Pillar Trim Trivia for Buick Whale Wagons

In reading about these big "whale" wagons, I'd learned that the original 1991 Roadmaster Wagon was SUPPOSED to have the B-pillar area blacked-out, which is why the chrome trim runs above and below it on the doors to tie the doors together. All the pre-production catalog pictures have that B-pillar in black, but at the last minute, GM killed the black-out on the Buick wagons. Some have said it was to speed up assembly and others said it was to save a few pennies-per-car. Once I saw those original pics, I decided to black out my B-pillars....as the Buick designers had intended.

ALSO, the C-pillar on the Roadmaster WAS always supposed to be body color. There is no chrome trim lines above or below that Buick C-pillar, it's boldy-color from the beltline to roofline, top-to-bottom. That wide C-pillar was shaped in a leaning "swoop" to accentuate the curve of that big rear 1/4 window and to seperate the look of the Buick and Olds (at least the Olds in '91) from the "lesser" Chevy wagons.

That C-Pillar in body color swooping upward was also supposed to help tie in with the 91-93 body-color roof-rack trim that sat directly behind the vista glass....making kind of a hoop from the beltline trim up C-pillar to and over the Vista roofline. When GM made the roof-rack on the Buick wagons black in 1994-96, it did wonders for visually lowering the entire car, but it also took away that "hoop" design....that frankly I don't think many folks noticed without pointing it out anyway. The roof-rack on my '96 wagon is still black, but I left the C-pillar body-color to minic what the Buick designers originally had in mind...and I think it does make the rear window look more-angled than the Chevy like this.







Fun Stuff!

-Mike

Looks great with the windows tinted like yours are. Never noticed that about the c-pillar, either. (I own a 92.)

Might try this on my wagon, but I'd want to take a picture of the tint in bright light to make sure it would look more like yours and less like the ones in the stock photos, where it doesn't provide the illusion of one really long window at all.

I agree - i think the blacking of the B pillar looks good - but you need to have the right level of tint so it blends in to give that mono-window look. If your wagon has no tint, i don't think it'd look good at all.

DPM96C wrote:

Looks great with the windows tinted like yours are. Never noticed that about the c-pillar, either. (I own a 92.)

Might try this on my wagon, but I'd want to take a picture of the tint in bright light to make sure it would look more like yours and less like the ones in the stock photos, where it doesn't provide the illusion of one really long window at all.