Junkyard Find: 1952 Buick Super
During my recent trip to California, I stopped by one of the biggest self-service wrecking yards in the San Francisco Bay area, a steel-company-owned yard that turns over its inventory of many hundreds of cars and trucks about every two months. If you see a car in this yard, you can be sure that its steel will be on a China-bound container ship within eight weeks. Such is the case with this 59-year-old Buick sedan.
As we saw not long ago, scrap steel prices have gone past $250/ton, a situation which has combined with high unemployment to send every dude with any sort of car trailer out knocking on doors and buying not-so-wanted vehicles. That means that a two-ton monster like this Special will net at least 500 bucks to the industrious scavenger who brings it to The Crusher. This car is probably too far gone to make a restoration worthwhile, although Midwesterners accustomed to extreme rust might disagree.
Wouldn’t this flathead pushrod eight be a great addition to a Billetproof-bound rat rod? I hope someone rescues this one before it gets eaten.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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My buddy had a 53 Special , it had a straight 8. The bigger models in 53 had V8s
Murilee and I seem to have the same tastes in cars. Every time he features one, I find that it's the same, or very, very similar to one that I used to own. This one is no exception. I used to own a 1953 Buck Special (with the Straight 8) and I loved it. Click the link to see the pictures. http://caughtatthecurb.blogspot.com/2011/02/my-old-buick.html