Car of the Week: 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme convertible
It pays to listen to your wife! Keeping the Reef Turquoise color ended up being the correct decision when it came to Scott Ulrich’s beautiful 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.
Scott Ulrich can confirm that his wife Annette was right. It isn’t always easy for a car guy to do, but Ulrich admits his better half had a better idea when it came time to pick a color for the 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme the couple was restoring.
“Yeah, there was a discussion,” chuckles Ulrich, a resident of Waunakee, Wis. “I wanted to paint it Viking Blue. I wanted a Viking Blue convertible. My wife said no we’re going to paint it the original color. And she won, and it’s the best decision we could have made! The rims are also painted that Reef Turquoise color, too. They are supposed to be an Argent Silver, or Argent Gray … and the body man said I don’t know how that’s going to look, so we went with the turquoise on the wheels. When I go to a national show I get dinged for not having the right color on the rims, and I don’t care. They look great. And then the white pinstriping, that’s not a decal. That’s painted too!” The cool color is probably the first thing you notice about the Ulrichs’ beautiful Olds, but it’s just a sweet car all around, regardless of color. The General Motors A body cars for the era had countless legions of fans, and for good reason. They had great lines, were great all-around performers, came in a variety of flavors, and could be loaded up with V-8 power if you wanted a muscle car with some sophistication."
And if you wanted a really stylish convertible that you could drive every day, it was certainly tough to beat the Cutlass Supreme ragtop, the plushest of the Olds’ mid-size offerings and one that shared many of its parts and styling traits with its base Cutlass and sporty 4-4-2 siblings. It was another car owner’s longing for a 4-4-2 that actually paved the way for Ulrich to land his ’70 Cutlass Supreme, which at the time was still a work in progress.
“I bought this from a club member that moved from Illinois up to Wisconsin and they found a 4-4-2 convertible that they wanted instead of this one and they talked me into this one because I was looking for a convertible,” he recalled. “This car was in the body shop when I bought it and it sat in that body shop for 3 years! In 2015 we had an Oldsmobile national show down in Brookfield [Wis.] with over 400 Oldsmobiles there and all my buddies were like, We gotta get [your car] out of that body shop and take it to the next body shop. So I found a guy in Waupun [Wis.]; TJ’s Auto Body. I like their body shop because they have restoration and they’ve got a regular body shop. So I brought it to them … Two years later in 2017 I got it back and won my first trophies!”
A Supreme Career
Along with being a little more upscale, the Cutlass Supreme coupes had a slightly different profile than their base Cutlass stable mates. The base Cutlass had a fast-back style roof line, but the Cutlass Supreme had more of a notch-back look. The Cutlass was one of the few GM A-Bodies that could be had as a notchback, joining the Chevrolet Monte Carlo and Pontiac Grand Prix.
For 1970, the Cutlass Supreme came in three body styles: two- and four-door holiday hardtops (pillarless), and a two-door convertible. They came standard with a 350-cid two-barrel engine that produced 250 hp. A four-barrel 350 with 310 hp was optional for buyers who wanted a little more giddyup under the hood. The top dog in the engine lineup was part of the Code Y-79 SX option package, which included a 455-cid Rocket V-8 rated at 365 hp.
Other standard Cutlass Supreme goodies included Flo-Thru Ventilation, a deluxe steering wheel, custom sport seat, cloth or vinyl interiors and a fancier dash than the base Cutlass model. Bucket seats were optional, as was a center console with a floor-mounted shifter.
Reef Turquoise was one of more than 20 original factory colors that were available on the 1970 Cutlass Supremes. A total of 10,762 Cutlass Supreme four-doors were built for ‘70. They weighed in at hefty 3,662 lbs. and had a $3,226 base price. As nice as they were, Cutlass Supreme sales actually dipped for 1970. Less than 27,000 were built in total among all three body styles. Just two years earlier about 54,000 were built for 1968, and production soared to more than 81,000 in 1971 and 130,000 in 1972. After a major restyling, nearly 246,00 were built for the 1973 model year. The Cutlass Supreme nameplate was a long-running fixture in the Oldsmobile lineup, debuting in 1966 and lasting all the way until 1997, when it finally ran out of gas and was replaced by the Intrigue in the Olds lineup. There are plenty of fans and car owners that would argue the model peaked in or around 1970 — a period that produced some high times and memorable cars for GM’s A-body lineup.
A Gem Again
Ulrich admits he’s glad he didn’t know then what he knows know about how much effort it was going to take to get his Olds back to trophy condition. He knew the car had languished in a shop for far too long, and still needed some parts and cosmetic work done. But the problems were deeper than he realized.
“I didn’t know about the quarter panels, I didn’t know about the trunk [floor]. I knew that I had to replace the hood … and I knew it needed to be painted and everything else,” he says. “I didn’t find out about the trunk floor until we were really far in. They had patched it up [previously] some way. At that point I just had to keep going. I said, ‘Do we have a choice? [laughs] ‘I’m so far in now I can’t go back.’ “It didn’t have any floors … rear quarter panels, trunk, hood door, door skin, little parts and pieces that didn’t come with the car… But with 1970s you can buy a lot of the parts and pieces. I think the only thing I couldn’t buy was the dash pad. They reproduce everything else. I belong to the Oldsmobile Club so a lot of the stuff is NOS stuff.”
Ulrich says one of his big scores networking with fellow members of the Oldsmobile Club of America and Oldsmobile Club of Wisconsin were the pair of rearview mirrors he landed for $250 .
“It really helps to belong to a club. I try to tell as many people as I can to join a club, it’s easier to talk to people and easier to find parts,” he adds. “And once you get to know people, you find out car people are just great people.”
Maybe the best news for Ulrich was that the car’s 350 V-8 was in good shape and didn’t need rebuilding, and the white interior had already been replaced and looked great.
“The top was white and I had that replaced. The dash was OK, I just had to clean it up. I put a new chrome strip around the front part of the dash. And then one of the guys in our Oldsmobile Club told me to get silver pen from Hobby Lobby … I just used that and kind of colored it in where the silver was fading out. It worked great. We never rebuilt the motor, but we did take it out and put gaskets in it. It looked like one of the heads had been taken off and redone already.”
Ulrich says he has not been able to accumulate much for history or documentation on the car, other than what the previous owner had. As far as he knows, the car is as close to original and factory correct as he can make it — other than the color of the rims.
“All I know is [the previous owner] bought it out of the Chicago Tribune, and it was kind of a rider/roller. That’s the way he bought it, and that’s the way I got it. It’s a non-air car, so there really isn’t any options. It had the white top, white interior. Crank-down windows … it was a low-option car,” he said. “Bench seat, two-barrel. It was probably some older lady or older gentleman who didn’t care about muscle, they just wanted a nice car.”
Ulrich has seen plenty of other cars come and go from his garage over the years, including another 1970 Cutlass that he had for three years before he sold it. He’s still got a hot-rodded ’67 Pontiac GTO convertible for days he’s feeling rowdy. As much as he loved some of his other rides, and as much as he likes the GTO, the turquoise Cutlass Supreme has become his ultimate keeper.
“Oh, I’ll have this one for ever. I’ve got way too much into it!”
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