Meet the ShamRockAway Motorhome, an 8-Wheel Buick Unicorn Born Out of Passion

Technically, Buicks don’t die, they stack up. That’s yet another humorous phrase of the kind this RV enthusiast – and overall legend – used to say.

J. Dennis McGuire, from Alma, Michigan, is the man in question: an inventor and a founding member of the Family Motor Coach Association (FMCA), dreamer of wild dreams and executor of even wilder ones. He is the brain and the hand that brought the ShamRockAway into the world, one of the strangest and too-little-known motorhomes ever built.

Call it a Buick unicorn and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. The ShamRockAway, also known as Noah’s Ark, was famous back in its day, but came to an unexpected and rather sad retirement after it was pulled from the road, and left to rot at some junkyard. There was an attempt to bring it back to life, when a person not related to McGuire’s family put it up for sale in 2011, but it doesn’t look like anything ever came out of it. For all we know, this Frankenstein Buick is lost for good.

McGuire started working on strange contraptions in 1948, his daughter Colleen said in a letter to Hemmings Blog at the time. This is the only official record of the ShamRockAway, prompted by photos of it rotting at Michigan junkyard going viral months prior. His creations included a 1942 skoolie conversion, a 1958 Flexible coach conversion, a semi-electric car, a wind machine to generate electricity that he set up on his house, and the ShamRockAway.

McGuire loved Buicks for their styling and their handling, so he wanted a motorhome that would have both. The result is an RV made up of three Buicks: a 1948 for the chassis and two 1962 models. One Buick was left intact in the middle of the motorhome, another was cut in half and placed at the front and the rear of the RV, respectively, while the third went on top. “I didn’t build anything, I just reassembled!,” McGuire would laugh.

He had help along the way: his son Michael designed and built the gearbox that allowed all four wheels in the front to turn. The ShamRockAway had power steering, Dynaflow transmission, two gas tanks, a “solid” frame, two AC units, two heaters, and air shocks on the rear axle, which drove the entire rig. Power came from an Electra 225 Buick V8, but there’s no word on the kind of performance the 9,960-pound (4,518-kg) eight-legged monster rig was capable of.

Photos of the interior have not survived, but according to the same account, it was spacious and, of course, customized. The ShamRockAway was 6 feet (1.8 meters) high and 28 feet (8.5 meters) long, so it was spacious enough for an entire family. And the entire family did make use of it: McGuire finished the project when he was 69 years old, and he and the missus went traveling in it through Arizona and Pennsylvania.

The doors in front had storage compartments for things like maps and booklets, and the diary that the two kept on their travels, documenting some of the strangest reactions they got from strangers. There was a bathroom, which could be made by bigger thanks to a folding door, as well as a kitchen and plenty of storage areas. The driver’s seat was over the engine, and McGuire had customized the dash, adding vacuum gauges, an altimeter, a CB radio, auxiliary battery switch, and instead of an air horn, a bicycle bell. The man definitely had a sense of humor.

The ShamRockAway was somewhat of a legend through the ‘70s, and had a brief re-emergence in the early ‘80s, when it was used as the campaign bus for Bob Tisch’s run as Michigan governor in 1982. After that, it was abandoned and, years later, bought by the man who offered it for sale in 2011.

That same man said at the time that he bought it with the purpose of restoring it because he considered it a piece of history, but he never got around to it. He was offering it with the travel diary kept by the McGuires, but whether he found someone willing to invest the kind of cash needed in it remains unknown. When the motorhome was offered for sale, it had already spent decades on the ground and, according to eyewitness accounts, it was completely destroyed by wildlife and the elements.

The ShamRockAway is the kind of build that divides opinion and gets the strongest reactions, both good and bad. Ugly and a hazard for many, it still gets credit from these very people for originality and for the mere fact that it exists, because someone was bold enough to follow his dream. “People would joke and even make bets that I couldn’t drive it away with all the licensing and safety regulations,” McGuire used to say. “Why, if we didn’t have the doubters, we wouldn’t have the doers in this country.”

And that’s probably the best way to remember this Buick 8-wheel motorhome: one doer doing his thing!