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Hi all, I have been on TGO for a couple years and have been getting great info and trying to give back when I can. I purchased my first thirdgen a couple years ago and have collected a couple more along the way.
The beginning of my progress was extremely slow because of college and lack of funds. Last summer I made some decent progress and now that I am graduating this spring I plan to have it on the road this summer and decided to finally start a build thread to document my first car from the ground up.
My first thirdgen, an 87 Trans Am purchased out of GA and shipped to me in OH in Spring 2013.
Just off the trailer!
Sitting in the sun for ~20 yrs did a number on the interior
I started with some very minor things including trying to get the car running. When I got it it needed a fuel tank and pump. Found a tank and pump for $50 that summer. Installed it but began to look into the engine and found this...
All the years in the heat dried the gunk into nice crusty ****
So the following summer 2014 when I wasnt in college I pulled the engine and trans out to determine where the next step would be...
After pulling the cylinder head and seeing the ridge in the cylinders I decided to set the engine off to the side since it is the original and I will hold on to it and tried to decide where to go with putting in a 350
Early this past summer I found an 89 GTA (supposedly) that needs a lot of work but only needed minimal work to get running and driving. I purchased the car and decided to pull the engine and transmission from it and set the rest of the car to the side for now.
The 89 donor
Road testing the engine
The PO had installed a holley carb conv. but the longblock would be just what I need
I pulled the engine and went through it with fresh rings, bearings, and gaskets since the inside was in good shape.
Engine Ready on the stand
This is where the progress is as of now. As soon as I get some time this spring I am going to continue putting the engine together and get her on the road.
I have a used grey interior to replace the seats and some other parts to make the interior a driver. The car will obviously need painted and the windshield replaced but I am going to drive it when I can to show off the progress I made.
Hopefully this thread will help keep me moving on the project as well, I would love to drive the car to the T/A Nationals this year in Dayton.
Thanks guys, I still plan to save the 89 but that quarter is realllly bad and theres a bend inside on the unibody as far as I can tell so idk if I can save it down the road
Well its been a bit since I've been able to update my thread but I was home from college this weekend and got a bit of time to work on the car.
I had decided to use the serpentine setup from the 89 car I pulled the engine from. I was able to put all the accessories on and get the radiator and electric fans on so I'm a tad bit closer to seeing it on the road.
Question for someone with experience with swapping the serpentine system, are the pre-bent fuel lines different on the serpentine cars with tpi? I tried hooking mine up but they don't seem to clear the aluminum brackets.
Well I found a set of the pre-bent lines I needed to pass that particular roadblock. To make my factory steel lines on the frame mount up I bent them to a 90 degree angle so the hoses would face forward similar to an 88+ car would have
Factory lines bent to fit
Fuel lines all installed (I don't know why it is auto rotating the pic)
Made a good amount of progress yesterday, reinstalled the driveshaft and torque arm as well as install the exhaust off the 89 donor car.
Exhaust system ready to install, decided to use this one since it has more of a "true" dual exhaust from the dual converter option but PO installed straight pipes already
Once the exhaust was in I began hooking up misc items like starter wires and transmission hookups to finish up all the minor areas.
Ready to start for the first time in ~25 years with new engine
I put gas in the tank, connected the battery and it started!! Took some cranking to get fuel and whatnot but it ran well.
Only ran it a few seconds since the radiator isn't filled and hooked up completely. Going to wrap that and a couple small things up this morning and hopefully take a video of it running.
Well i had a rather good weekend of working on the interior of the car and getting it cleaned up. The car had been filled with extra parts to use and whatnot for the few years it has been sitting so I finally got the chance to clean it out and start putting the interior together now that its running.
Pulled the carpet out of the back and removed all the extra parts and disassembled everything but the dash. Where I started cleaning...
I cleaned up all the plastic interior parts that were covered in layers upon layers of dirt and s**t. Then cleaned and vacuumed the carpets and seats.
The carpet cleaned up much better than I expected it would.
Those seats are not the ones that were in it when I bought the car (seen in the first pics above). The gray seats I have are from a Firebird and are in good enough shape to get the car out and on the road. I am thinking of eventually doing a black interior but not sure.
I had a lot of other parts to replace like door sills and stuff that I had from the last couple years of collecting parts.
Haven't had much time to update lately, I have done some small work now that I have gotten the car out and been able to drive it a bit. I had a shifter cable issue where the end kept falling off the stud on the transmission so I had some of the interior apart to fix it. That led to me replacing some of the parts I had come across.
I replaced my shift plate so that i could use my power mirror switch, I replaced the dash trim on the passenger side to have the "performance suspension" on it.
Also I replaced the aftermarket radio I wired up with a UT4 radio with the push button volume and tuning controls that I pulled from a parts car.
I gained a set of GTA wheels with Raptor 245/50ZR/16 tires on trade for some parts I had. The tires on my car were old a dry rotted from sitting in GA and also didnt have much traction when I made a couple WOT runs.
03-15-2016, 03:05 PM
