my friend and i are converting his hardtop '82 trans am to a t-top car so far all we have done is bracing on the car and we have the roof skin cut off to see what all the interior bracing looks like. we have a t-top roof off a 92 camaro donor and hopefully the conversion will be done by the end of next weekend. but we had a setback today, my friend's hand slipped when he was working and he sliced his wrist open on an exposed edge of the bracing we put up.(he's gone to get stitched up) so here are pictures of how everything is going.

measure 10 times and cut/weld once. its a straight forward conversion really.

I did the oposite. Went from T tops to vert.

yeah we got the measurement thing down that's why we haven't cut anything yet. you went from t-top to convertible?
or t-top to hardtop?

T-Tops


to

TARGA that I desided not to finish


To

VERT

yeah we had toyed around with the idea of doing a targa, but decided it was too much work for amateurs but it might be something that we would do in the future. but we would have taken a convertible and made a targe from that instead of going from t-tops to targa, just because of the fact that the convertible has internal bracing to compensate for the missing roof bars. would be a lot of body work, probably have to change out the whole rear section of the car.

well here we go! we did a lot of measuring and then cut with extra so we could trim along the way and make everything fit, it's all set to be welded tomorrow and then we begin the body work again to smooth everything out and get it ready for paint. there was a paenl spot welded onto the inside of the sail panel which we removed from both roof sections so everything would be easier to manipulate and trim. The t-top roof is now duct taped onto the car until tomorrow when it will be welded. The pictures are in reverse order and if you click on them they will enlarge

here's a pic of the car pretty much before we started any work on it

Man, and here I keep trying to find a nice hard top early 3rd gent a (without the full aero package, or for that matter, any hard top firebird that is straight and I could convert to one) and everything that I find is a t-top.

Any issues with the different contour at the front of the sail panels between the camaro and ‘bird (the bird has a sharp front edge, the camaro has a curved edge)?

no not really we cut the roof high enough so we wouldn't have to bother with it and a little grinding will work that out we still have the hardtop roof frame if you want it lol

i don't know about you guys but i think it's pretty crazy that a couple of teenagers like my friend and i took on a project like this and it's coming out really well,here are the pictures after it was welded and some of the welds were ground down. we did not do the welding, the guys taht work at the shop where the car is did it free of charge.

does everything line up? like the t-tops, windows, etc?

Naw, not really… Like most things automotive (or anything that people consider really skilled), the actual doing part is not _that_ hard if you take your time, measure carefully, figure out where the designed in tolerances are…

It is nice to see that you guys do appear to be doing a decent job of it and not turning it into a hacked together POS, though again, it does bother me that you had a perfectly good hard top that looked just like my ’83 before you started, something that I’ve been looking for for a while…

It is nice to see that you guys do appear to be doing a decent job of it and not turning it into a hacked together POS, though again, it does bother me that you had a perfectly good hard top that looked just like my ’83 before you started, something that I’ve been looking for for a while… [/quote] Like he says, its cool u guys r doing that but the car will never be the same. good luck.

well i wasn't really aware of any value or that there was anything special about earlier model hardtop cars, but now that i think about it it is more common to see t-top cars than hardtops. But it makes no difference, my friend was determined to have t-tops no matter what.
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yeah everything lines up perfectly we were constantly measuring and testfitting with a windshield and hatch before we set everything in place to geet welded and in a couple of the pictures you can see that the inside of the sail panel matches up exactly with the new roof. and the A pillars line up just as well.

sounds cool, hope it turns out well.

Like he says, its cool u guys r doing that but the car will never be the same. good luck.[/quote]

I don't think that there really is any special value to the hard top cars, I actually think that they're worth less, but since I’m bigger then the average bear and want to build something that will need a 10pt cage I really don’t have room to put the halo bars inside or under the t-top side rails so I really want to find a hard top car, otherwise I would prefer a t-top…

ahh well that makes sense too, and if you are making a true racer then it makesmore sense to have a sheet of metal over your head than plastic that might shatter

now we just need to strip the paint, smooth everything out with body filler and get some primer on there, then the car will get paint, not sure what color to use though... black, red, or silver?

more pics of the car in primer before we hacked into it
it's an 82 so obviously the gfx are not original and we weren't sure how exactly the sideskirts were originally mounted and we made our own brackets to hang them they're going back on and so is the gta hood, but the gta hood has a little more work needed than we had expected. i guess this thread is starting to turn into more of a bodywork kind of a thread.

awesome work man. I like seein others do work like this.

I have a 90 TA with T Tops were about to do a 3inch chop on just to see how it works out and looks.

you're gonna chop the roof 3 inches?
isn't that kinda radical, what are you planning on doing for glass? keep me posted on the progress tho, i'd like to see how that turns out

2-3 inched ya. Just for something to do. We just gutted a car and swapped everything over to my old 85 TA. the 90 has some little rust spots that need patched nothing.

As for glass. Were thinkin Percys speed glass trimed to fit.

that's gonna be some pretty tricky fabrication, any special plans for getting the pillars and the back of the sail panel to line up? it seems to me that you will actually have to add to the roof because it gets longer and wider as you move closer to the main body of the car but it sounds like it's gonna be really cool post pics of the progress if you can!

Well from the looks of things you guys are doing a bang up job on all the fabrication but unfortunately i still wonder why you didnt just find an old phucked up t-top car in a yard somewhere and spend your efforts building that? At least then you would be sure about your t-top fitment and wouldnt have to worry about leaks. (provided you have decent seals of course). Oh well, to each his own. You guys went the hard way, but i have to say youre doing a really good job on it compared to most of the other t-top conversions ive seen. Keep up the good work and yall will have a badass ride!

yeah if you could find a t-top car in a yard in ny that wasn't already rusted to useless pieces it would be the easy way to go, but his body was perfect, it just lacked t-tops so we did this. and it really isn't as hard as one would think, just intimidating. but thanks for the props

Ah i forgot yall are up north. Being a good ol' Georgia boy i sometimes forget what rust can do to a car. Point taken, i understand why yall are going to so much trouble now. Good luck and keep up the good work. And of course, PICS!!!!

yeah i can't understand why we don't just use sand like everyone else,
we'll have more pics up once the rest of the body filler and spot putty is done and we have a coat of primer on the whole car, that'll give us a nice before and after shot

finally got some paint on the car
before...
after mostly done...

If anybody is interested in the conversion I have a complete setup from an 86 TA with the C&C t-tops, rust free.

hey I definately have seen that car on ebay, Am I wrong?

the t/a?
if you did it wasn't this one, maybe someone stole the paint job!
this car still isn't completed yet. school started back up and it's hard to get quality time to work on it

it's for sale now though

I WOULD DO THE OPPOSITE BECAUSE T-TOPS ARE FUN AND ALL BUT LEAK EVENTUALLY AND I WOULD TRADE MY T-TOP CAMARO FOR A HARD TOP ANY DAY

Looks like a very nice job....good pics showing the progress. Congrats on the results.

thanks
i'm pretty psyched actually, if you do an image search on google for t-top conversion you pretty much see all of these pics and before that there was maybe only one pic for any kind of info on the subject

I'm gonna hand it to you, that car looks BREATH TAKING!

Awesome job on the conversion, It looks so much better with t-tops, Nice color you picked too, I want whoever painted that to paint my car....

huh, I kind of like the area aroudn the lights blacked out like on the camaro... you need to post pics of it more complete for a final verdict...

Looks good...

here's the car as it sits now, i dunno if i mentioned how the louvers in the hood are actually functional. he decided that he didn't wanna finish the car because he wants a 4th gen if it was mine it'd be finished and i'd be driving it but i can't convince him to do it. for some reason when the lights are on all of the gauges are messed up and don't work properly, i think it's just a bad ground and all of the wiring needs to be sorted through and figured out.

Looks like you guys are doing a nice job Good Luck.

Shaved door handles...cool

Are those center rocker ground fx pieces Camaro ones? Look it, to me.

I'd love to convertible-ize my 87 GTA. Maybe I'll find a 91/92 Firebird convertible some day, and swap the nose, side rockers, and rear ground fx, and make it into a pre-90 GTA 'vert!

no, the rocker gfx are from an '87 gta the door pieces just havent been mounted yet.

I've just never seen one like so, so the missing door piece didn't occur to me. Makes sense though. Great conversion job!

Can't even tell that it was once a hardtop. Shame he won't finish it. Is he planning to sell?

yeah for some reason people think that the car is only worth $500, the paint we put on the car cost at least that, he's probablt going to end up parting it out and sell the body as a rolling chassis. because it's rust free

ok so he can't make himself part it out, taking it back to an '82. good thing we kept the original bumper covers