While out buying car parts the other day, we noticed the seller had something very exciting sitting in one of his shops: a genuine barn find! It is not pictured in the barn setting here, having already been retrieved from an old Nebraska farmstead, and this stop is just the beginning of the journey for this old beauty.
It is a 1942 Buick convertible, and it looks like a Series 40 Special, the most compact of Buick’s 1942 offerings with a 118-inch wheelbase. The Super and the Roadmaster, Series 50 and 70, would have the “Airfoil” front fenders that carried all the way back across the side of the car to the rear fender in a tapering contour like the one seen in this advertisement:
According to the Standard Catalog of American Cars, the ’42 Buick was produced until the first week of February, with 1,776 of those being the Series 40 convertible. The ’42 Buicks in every Series were powered by an OHV Inline Eight, and the Special engine had 248CID and 110-hp. It would have been a “blackout” car with painted trim if produced during the January 1942 wartime transition period, so the brightwork on this car indicates that it was manufactured some time prior to that date.
Notice that the advertisement above references Buick’s role in wartime production, the building of Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines:
I don’t know the back story for this Buick, and I’m not sure that I want to know since such stories are often rooted in sadness; at best, it is a project not finished and, at worst, a life interrupted. This story ends with a ray of hope, however, at least for the car. It has already been purchased and is headed back east for restoration. Here’s to a bright future for this survivor!
