Massive design fail...attention all 58 Buick owners!

[Resurrector]

My Special has had an extremely irritating squeak that occurs at any time the car is moving and constantly at highway speed...a high pitched shreeking...imagine a knife edge against a piece of metal...just realized what it is - the throttle linkage bolted to the firewall. It's a vertical shaft held by two brackets, top end connects to the rod going to the carb, bottom end connects with rod to gas pedal. There needs to be plastic or rubber bushings between the shaft and brackets, so you'd have to drill out the brackets to a bigger size, or if you don't care about originality, just update the whole overly complicated and sloppy mess to a cable system from something newer and eliminate the hole through the firewall that lets noise/fumes in (if your rubber boot is as rotten as mine was, anyway).

If you have your engine out, NOW WOULD BE THE TIME to do this as it's not fun getting this thing off.The upper bracket is cherry pie, just a 1/2" socket for one bolt...the lower bracket must be unbolted from underneath, you can just barely get a 1/4" drive ratchet and 7/16" and a 5/16" sockets on the two bolts. If you have one of those 'micro' 1/4" ratchets, that would be the trick. Once I got it off, I scored the shaft at the upper spline before taking it apart, otherwise I think that lever could go on any which way, and the whole deal would be misaligned.
Trust me on this guys, make it a priority if you are anywhere near running your car, or you will regret it! I tried uploading a pic but it is too wide...the 1200 pixels wide limit thing is pathetically small, I took that pic with my damn cell!

[58limited]

Hmm...My Buick has the original set up and it makes no noise. Not sure why yours does.

Use editing software to edit the picture. The width is set to that so pics can be viewed in their entirety without scrolling the screen to the side which also makes it harder to see what is being shown. Using a larger picture would also make any text in any thread window extend for the width of the widest picture that is posted, necessitating scrolling to read every single line - that is a real pain in the ass as I've found on other forums I belong to. Actually, 1200 X 1200 is too big for this forum for the listed reasons, but I'm not going to change it to a smaller size now because it would knock previously posted pictures off. Picture sizes will stay the same on this forum.

[Smartin]

I hate the throttle linkage on these cars.

[Resurrector]

Thanks 58Limited, that's been a confusing thing for me on forums, will try that out. I can't imagine why all 58 Buicks wouldn't have this issue sooner or later, maybe yours hasn't worn enough yet.
I think the biggest problem with the linkage is, it's mounted to both the engine AND the body...the engine vibrates and rocks...duh, GM!
I took the gas pedal and cable off a 79 GMC, will adapt that and save future headaches.

[frame30]

Do you have any photos of this? I'm at the putting-back-throttle-assembly now. Cheers. Michael.