just letting u know what i know about my car,i have a 88 trans am gta, 5.7 ltre,v-8,automatic. all wheel disc brake,the rear end is a borg warner 9 bolt 7 3/4 ring gear, ratio of 3.27.i don't know what kind of tranny is in it , my question is this:
1. is my rear end rare or not , im asking because gm is telling me it is ,i had to replace the pinion bearing in it an gm doesn't have them anymore,i had to go to aftermarket to get them.
2. my center caps on my rims says WS-6,what does that mean?
3.as i'm from ontario canada ,is there anyway i can get info on how many was shipped up here ,by the looks of things i have a california car here,i think.it was hard to find parts for it up here.
please help , i'm at a cross roads of keeping the car or selling it, if parts for it up here in ontario are scarce. thx alot

 

1. It's not "rare". But it is less common than other kinds. Last time I was in NAPA looking up rear end parts, they had a section for GM 7.75", which is of course the 9-bolt. Of course GM has discontinued that type of parts. They sell and work on mostly NEW cars. Your car is now almost 20 years old, and they don't keep parts for cars that old, especially not when the parts are widely and cheaply and easily available in the aftermarket. In any case, GM is the wrong place to go for any sort of universal car parts like bearings; they don't make them themselves, they buy them from bearing companies, and there's no sense in paying GM's markup when you can get the same bearing company's product through other channels with less markup.

2. I believe that means that the center caps have WS-6 printed on them. WS6 is a suspension option package that's been around since these cars came out, the exact composition of which has changed from year to year. Nobody really cared about it until they badged a newer car with it in the late 90s; all it meant, was that the car had the top suspension package for that year. Now all of a sudden everybody just has to know "does my car have WS6 or not", even though they have no clue what WS6 even means as far as how their particular car might be affected. They just seem to want to spank off about it, rather than being concerned about "do I have the performance suspension" or "what size are my sway bars" or some other parts-related concern. In some years, ALL of certain model cars got that suspension option, and GTAs were one of the ones that typically had it. IROCs were like that in the Camaro line; basically, the maxed-out car, that got all the good stuff, whatever that might have consisted of in that year.

3. California cars are originally shipped to and sold in California, not Canada. Unless somebody is standing at the border and keeping count of the number of such cars entering Canada and the number of them leaving, and is keeping a running total of the balance, there's no way to know how many California cars somebody drove to Canada and have stayed there. But, there's no "the looks of things" about it; if your emissions sticker says "California", it's Califorina, and if it says anything else like "Federal" (the other 49 states) or "export" or "Canada" or whatever, then it's not a California car.

Your trnsmission is the same as any other of these cars; it's a 700-R4.

 

thx for the info .