KBcobra

Well my buddies and I were going through a local junkyard for a silly project (gokart) before one of them goes to the Air Force, we came across this Firebird.
This firebird was mostly intact minus the engine and transmission. So we paid the junkyard $170, loaded it on the trailer and off we went! After further inspect we found the car was originally an LC1, a 82, and had a solid body (some surface rust here and there). So we got started on the cleaning process.



We cleaned up the interior A LOT


We seem to have a good starting point especially for a $170 "junk car"

Concerns so far.
Title - Been in contact with the last registered owner
Engine/Transmission - neighbor offered a 350/400 SBC plus a TH350 for $400
Wiring- Dreading that
Misc parts - There are 4 other 3rd gen Trans Am at the same junkyard that we could use.
Any other concerns I will post here.
Pretty excited to get this on the road again

musclecar70sfan

iTrader: (1)

Good job! Can't wait to see progress pics on it! Good luck

NowhereFast

I love the early birds. It's great that you saved another one from rotting away.

I can't wait to see how it turns out!

92RS(real slow)

nice find looks very solid

Duane's 91 Z/28

iTrader: (1)

Nice find!! That car is clean!!

SKELITOR117

iTrader: (3)

WOW. That's in GREAT condition for a junk car. Especially if you only paid $175 for it

BobtheGreatII

Hi there.

I suppose you can say that I'm officially the legal owner of the vehicle. I'm happy to say that I managed to get the title for it, and that we are still waiting on the bill of sale. Engine and transmission should be here sometime tomorrow. If it's alright I'll be posting some pictures here too. And without further wasting your time, here's some updated pics:

Here's the car off the trailer and with the hood "on":



*The plates are to the original owner, from 2001.
The driver side before cleaning:


After:



Passenger Before:



After:



Backseat Before:

BobtheGreatII

Backseats taken out for cleaning before:



After:



Backseat after:



Hatch opens after having to drill the lock out (it broke in to pieces when I put the key in):




Started cleaning that out:



I did manage to find the original owners manual in the compartment to the left.


That should be it for now. Hope to keep you guys posted, even with some videos here soon. Thanks.

SKELITOR117

iTrader: (3)

[quote=BobtheGreatII;4981216]Hi there.

Engine and transmission should be here sometime tomorrow.

Surely not the origional engine and transmission (not that there is anything wrong with that). Are you restoring or upgrading? What engine and transmission are you using?

KBcobra

The car originally was an LC1 with a TH200 (yuck). His neighbor offered us a SBC of no less than a 350 (he said possibly bigger) and a TH350 for $400

SKELITOR117

iTrader: (3)

I apoligize for my ignorence but I am not familear with those. Could you specify?

KBcobra

2.8L v6 2bl carb and a weak 3 spd automatic.

BobtheGreatII

Gonna leave that kind of stuff to my friend here. He knows the technical stuff a bit more.

SKELITOR117

iTrader: (3)

Ah. I see. If I am correct that is the same V6 that came stock in those years. My friend has a 89 V6 firebird that is very similar. I do believe most came with the 700R4 Transmission though. Or at least that was the standard automatic transimission.

SKELITOR117

iTrader: (3)

So just getting it mobile for now. What would you like/plan on doing to it?

KBcobra

That seems to be the plan. Getting it mobile again and eventually work on body work.

SKELITOR117

iTrader: (3)

Gotta start somewhere.

Bullydawg

iTrader: (7)

Looks like the interior cleaned up pretty well. I would take the plastics out and repaint them though, give them a good scrub, and buy some spray paint. Is the interior brown?

Looks like a good project! Keep pluggin' away!

80schild

iTrader: (5)

The seats look amazingly good other than fading. I wonder if there is some way to dye them back to the correct color?

KBcobra

It's claret I believe. Any idea where I can find some spray paint to match that?.

chazman

iTrader: (4)

Nice find!

BobtheGreatII

So good news! I called the guy about the engine. he's going to be pulling it out here sometime at noon, and have it back to us around 5. So I'll have some pictures of it then (hopefully it's not going to be too bad of a project :/ ).

And yeah, mainly getting it moving. I would like to pull at least the rear plastics out and paint all of them. Other than that there isn't too much else that needs done other than maybe replacing some interior elements and repainting the exterior. The hood might need replaced, since the corner is pretty smashed in.

SKELITOR117

iTrader: (3)

And you could always get a cooler aftermarket hood. Or go to another junk yard and find another one.

BobtheGreatII

We're running in to a bit of a road block. While playing with the wiring, we've stumbled in to a horrible hacked up mess. We've narrowed it down to what we believe are the most important wires right now. Unfortunately we have no idea where they go (hacked apart)... Can anyone here help? Or possibly point us towards a better wiring diagram than what's in the Chilton book?

These all are coming from the drivers side firewall:



And what we assume are the battery connections, but again, it's all torn up and spliced together:

SKELITOR117

iTrader: (3)

Outch. That is messed up

SKELITOR117

iTrader: (3)

They dont hace the electrical diagrams here. I'd just Google 84 firebird electrical diagram

BobtheGreatII

I actually did find this:

https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/ltx-...project-2.html

That should help a bit.

1989karr

that looks pretty hacked i dont think thats even factory wires in the second picture??....may want to consider just getting another harness from one of those cars in the junkyard? From personal experience, its a LOT easier to work with a non chopped harness lol

SKELITOR117

iTrader: (3)

Very true. Unless you know exactly what your doing, you dont want to mess witht this. And even if you do know what your doing, it would still be easier to find a new harness. Alot of this wiring doesn't look right from the get go

BobtheGreatII

It very well may come down to that. Looking at some other wiring setups... it looks like we have everything. But for whatever reason it got cut up and then put back together.

kymmee

Nice to see another 82 V-6 with maroon interior. Mine is maroon exterior also. You can get SEM flex paint and paint the interior plastics and seats. With the seats you kinda spray a small area and then use a stiff brush to blend. Mine were sun bleached and they came out looking decent. Nice find and save.!!

BobtheGreatII

Thanks. Well hopefully our guy with the engine and transmission follow through with getting us the engine this week.

KBcobra

We managed to label most of the C100 today. Look at this nice pretty splice.

NowhereFast

Early 3rd gens had different transmissions. In 82 you were able to get a 4 speed manual. Unlike the 5 speeds of later years. The automatics were different as well. The '82s had 3 speed autos, and in '83, they went to a 4 speed auto (the 700R4).

BobtheGreatII

So. Turns out that the engine we got from the guy was a 305. After spending $400 on both the engine and transmission, should we ask for our money back and hope we can find a 350? Or do we just keep what we have and try to fix it up?

Also, I already know what KB here is going to say, so ignore him. I'm asking you guys.

gwarren007

iTrader: (1)

get your money back

Guest

That $400 should get you a real 350, and a 700R-4, from the salvage yard. It will at 3 of my nearest salvage yards. Much better than a 305 / TH350. Both for acceleration and for MPG.
Try for an '87-up 350, probably from a pickup, but leave the heads. Better to hunt some 305 heads, like 081s or 416s, and swap them on, before buying the engine. The best 700R-4s are '88-'93. Again, a pickup version will work, just make sure it's not from a 4.3L V6. Then you'll just need to swap to an F-car tailshaft housing for the torque arm bracket.
If you have the TH200c driveshaft, sell that to someone who wants a TH350, and buy any stock F-car '83-'92 driveshaft.

KBcobra

We are actually keeping the TH350 since it actually has a 9" tail shaft. We don't care about gas mileage at all. We are going back to the salvage yard to pickup the rest of the parts we need. We will see about pulling a c100 harness out of one of them.

Guest

Okay, keep the TH350...
Do you realize you'll need a 4.10:1 gear just to beat the 700R-4 with a 3.23:1 gear? Or a 4.56:1 to get close to a 700R-4 / 3.73:1.
Don't ever try that, because once you do, you'll never go back to the TH350 ever again. It really is that much better.

BobtheGreatII

Holy cow it's been a long time since I posted the work on this car. Prepare yourself for a lot of images (56k beware!)

So here's the original engine we thought we were going to use:



And a side view and right about this time we figured out that it was a 305:



Disapointed by the 305 we had to cheer ourselves up with a different hood:



We also picked up a gas tank lid without the lock in it:



Deciding that we were going to keep the TH350c we started to separate the 305 from the transmission:



Finally it was free!



This was the first attempt at trying to clean the TH350:



We also picked up a nice new cluster:

BobtheGreatII

Which I think turned out real nice inside the car:



We soon got our 350 that we had originally hoped for:





Here was round two of trying to clean off the transmission:



Interestingly enough there was a set of v8 valve covers behind the seats in the bird when we first got it. I stripped them down so that they could later be painted:

BobtheGreatII

And so we cleaned the engine and prepped for paint:





Then we had to start assembling the accessories:



I also did a quick (and not so pretty) paint job on the inside of the engine bay to clean it up a little. It's not perfect but it turned out okay:





And so with that the engine was dropeed in!






The engine was dropped in this past labor day weekend on saturday/sunday. Monday we spent figuring out the wiring harness. Which lead to a pretty shocking discovery (no pun intended)... BOTH LIGHTS OPENED AFTER 10 YEARS!

Watch Here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLy66gChT_o

After we played with the timing for a while, we wound up killing the battery. Couldn't be helped, so I charged it over night last night. Today I got in and turned the ignition, only to hear the lovely sound of success!

Watch Here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2-_3NaHftA

So now you are caught up and hopefully from this point on I can do a better job keeping this thread up to date! Thanks for taking the time to look at the pictures and videos and I'll be sure to post more work in the coming days.

bradley23150

iTrader: (10)

You're doing an awesome job so far, I gotta say. I say this all the time buy the early third gen birds are without a doubt my favorite of all third gens!

It also seems like the 82-84 headlights work much better than the later ones, though they may be noisier, they work longer and put up less fits. Engine sounds like it could use some tuning, but it's coming together nicely!

Awesome-X

It's coming along great, especially for a jy buy. I wish our yards would sell their cars for that much, I wanted to buy a 4th gen Camaro with a piddly 3.4 that they said had "engine noise" and they wanted $800 for this pos. They didn't know if it ran or drove and it was mostly fiberglass and they wanted that much for it. I'm sure you can imagine my response to that price

SKELITOR117

iTrader: (3)

You got a 350 for it? Very good. It is coming along great.

Sparkytfl

For next time, get to the dollar store and buy some LA's Totally Awesome degreaser. It's yellow. That plus a dish scrubber brush works great for cleaning off slime like on that transmission. Just wear rubber gloves because it'll dry your hands out so bad you wont be able to open them all the way.

Great deal on that car.

Are you actually going to be hooking up the AC?

BobtheGreatII

Funny you say that. There's quite a few cheap solutions to cleaning off oil on the engine parts. There's this stuff at Wal-mart called Purple Power and it works great too. Same thing though, dries out your hands quick.

And I do plan on hooking up the AC. Simply because my truck doesn't have it and I'm dying for a vehicle with it.

Also, I don't have the piece that holds the radiator up against the vehicle, for a temp solution I'm using zip ties, does anyone know any cheap solutions to holding it steady other than that $100 plastic piece that goes on top?

Awesome-X

They aren't really too hard to make, I've seen several threads where people made custom pieces but I can't seem to find any of them...

SXN

Great project man.. I've always wanted to learn how to swap in/out an engine but have never watched anyone do it.

Can't wait to see the end result.

chazman

iTrader: (4)

Good job, man!