Well i just freed up 300 dollars from selling cylinder heads and i am wondering on what to do next for my 1982 firebird. So far i have changed the rear end/intake manifold/ and put on headers on. I will only use 300$ no more since school will be starting very soon for me and i will need to keep the rest of the cash i get.

So far ive been thinking about upgrading the ignition/putting in a high flo catalytic converter/beefing up the 700r4 or putting on a new carb which could create problems since all of the electrical ****. If anyone has a suggestion i could do to put the money into i would really appreciate it.

BTW im not upgrading to a 350. Stupid... yes but ill make do.

 

Ok well heres my take on it. FIrst i want to say that on a 300 absolute max budget we wont get very far. Ide also like to say that assumeing you have the 700r4 i wouldnt mess with the trans. Reason being the early 700r4s were plagued with factory design problems and so trying to beef it up wouldnt make sence. Youde be much better off running it till it dies and replaceing it with one of the later 700r4s. Same thing with the torque converter the early 700r4s had 27 spline input shafts where as later ones had 30 spline so if the trans did quit it would be useless to you should you upgrade to a newer 700r4. One last comment on the trans alot of times transmissions over 100k that have never been maintained will fail if the trans fluid is changed as that was the only thing holding them together. Long story short under normal circumstances ide agree but in your case ide avoid trans stuff. Ignition stuff too is kinda a waist of time on factory street motors unless youve got some big money to spend on MSD equipment that has things like rev limiters and can fire multipul sparks in the low RPMs. The cat would be a good idea though. Becarefull with the exhaust as i imagine its old and rusty you may make things worse tying to take it apart or break it then youve got a real issue with the 300 budget. What ide recomend is a set of high ratio 1.6 roller rockers. Its easy to do and in essence has the same effect as swapping to a slightly larger cam by creating more lift and although i dont recall the specs on your cam (im assuming the lg4 305) i know its not particularly impressive to say the least lol. They run on average $200. From there a decent cold air set up could probably be put together with the remaining $100. Ide guesstimate that stuff could be good for another 25 hp give or take a little depending on your current set up.

 

Since you already have headers, you should replace the rest of the exhaust.

 

you know what would be tight, intalling new smooth flowmaster collectors from headers to cat (Y-PIPE) ..ive replaced my cat with a magna flow high output cat, pretty tight, not really big difference though. ive always wanted to install an exhaust cut out. Its basically a mini Y pipe after the CAT, and you install a electric cutout on the other tube. with the flipp of a switch its instant open exhaust, load and bada$$ ..check out this video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KizTyCCLwmc ) just like your car. i cant install the cut out because im running TPI setup and it needs the back pressure to run with out codes being thrown. the cutout setup is LOUD haha. and when your done, just flip the switch and it goes back to being quiet again.. hehe. you can get them for like 160 through www.summitracing.com but i just relized if you have the oval pipe, you might need to get an oval cutout.

 

ty for all the ideas i might go with the cutout, or replace the cat its down to one of those.