1982 Recaro Trans Am belonging to a good friend of mine burned up in a fire...melted the top or nearly melted it. The fire was hot enough to melt the rims. The rear end looks ok (see pic) is there any thing besides seals and bearings that i need to replace if i use it in my car? I'm sure the discs will be warped and the calipers are toast (no pun intended) but what about the axles and the axle tubes? is there any thing in the posi i should look for?

 

I'd be scared of that rear end. I've rebuilt rear ends that were in fires before and I checked the hardness of the gears. The heat from the fire made the gears soft and not useable. If you have $0 in this then give it a try, but don't invest much money into it or trust your life to it with a lot of HP and speed.

 

it is free to me, mostly i just want the posi that is what i am concered about mostly. the exhaust pipe from the header back is the only im sure i can use as is

 

Meh, takes an hour to swap it. Bolt it in and give it a few burnouts to try! Don't need rear brakes for that XD

 

The posi that's in that won't be worth what you are paying for it.

 

I'm with Big Gear Head on this one .

You can see at first glance that the rear rims are more melted than the front , which is logical since the gas in the tank likely fed the fire back there . The rubbers for the sway bar are incinerated right out of their brackets and the seeping oil that was dampening the pumpkin has turned to a baked away shadow of carbon residue . With that level of heating that is evident I would suspect the heat treating of the gears that occurred at the time of manufacture has been compromised and the parts are no longer roadworthy .

 

wow, so you think he should pay me to take it? FREE is about as cheap as it gets. i know these are NOT the best rear ends around, if i could just buy the best of every thing i would, i would have no use for sites like this because i would have HMS building whatever i want. and it sure as hell would not be a third gen f-body. but in the real world where i live we make do with what we have. im sure there are a lot of parts on my car that nobody would choose to use, but they work.... sorry, some thing about this response just rubbed me wrong. i must be getting to old to ignore crap i dont need.

 

thank you .... your (and big gear head) opinion is valued...... any thing on this car that you can think of that maybe of use?

 

As far as salvageable parts goes , since it looks like the fire was less intense in the front , there may be some small items reusable there , one quick thing I see in the pictures is that the front sway bar did not have it's rubber bushings cooked out like in the rear . Since the rims really didn't melt in front like the back ones did the spindles could be OK and it looks like the control arms may be reusable too . I do understand your desire to take anything usable since parts for these cars aren't all that plentiful , at least in the pick N pull yards in my area . It's just a shame that the fire had to be hottest right where the part you want is .

 

Also I think the comment about the posi being worthless is that they weren't the greatest rear ends to begin with. Even without the fire it's prob shot anyway unless it's a really low mileage car.
We understand about being low budget, but some stuff isn't worth the time you will have to put in to use it, even if it's free.

 

There is no such thing as a free lunch. It still costs time & time is precious. I don't think the effort is worth the results.

Think about how you'll feel if you spend hours of your life & hundreds of your hard earned dollars to get this thing removed & installed in your car & it does two good posi burnouts & then goes back to one tire fires. Is it really worth all those resources to save a couple hundred dollars?

 

I would be concerned with the heat making parts brittle or warping (such as the axels), as for the posi unit itself, chances are its shot anyways.. the gov-lock posi units are known to be pretty junky, a quick test to see if it is still working would be to pop the car in neutral (if you can still do that) and spin the tires and see if they both turn in the same direction, if they spin in opposite directions, chances are the posi is not working properly anyways.

The following thread has some good info on the rear end.

https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/tran...-10-bolts.html