Build Pics of Challenge '94 Trans Am

At the challenge I saw the car sitting up on the trailer so I popped my head under to take a look. Holy crap I have never seen such a clean underbody.

With the chassis and engine behind us we moved on to the interior. It had been months since this car had run and I was more than a little nervous that I had clipped the wrong wire somewhere. I bolted the dashboard back in and started making plates to fill in the radio and glove box holes... Here you can see the radio block off and the beginnings of the console. I used Toyota billboards to make them. When in their natural setting they look like this... They're made out of plastic and have dated material on them. When the dealership throws them out, I scoop them up.

You just made me kill an hour while I am supposed to be working!

Thank you

In reply to Blitzed306:

What do you think I'm doing at work right now?

Awesome, Matt. Awesome.

I have been following with great interest and amazement!

updates?...

Oh man. There's pressure in doing a build thread where people are following. The next things are not necessarily in the order they happened but they are part of the interior.

Here's that hole in the dash I was talking about earlier. I was going to use billboard to fill it but the bends and angles were too complex. Pops scored some scraps at the local carpet store and I cut out a pad...

I did, however, use billboards to make the door panels. Here's a shot of the back of one... I had to grind the panel to reduce the thickness of the plastic to enable the power window switch to fit through and make contact with the pins.

I didn't get around to it but I was going to use an old serpentine belt as a door pull.

hrdlydangerous wrote: Oh man. There's pressure in doing a build thread where people are following.

At least you have the luxury of having finished the car already! Try doing it real time.

hrdlydangerous wrote: I didn't get around to it but I was going to use an old serpentine belt as a door pull.

Wicked cool! Do it now, we'll wait.

As I mentioned earlier I ground out all of the seam sealer in the interior. That made a HUGE mess. It looked like this after I was done...

I had been reading about the nightmare of fuel pump replacement in these cars. The one in our car is pretty noisy and a local Millville competitor gave us an extra pump after he switched to a fuel cell. I read about making an access door to eliminate the need to take out the rear for a pump change. Thinking ahead and knowing that E36 M3 happens at the worst time, we decided to do this...

Pops made an aluminum cover for the hole and I sanded and polished it. He made a flap that hangs down over the hump and the Trans Am script that once resided on the door added a nice finishing touch... It's hard to tell in this photo but the wing nuts that hold the tail ligts in are all parallel with the floor. The latch is painted and the bolts are a contrasting silver.

We made a belt bar for the five point harness out of some steel tubing and plates. They mount where the speakers used to be. In this photo you can see that I painted the floors red. One of the door panels is resting on the fuel pump cover.

What you can't see (and what I can't find pictures of) is the third gen camaro manual seat tracks we used to mount the plastic OMP race seat to the floor. Thanks to Also Ran Racing for the photo.

I used the rest of the carpet from the dash board to make floor mats, which I glued to the floor

Since we sold the airbag from the steering wheel to recoup budget there was no more horn button. The rules say that a horn is required so we re-wired the rear hatch release button to operate the horn.

Trunk well painted. At the top of the picture you can just make out the hammer marks from beating the quarter panel into submission.

Really cool thread. Must have more.

No racecar is complete without a set of cool wheels, or in this case, two sets. I had been asking everyone I came in contact with if they had skinnies. My digging finally paid off when a fellow in my body shop said he had a freind with "old" skinnies. What they turned out to be were 1971 vintage Cragar SS's.

Let's face it. Cragar SS rims are cool. I managed to score these 15"x4.5" Cragars for $50. Sure they had been painted with a brush after the chrome had pitted and peeled but, hey, they're Cragars.

It turns out that in nice shape these are worth a pretty penny. Cragar stopped making this size sometime in the late 70's. The inside of the rim said "For Drag Racing Only". No worries there...

Sadly, there was no saving the original chrome. I sandblasted them...

...and then painted them gray and silver a-la torque thrusts

And in a nod to irreverence, I painted the Cragar logo red... The front tires are the ones I used on my Mustang. I grabbed them out of the trash bin at Atco raceway. Photo credit to Also Ran Racing.

I painted the 15"x7" S-10 Blazer rims to match and mounted 26"x10" M/T slicks on them. The same I used on the 'Stang which I bought off of this board for $75.

The other set of wheels are ZR1 knockoff 17"x11" with five year old 315/35 Kumho V710's. I found these on the njfboa board for $425 but negotiated them down to $350. The seller owns a WICKED CP camaro that now uses 335 series tires on CCW rims.

Here's a profile shot next to the original 245 all seasons...

here they are on the car for the one test day we got in before the event... Astute viewers will notice Hoosier tires in this pic. I made friends with a local Millville racer named Joe. He's got a C4 Corvette and has given me a few sets of R6s that are cycled out. We chose to stick with the Kumho tires because they were a little stickier but the Hoosiers are great for local events.

man nice build... and not being in real time = fast build info so no rambling on and on (like I do in mine lol :)... pretty kewl.

makes me want to spend much more time on my build... but alas I tend to be lazy

One more segment before I go to bed...

I used a big 'ol hammer to beat out the damage on the quarter panel but now I needed to smoothe it out. I'm no body man but I figured that using bondo couldn't be too much different than doing drywall mud. Besides, if I messed up I could always sand it off and start again. Piece of cake. Here's the panel sanded to bare metal. It looks a lot smoother in this shot than it really was. I had every intention of filling that antenna hole but never got around to it.

Bondo going on. What was that I was saying about messing up and sanding? Yeah. This stuff dries FAST! I used about a third of the can just applying it and then sanding it off. You can see at least three layers in this photo. It's not easy getting the curve of the fender.

Finally on to paint. I used the same Rustoleum "Sunrise Red" to paint this as the rest of the car. It really is uncanny how well it matched.

See? I told y'all it'd buff out.

That's all for today. Tomorrow... Paint!

This thread is awesome. I even noticed a Cutlass in an earlier pic.

Great job! I look foward to the $2012 upgrades also.

How light did you end up getting that beast?

This is a super cool thread, thanks for posting!

Just out of curiosity, where did you sell the take off stuff? Craigslist? I didn't realize there was any market. I'm in the midst of gutting my 98 camaro and if I can get any return from the interior bits and pieces (airbags, etc) that would be pretty sweet.

In Reply to EdenPrime:

In Reply to Gasoline:

Yeah. so am I. The problem is I built it with almost no regrets so I don't really know what to do for an encore.

In Reply to accordionfolder:

The car weighed 2950-ish at the challenge with the autocross tires on it and the T-tops in but without me.

I ran a lot of CraigsList ads for quite a while. It was not a fast process. I found one guy who bought the seats, mirrors and hvac. There was another fellow who bought his car back from insurance and needed the airbags and sensors, and bumper beam.

I let them pick whatever odds and ends they wanted from the scrap pile while they were at the shop.

The correct answer for 2012 is a junkyard Holset Turbo and MegaSquirt.

Javelin wrote: The correct answer for 2012 is a junkyard Holset Turbo and MegaSquirt.

This. And a huff of the silly gas.... for fun.

I actually thought about a rear mount turbo, but don't know what junkyard turbo would work, if any.

Anyway, on to the paint...

I knew I wanted to do something pretty wild for the paint scheme and I got inspiration from my helmet. I started to lay out the basic outline of the checkered flag... I took a green scotchbrite pad and scuffed up the surface. I forgot to mention earlier that we made blockoff plates for the sold-off rearview mirrors. You can see them in this picture.

I masked off the car with floor mats that my dad had in his shop and then sprayed the Valspar white rattlecan paint.

Next I took some 1/16" masking tape and laid out the checkerboard design, masking off every other block.

Because of the overlapping design, I did the black in two stages.