Zenobian84

Hi all; been a lurker for a while here on the site, but just recently got around to becoming more active. Found myself buying an old '84 Trans Am almost 2 years ago, but it's been mostly a weekend project when I had the time for it. I'm a mechanic by trade, been doing it for almost 8 years (around 3 professionally) in total now, though my professional experience isn't as long as I'd like. But what can you do, right? Keep on wrenching, I suppose.

Here's an older picture of the car in question for reference; it's been a learning experience working on this thing, to be sure.




Finally getting in gear and going about fixing it up, but I wanted to change a little bit about it. It's a WY6 Trans Am; came with Lier Siegler seats, T-5, and most of the niceties that the other T/A's at the time could be ordered with. Decided long and hard about what I wanted to do with the car, and I eventually came to the conclusion that the ground effects had to go. Was on the fence about keeping them at first, but the more I got to thinking about it, the more I decided that I think they don't make the car "sleek", if you can say that.

Normally, I'd leave things like this alone (I also own two other old Jeeps, one of which is meticulously factory spec'd) but since I'm going to be driving this as a daily driver at some point in the future, I want it set up to my own tastes.

As it stands currently, the car has all the original effects on it save for the long door runners (under each door to behind the sail panels). I'm aware that the smaller effects on the doors themselves have nuts holding them on inside behind the door panels (at first I thought it was only the hex-caps on each side of the door holding them on, but low-and behold I was quite wrong).

I was at a bit of a loss as to how to get the effects off the front bumper, but I did a little searching on the site here and discovered that this is a solid unit piece, and the only way to "get rid of" the effects is to switch to the non-T/A bumper. Is this correct?



Second question I thought I'd ask before I started dismantling is whether or not the trim on the bumper can be taken off, or is it the same type of setup as the front bumper, IE: I'd have to switch to a non T/A bumper. It would seem that the gold trim is held on with push-pin type bolts... although I could be wrong in my summation. At one point, I had it off to clean it up, so I probably should have looked then, but I can always pull it back off to verify.



The final question is how do the attachment brackets under the doors come off? Are they riveted to the body or are they bolted in somehow to the body? I've seen photos of other members attaching them to their non-ground effect cars, so I know they can be taken off. I must admit the ones I've seen looked like they were removed quite cleanly, so I'm hoping I can get mine off that nicely as well. Once everything comes off, I'll probably end up storing it in case I ever decide to put the package back together.

My thanks goes out to the people who decided to create this site. It's been a big help finding part numbers and learning things I would never would have had the opportunity to do otherwise. Here's to learning more about these cool old cars.