1978 Oldsmobile Toronado XS

Are ones digitalized 007 worth more than the 002's and up?

 

Nice build up on your car jaunty. Just read all your posts nice to see this one saved.

 

I don't know how the Oldsmobile Heritage Center handles their records or where they came from, but I know for the Pontiac line that regardless of destination of the car, if it was built on the production line it had to have an invoice\record created for it as that was how the line was managed and ordered. Engineering cars were the only ones I am aware of that didn't get VINs as they were never to be released to the public. Executive, employee, "brass hat," etc. cars all were built on the line as normal and all had an invoice generated, it was just billed\designated to a GM specific code as opposed to a dealership (they had to do this as if the car ended up not being taken for one reason or another it had to be sold not to mention messing up the line and scheduling builds).

As far as why the first two didn't have any records, pilot production could be an explanation or a simpler explanation is that the records were just lost over the years. It's been 40+ years and once a car has been paid for and accounted in the system after the model year is over, it wasn't necessarily carefully tracked and handled. In some cases records were tossed in the trash - which is how Pontiac Historic Services came about, an employee saw them tossing the files in the trash and jumped in to save them.

 

I just received the November issue of Journey with Olds, the monthly magazine of the Oldsmobile Club of America, and it's mostly devoted to 1977 Oldsmobiles. That's not quite the year of my car, but it was the first year of the XS option, and the magazine has an image of the letter sent to dealers in October 1976 announcing it. I thought it was pretty cool, so I scanned it and enlarged it.

At the time the letter was written, Olds still had plans to introduce the XSR as well, and the XS was priced between the Brougham and the XSR as mentioned at the bottom of the page.




On the same page is the letter from March 1977 where Olds tells its dealers, basically, "never mind" about XSR. I read elsewhere that they couldn't get the roof mechanism to work reliably enough. The letter is partly obscured by the letter above of the way the letters are presented on the page, in sort of a montage format.

It says that they planned to bring out the XSR for '78, but that never happened.

 

Achieved some small victories today. I've mostly just been driving the car around town the last few weeks as major things are done. Working on small things, though.

For one, the horns have never worked on this car. I finally had a chance to look into the problem. The previous owner had put in an aftermarket Stebel air horn system that apparently worked with oil flowing in tubes, something I've never seen before. But the system didn't work, and it looked older than the hills, so I took it all out. I also found that the original horns, which were still there, were rusted well beyond any chance of functioning. Third, for some reason, some of the wires for the horn system at the horn relay were disconnected. Not sure why.

Anyway, I bought a new horn relay and two new horns, and I had a chance to install them today and reconnect those disconnected wires. Now I have horns! What a feeling.

In the process, the door-open chime that sounds when you open the driver's door with the key still in the ignition started working, something that also has never worked. The chime is part of the same relay.

Third, I put a new hood insulation pad in. The car came with one folded up in the trunk and none on the hood itself. It turns out that the one in the trunk was correct for the car with all of the mounting holes and cutouts in the right places, but it was tattered around the edges, and I didn't want to use it. I could not find an aftermarket one specifically for this car, so I bought a generic pad of the correct size and used the old one as a patter to cut it to size and put the mounting holes in the right places. I laid the old one over the new and sprayed spray paint through the holes to mark the positions on the new pad to cut them out. Worked very well, and the pad fits very nicely. I was actually a bit surprised to discover that the whole car sounded quieter when I took it out for a drive. It's amazing how much the presence of the pad can muffle the engine, which is the whole point of these land barges!


The old Stebel horns.





New hood pad. You've never seen such exciting photos, have you.

 

Want to see the car in action? I had my wife take some video of me driving it around the block. It's only about a minute's worth, but after seeing nothing but photos, I thought people might like to actually hear it run and see it move. I always like that throaty rumble of an Olds V-8.

Yes, that's the dog across the street barking. Nothing I could do about that.

 

Magnificent, Jaunty!

I know that restoration was neither easy nor cheap but you have preserved a beautiful piece of automotive Americana from a now orphan US automaker.

The very best wishes for you and yours for 2018!!!!

JWD

 

Thanks, and same to you!

 

Ah, it did have them, the trunk-mounted stop lights! I'd always thought that was a great safety idea when I was a kid, and of course it went into production cars, eventually, but yours has them and they work. I also was grooving on both the engine and exhaust tailpipe notes. It sounded great as you chogeyed into the garage.

 

1986 was the first year that the center, high-mount brake light requirement went into effect. The difference between that and the lights on my car is that the 1986 law required that there be a single light and that it be centered. I couldn't find any mention of this, but I presume that two high-mounted lights, like on the Toro, would have been acceptable as well.

 

Cool video. Thanks for sharing.

 

Just picked up a set of NOS wheelcovers on eBay. They're so pretty, I almost hate to put them on the car as they might get dust on them. I'll put them on as soon as I finish a couple of projects on the car (repairing, or at least trying to repair, the cruise control; replacing some of the dash and instrument cluster panels with better quality used pieces) and can get it back out in the sunshine.




This is the set that came with the car and are on it now. Serviceable, but they have definitely been around the block, literally. I don't know what that yellow crud is on the one on the lower left, but it won't come off with any of the non-harsh treatments I've tried. I've been afraid to get too aggressive for fear of doing more harm than good.

 

Since I brought it up, here's what I've been doing with regard to the dashboard.

First, I found on ebay a very nice quality right-side trim piece. It's the piece that surrounds the radio, an A/C vent, and the rear defog switch. The one on my car was not bad, but it had a scratch on the upper left side.

The old piece. The second photo shows the scratch better.






Here's the new piece. It's not NOS, but it might as well be. Extremely clean on both sides.




Here's the new piece installed. I would love to do something about the chrome trim surrounds, but that damage is just the chromed surface laminate peeling off. Not sure what can be done short of finding another piece in better condition.

 

Look into hobby materials. There are foils that are polished to a brilliant shine that could be carefully applied (I'd practice on junk pieces) with adhesive, after stripping off the original foil. It's applied like the chroming on toys, which is a vacuum-applied process, and is impossible to duplicate since you'd need the original Olds dies and vacuum machines to do it with. I think the foil is your best bet. Check the Micro-Mark website/get their catalogs coming to your home.