pinstripes after that paint work.
When Scott was older, he got the W-30. Jeff said this car was what turned him into an Olds fanatic. He has had many nice, fast, and rare Oldsmobiles over the years. It seems Jeff bought a '70 Sport coupe W-30 that was green with gold stripes. It was not just a W-30, it was a 4-speed with a W-27 3.91 rear end! Scott had been holding his own racing this car on the street. He traded the W-30 intake to Jeff for the Torker that is still on the car. W-30 intakes were a little cheaper back then. Both guys decided to rebuild the engines. With a little help from people Scott's dad knew that raced Oldsmobiles and several other shops around his dads', Jeff and Scott began building engines. Jeff put his in his sport coupe right away. The engines were built very close with a couple of small excptions. Jeff's 4-speed car got a wilder cam. All I can say is that it's a good thing the sport coupe was a 4-speed and did not have power brakes. The cams were ground to their specs by Herbert. The other difference was that Scott had a little more money at the time than Jeff did, so he put the extra money into this car's heads. Scott let this car sit at a garage for a couple of years before putting the engine in. He took the hood off and stored it. However, the fenderwells were bleached white by the sun. They were painted black at that point. When Scott got the car back together, he didn't keep it long and sold it to a guy in Kettering.
Chester, from Wilberforce, bought the car from him. Somehow Chester met Marc (remember Marc). Wilberforce and Xenia are small towns and close together. Chester got a lot of parts and Olds knowledge from Marc. Marc still had the ragtop, but he had aquired the sister car, the W-30 sport coupe from Jeff! Chester did a lot of work on the car - some good, some bad. He had it painted the Ford green you see in the picture and painted the fender wells red again. Now the cars truly were sister cars having nearly matching engines and both being green. Then Chester had a run in with a pole and it pretty much won. Marc went and looked at the car and knew he had too many projects to buy it. In 1992, he talked Randy into buying the car. The car needed some work. One of the NOS fenders that Chester put on the car was gone. If you look close, you can see the driver's fender does not match. When Randy was rebuilding the car, he painted the fender with a spray can. You just don't leave a primered NOS fender on a car if you want to keep it from rusting. The passenger fender is kinked on the top. The wreck moved the hood over and crunched it on the top without really trashing the fiberglass. When the body shop looked, the front frame horn was bent. Marc found a nice frame for Randy and about 8 years later, Randy had the car back on the road. While replacing the frame, Randy went ahead and put stainless brake lines on and put a complete kit in the front end. It was a long project and he did a great job considering he had never even thought of being a body man or doing the main part of a frame off restoration.
Randy's truck chucked it's tranny. He was driving the W-30 to work and going through massive I-75 construction every day. The car got an electric fan to help keep it cool in traffic. The problem was that the truck needed a transmission and the Olds was drinking about $8 of gas a day to go back and forth to work. I got an email from Randy on a Saturday last October asking me if I knew anyone interested in buying a '70 W-30. Let me think about that for about a nano-second. Then I started really thinking and I realized that I knew a lot of Marc's friends. I remembered Randy, but I didn't remember which car was his. I had gotten a call a few years before by a friend of Marc's that was moving and needed to sell a '70 that was apart and on the way back together. I replied to Randy's email and told him in my old age, I had forgotten which car he had. I asked how far it was from being able to drive it. I got hold of him by land line Sunday night and found that the car was being driven. I arranged to meet him where he works Monday evening. I work a few miles from where he does. I had no problem finding the place he worked. I spotted the W-30 in the parking lot right away. By the time we left, I had another Olds. We worked it out that I gave Randy a down payment so he could get his truck fixed. He delivered the car to my house the next Saturday. I live on a corner and Dave and Greg had a truck and trailer on the side waiting for the car. It went on the trailer and was stored in Dave's barn until warm weather.
Did Randy just happen to email me? Nope. He had talked to Marc and Marc told him to get in touch with me. Marc knew that the bench seat column shift automatic would work well for me. Thanks Marc! The main idea was to keep the car in the Olds crowd and not sell it to some kid that would wrap it around a pole like Chester did. Considering the car, that's a pretty easy thing to do!
Well, spring came and I had been hunting parts on ebay and my garage. A stock intake came with the car as well as another NOS fender for the kinked passenger side. Randy had made one mistake that he was overly abused for. He had never put a doghouse on and had used the wrong pads under the core support. The front sits low and the doors don't fit right. With the front tilted down, the doors were hung so that they would not bend the fenders. The driver's door is bent, but I think Greg just might have a door for me when I get around to painting it. One part I picked up was a QJet from ebay to make the car a little more steetable. Dave tuned it. With the 850 Holley replaced and new plugs and wires, it started out a little more drivable.
I haven't done much to the car because I have been spending too much time driving it. The engine is far from fresh and has sat, but it runs better the more I drive it. The plugs were fouled very quickly. When I got the car, it had SSII 14x7s on it with Firestone 235/70/14 tires. I put 275/60/15s on the back and that did wonders for driveability. I didn't have any bolt in center 15s, so the snap in center 15s don't match, but it takes a second look to notice. With a transmission that has no slip going from first to second and a 3.91 gear, you had to work to keep it from breaking the tires loose when it shifted. Now it squeeks the tires instead of barking them. Everything is a compramise. Now it won't break the tires loose and go a little sideways when you tromp it at 40MPH. I kinda miss that, but it moves ground a lot better with more rubber in the back and attracts less attention by not turning the tires everytime it goes into second.
Factory options: 442 Holiday Coupe, W-30 option, heavy duty cooling, 3.91 12 bolt anti-spin rear end, bench seat and black interior, power steering, power disk brakes, Rally Pack, sport steering wheel, AM-FM Stereo radio, rear window defogger, and Super Stock II wheels.
Engine: TRW 0.060 over pistons, machine work by Dayton Crank, head work by a friend of Scott's dad (still has the "F" heads), transmission by Gem City Transmission, engine assembled by Jack Good, Edelbrock Torker intake, Chet Herbert cam, 88/98 '70 Qaudrajet, and Moroso valve covers. I'm not sure who did the HEI, but it is right and set up for mechanical advance only. I have a set of Olds DRCE style valve covers to put on it. Oh, did I mention that it has to have tall covers. Remember the extra money Scott put into the heads? I put Taylor Spiro Pro wires on it, but made the mistake of getting blue. I got them mail order and didn't realize that their blue would be Ford engine blue, only in glow in the dark form. The 600 degree heat rating seemed like it would go well with the headers. The pipes go out the back through trumpets.
To me, one of the best tail looks is a '69-'72 Olds A-body with a wing on the top of the trunk and a rear sway bar under it. Then you add a W-27 rear cover and tailpipes topped off with trumpets coming through the bumper cutouts and you have the Olds muscle look! 442s came with the bars, you didn't have to order the handling package like on a Chevelle. The Chevelle had an optional F-41 while 442s carried the FE2 stock. The boxed lower control arms were not available on Chevelles. The bars were as big as big as they got on A-bodies. Some Buicks and Pontiacs had some sort of spoiler, but the W-27 was Olds only! Granted, this is just the cover, but there are still some aluminum carrier W-27s that survived the drag strip. The O type rear end is not as sturdy as a 12 bolt C type, but the axles bolt in on the ends, so you don't need C-clip eliminators to run NHRA until you break the rear end with the 500 ft. lbs. of torque a '70 puts out.
The Buicks were 510 in A-body form. Some of the Olds 455s were rated at 510 as well, but not the 442s. The '66 was the quickest 442, but a lot of people got this view of a '70 442 or W-30 442. On the street, the torque would pull from just about any speed. The '70 442 and W-30 was the first legal year for the larger 455, had more torque than any other year, the W-30 was rated at more horsepower than any other year, this was the first year for a factory aluminum intake on the W-30, and the F heads are marginally better than any other head. Once you take a grinder or Dremel to an Olds head, it doesn't make that much difference what casting you start with. The F did have a slightly larger intake port to begin with and like the D and H had the opening between the center exhaust ports already closed for you so you didn't have to find a welder to work on your heads. In the early years, the pressed in seats unique to F heads was looked down opon due to fears of the seat coming loose during severe duty. Now everybody wants a pressed in seat because none of the big 3 can tell you how deep you can cut the valve seats and stay in the hardened area. That makes a bit of a difference on the street using unleaded pump gas. The '70 was the peak year in many ways and is probably the most popular. I knew I forgot something, the '70-'72 had the big W stripes on the hood and sides with a diecast emblem on the W-30 and W-31 cars. The higher, quicker revving early 400 engines showed their stuff when you went down the strip. With all the goodies the '70 had, the '66 & '67 get to the end of a 1320 foot piece of pavement quicker than a '70. But the '70 did go to the 455 from the 3.8 bore 4.25 stroke 400 that was used in '68 and '69.
Last Update: 9-05-02