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This Cadillac was never in an accident, painted or even smoked in. It was always stored in a garage and mechanically taken very good care of by the previous Doctor who owned it. The paint on the entire car is absolutely gorgeous! The body of the car has only one very minor crease just below the right rear upper pillar which happened when the Doctor was backing out of his garage.
I purchased the car because I truly enjoy working on different kinds of cars and studying their designs and I never tinkered with a Cadillac before. I am a retired 36 year Mechanical Space Shuttle systems Engineer and an Aircraft A&P mechanic who just loves to tinker with cars, all kinds of cars! For example, some of the last few cars I had were a 1974 VW THING (amazing very simple German Engineering), 1931 Model A Murray (actually have had 3 Model As), 1929 Model T (scary car to drive!), a Mazda Miata, Several Honda S2000 (those are amazing cars!), 1992 Toyota Winnebago RV and I could go on and on. I study their mechanical designs and if possible make them better as I perform any needed repairs.
When I got this Cadillac there was a fuel system problem so I decided because of its age to just replace everything, new Bosch Fuel Pump, fuel filter and the fuel injector pressure regulator. The AC compressor, receiver dryer were replaced before I got the car but for some reason the dashboard HVAC systems circuit board/vacuum module did not want to direct the air flow through the dash board center vents. I smoke tested the entire vacuum system under the hood as well as under the dashboard to see if there might be a vacuum leak and only found one leak under the hood, it was the EGR valve so I replaced it with a new one.
I continued troubleshooting the HVAC system into the underside of the dashboard and ended up replacing the HVAC system circuit board/vacuum module and that fixed the issue.
The car had older mismatched tires on so I bought a new set of tires and had them road force balanced. The dashboard “Service Ride Control” indicator kept coming on and from what I could tell it was because of a leaky set of air shocks in the rear. I prefer to keep things simple on the cars that I work on so I decided to disable the rear air shock onboard compressor and replaced the air shocks with a set of Monroe coil-over shocks. There is actually a GM service bulletin that gives you this as on option so I followed the GM procedure to disable the “Service Ride Control” dashboard indicator after the new Monroe coil-over shocks were installed.
Another miner issue I noticed under the hood was a slight wining noise that was coming from in the front of the engine. My stethoscope was telling me that the wine was coming from one of the two serpentine belt idler pulley bearings so I replaced both of them. I still had a wining noise so I also installed a new serpentine belt but the noise was still there. The last thing my stethoscope pointed to was the Power Steering Pump so I replaced it along with a new pulley and that finally took care of the issue. And yes indeed, I did flush the entire power steering hydraulic system before installing the new pump. Actually, while I was changing the hydraulic fluid in the Power Steering system I decided to also flush out and change the brake fluid with new synthetic fluid. BTW, the car also has a brand new battery with a three year warranty.
Like I originally said the car was mechanically taken very good care of by the Doctor before I got it but I’m a pretty picky person so wanted to make sure that even the smallest issues were taken care of before I let the car go. Also, from what I understand the GM 4.9 V-8 is a great little engine that can last up to 300K miles so I imagine this car still has a lot of life left! I would keep the car but after driving it around for a while I’ve decided that I’m really not a Cadillac kind of a guy. This car rides way to smooth and quite for me, I mean you don’t ever feel any of the bumps in the road, you just hear them.
As shown in the last photo I have all the original stuff that came with the car, Owners Manual, Keys, Remote and some of the previous maintenance history. The car even has the original factory floor mats in the front and rear and they still look like new!
