Very high option for a Delta 88 including 455. https://stlouis.craigslist.org/ctd/d/1970-oldsmobile-delta-88-2/6308252093.html
Reminds me of my '70 Delta, just not as many bells and whistles. Mine was also a 'Holiday coupe,' with that same Galleon Gold paint, but with the matching gold vinyl top and gold interior, and I had the 350-2V engine with the T400 trans.
I have a couple leftover parts from my Delta. I should contact this guy, see if he'd be interested in them to include with the car for a few bucks.
It's got the right color interior and engine. Judging by that spotlight, could this be a tweaked 455 dropped into some federal agent's sleeper? Say, Alcohol, Tabacco, Firearms or I.R.S.? Did you have the trailer towing package or did you install the T400 yourself?
I don't know if it had the trailer tow package, but it definitely was factory. I had a set of the Olds shop and Fisher body manuals for 1970 MY, and I used them to verify the engine and trans were both factory-installed.
You don't really need a manual to verify engine originality. All you have to be able to do is find stamped numbers. Beginning with the 1969 model year, federal law required that a "VIN derivative" (partial VIN including the last six digits) be stamped on the engine and transmission of every car sold. If the VIN derivative matches the car's VIN, the engine/transmission are original to the car. This is the only true meaning of the phrase "numbers matching," by the way, because there are numbers that actually match. You see this phrase thrown around all the time, including being applied to cars made before this mandate went into effect, and there's actually no numbers that "match" on such cars. The only things that can be used to somewhat verify originality are date codes. You want, for example, to make sure that the date code of the engine installed in your '65 Chevelle predates the build date of the car. That at least makes it likely the engine is original, but there is no way to be 100% certain.
That means, if an entire engine or transmission was replaced with a crate version, because of warranty issues, the owner of the entire vehicle would be at a disadvantage, if that vehicle were to be destined as a classic decades later. He would then have to settle with a much lower sale price than the owner of an equivalent vehicle putting his own for sale which never underwent major warranty repairs of this magnitude. Or were these crate units stamped with partial V.I.N. numbers directly at the dealerships?
That's a good question, although, if you have a catastrophic engine loss, the replacement crate engine would void the claim of originality, even if the numbers were stamped in and did match.
I think that anyone back in the day who needed a new engine for the car shortly after purchase and thus got a "crate engine" was probably more concerned about getting a functional car and less concerned about the effect of the replacement engine on the car's value decades later. I supposed that, if you were concerned about such things, and the engine died while the car was still under warranty, you could have insisted that GM give you a whole new car instead of just replacing the engine. Whether GM would have agreed to do this back then, I don't know, but you could have said that one of the factors that was important to you as a buyer was that the car be all original. GM, on the other hand, could have countered with "our responsibility is to give you a functioning car, and we've done that."
I doubt that anyone buying a car, back then, or at any point in time would have forseen that particular car changing hands as a classic which would eventually be more valuable in the future than back then. They couldn't have known how time will change. The thinking, back then, was about everything moving forward and getting better. Without a crystal ball, they would never have had a motive for preparing for the worst.
I know Pontiac;s that had the engine replaced under warranty received "service replacement" engines, they were stamped with "SR" followed by a 3 to 5 digit number. All the date codes would be for the date the engine was made, hard to verify unless you have all of the service records. The cars with SR blocks don't seem to take as big a price hit as cars with other blocks swapped in. I am sure the other makes had similar procedures. This does seem like a very nice car, it just doesn't do anything for me personally
Nobody stuck to that. At that time, gas was cheap, families were bigger. You are right, insofar as Detroit should not have let cars expand to gargantuan proportions, but what they did back then was driven by customer demand.
