SHOW BOAT

LUCKY’S SPEED SHOP HAS TRANSFORMED DAN APPLEBY’S BOAT-TAIL BUICK RIVIERA INTO A SHOW-STOPPING CUSTOM

- CARLY DALE

LAND-yacht. Barge. Boat. All cheeky nicknames for gigantic 70s-built American cars, predominantly from the GM stable. Not content with sheer size, manufacturers at the time also added unusual body styling to the mix, with Buick’s early-70s boat-tail design perhaps the most distinctive.

And it’s this pointy-ended feature that lured in Dan and Monika Appleby while they were on the hunt for a tidy weekend cruiser. Monika was keen on a muscle car, while Dan preferred a custom, and the locally sourced, big block powered 1972 Buick Riviera coupe they found neatly ticked both boxes.

As the Rivi arrived in project form, it toured the local shops for paint, panel, airbags, diff and donk before returning home for assembly. “That’s when I discovered the limitations of my tools and abilities,” Dan shrugs.

After spying an article on Ben Erdahl and Lucky’s Speed Shop within this very magazine, Dan was amped to get the Lucky’s team on the project. A deal was struck, and with it came a complete rethink of the Buick’s direction.

“Ben had me focus on the vision, on what I wanted to achieve,” Dan says. “I started to build a tidy and mildly customized cruiser, yet deep down I wanted something more complete – a full custom with handcrafted workmanship. My vision was for a European styled American grand tourer, which meant that almost everything had to be redone.”

It might seem like an extreme measure, but you can’t obtain perfection by making compromises. “I have learnt the difference between a good enough job and a great job,” Dan says. “Virtually nothing is off-the-shelf – Lucky’s made the car, and it shows, as the attention to those details is phenomenal. Everything down to the fasteners and brackets has been hand-made or modified.”