A little back story is required here. I am 20 years old, and have had issues with authority my whole life. My parents and I have never gotten along. A few months ago I was kicked out of my house. I am currently residing at my girlfriends house. Her parents have been helping me out. I saved up every cent I had (started with nothing) and have been working two jobs. This 89 Camaro RS (see signature) was the only thing I could afford. $700.

When I bought it about a week ago it had a few things wrong. Like the horn doesn't work. I have changed the relay, but that didn't fix it.

She needs 4 new tires. I am currently broke. I am going from paycheck to paycheck at two part-time jobs. So that is going to have to wait.

The hood wouldn't pop when I brought her home, but nothing a little grease wouldn't fix.

The driver's side interior door handle was broken. So with a little help from TGO and a youtube video, the door panel is off, and come payday I will be ordering the part.

Thats 4 things that have to be done before inspection. Luckily I crossed one of them off of my list. I thought that my Hazard switch was broken two, but it turns out that it is still functional.

The body is in good shape... except for the paint that is. She was built in California where the sun shines hard and they used water based paint. So she is faded along the hood and roof of the car. The hatch has a little less sun damage than the rest of the car, and I will have to paint her. The front bumper has some stress cracks to the paint, but the bumper itself is in good condition.

The driver's seat has some damage to it, but I did plan on putting more comfortable seats in her. the dashboard is cracked from front to back in three places. So I WILL need a rebuild of that (but for my purposes a dash cover will work until I can get the funds). The center console is destroyed in the back around the ashtray. The previous owner had two children that appearantly liked to kick their feet while in the car.

The steering wheels is slightly off, so a front end alignment will be necessary. Lucky for me one of my friends is a mechanic in training, and he can help with with alot of this stuff.

When I brake hard it feels like she is locking up, or my *** end is going to swing on me. My dad said it might be the booster?? I have no clue. I am not a mechanic. I am relying on you guys solely. please look in my photo album for pics.

 

get er done man. gotta start somewhere. youll find free stuff you can do to your car to make it suit you better. 3rd gen camaro is one of the best cars to start with!

 

Start getting friendly with your local junkyards. Right now, when you have free time you should be figuring out where they are and seeing what they have.

You need to buy an actual repair manual for your car. You MUST have this since you are not an experienced anything guy yet.

Never give up. There is NOTHING that you can't fix on that car, yourself, at the house. NOTHING. It just takes patience and time, and not too much money if you keep hitting the wrecking yards. Tires, engines, whatever, they are all there at the yards and in good enough shape to pass the inspections.

Your most important function in life right now is to get on a budget. You can't live at a girlfriend's house forever. You have to have a place, and then a car that can get you to work. You don't need headers, you need TIRES. Budgets help you to build priorities on paper, on purpose.

You have more time than money. That means you can read on this site and absolutely figure out how to do everything necessary yourself.

Good luck!

 

Thanks KrisW. Good words, my friend. To get her on the road she needs tires, door handle, and the horn. I get paid this wednesday, and will start posting updates then.

I did go to our 1, yes 1, local junkyard (I live in a VERY small community). They had only 1 third-gen on the lot. For a door handle, they wanted $45! I found a door handle on RockAuto's website for $15 shipped to the door.

 

I understand. One junkyard means hitting up the wrecking yards via eBay, and even on this site. Hawks third gen has salvage cars on their site and they have almost everything you need.

Another method that I use personally is to modify other brand parts to fit my car. My sun visors are from a Grand Am GT. When my expensive under-hood relays go bad, I convert them to the cheaper 5 pin cube relay. Lots of "close" parts from other GM cars can be made to fit your car cheaply.

15 bucks is hard to beat! The horn from nearly any car will work to pass inspection, as long as you have 12v to power it, and you have the ground wire hooked up properly. You may have to clean the mount very well to make sure it is grounding.

 

Yea. I am not into all of that conversion stuff. I would, however, like to change the rear drums into discs.

 

Do yourself a favor, and pull up bigyellow.com. Look up "Auto Parts - Used", and "Auto Salvage". Change the "within" to 50 miles, and specify your zip. Zoom out on the map. Some of the hits will be worthless, like "Advance Auto" and new car dealerships. Ignore those. Print off a list of junkyards/salvage yards that sound promising. Pick a weekday that you are not working, pack a bunch of small hand tools in a 5-gallon bucket, and take a road trip. You are looking for the old-school junkyard, and staying away from the newer recycle yards that pull the parts for you and charge higher-than-new prices for small parts. It's trial and error. Alot of the places you stop at will say "Sorry, I don't have anything that old". When you get that response, ask "Any idea who might have them". You will be surprised with the results you get. Once I was directed to a body shop that built race cars - he had dozens of second and third gens in the back lot, and sold parts regularly for decent prices. Another time, a recycle-type junkyard gave me the address of some old guy. He had operated a junkyard years ago, it closed at some point, but he still loved his junk; he had an old SE, a Trans Am and a Berlinetta in 6 foot tall weeds.

Over the course of a day, you will find some interesting yards. Probably 1 yard out of every 5 or 6 will be a keeper. You'll get a feel for what yards are honey holes and which yards are rip offs. Keep a list of these few yards, and return every few months. And DO NOT assume that the car will be there when you return in a week or so. If the part is there, and you will need it eventually, then buy it at that moment.

One last observation - I've found that the person manning the yard phone often has no idea what might be in the yard, especially at an old school pick-and-pull. For this reason, I generally do not call. YMMV, and some will disagree... just my observation

 

Thank you very much. I will be taking a road trip on Friday hopefully. Wednesday I get paid, and should have the funds to title, register, insure, and order the parts necessary for inspection.

 

So I have finally completed my task. I haven't been keeping up with this restoration thread though...

Last week I bought some wire, and a button and routed a new horn button (because at this time I didn't have time to fool around with the proper fix), ordered the driver's side door handle, title, registered, and insured her.

Yesterday I bought 4 new tires (cheap ones, so no rippin' and tearin' for now). I went to get her inspected by my local guy that never really checks anything. Unbeknownst to me, he had began teaching another guy how to do inspections, and was doing it the right way. He popped my hood and "failed" me for not having my battery secure. He told me to run up to the closest car parts store (which happened to be NAPA) and get a kit.

When I got to the NAPA and told the guy there of what just happened he said, "You must have just come from Charles'." Which is indeed the guy who does my inspections. Apparently there was some sore of crackdown. But I digress.

So I did end up finally passing my inspection. Now it is on to repairs for my personal satisfaction. First up I think I would like to get a new dashboard. Mine is cracked in three places turning my dash into four equal parts. It looks really bad from the front of the car. I think I would at least like to get the back window tinted as dark as my state allows. Here in VA we can only have 50% on the side windows (35%on rear sides) and 35% on rear windows.

 

Good job, man!

Another old third gen back in the fight!

Good job on the repairs. I don't know how it is where you are, but down in Florida we get the whole car tinted for about a hundred bucks.

Good luck!

 

Congratulations and good luck with your first Camaro!

Regarding my advice, my fellow members previously said it perfect regarding hitting salvage yards as well as putting priorities first (tires-to actually drive the car-take prescendence over headers).

My suggestions, now that the car is inspected, are to do things that you will make you comfortable to drive the car so that you will maintain an interest in it. For example, when looking at your photo album, I see that your drivers seat needs some TLC. Instead of the tint, take some of that money and buy a nice set of seat covers. This way, the seats will automatically look better and you won't add to the existing damage.

My other suggestion is to check out Craigslist. If you aren't familiar with it, it's basically a 'want ad' magazine on the computer. If you like the ad, ask questions of the seller. If you want to buy, you make arrangements to meet in person to complete the sale. I don't know where in VA Mathews is located, so I did a general Richmond area search for you on Craigslist. I typed in 'Camaro' in the auto parts section and here are your results based on the time of this post. Good luck.

http://richmond.craigslist.org/searc...minAsk=&maxAsk=