I was destined (or maybe doomed) to be a 3rd Gen nut from day one.
My parents divorced when I was ten. After the divorce, the first thing my mother bought, less than a week after my dad moved out with my older sister, was a brand new, bright red 1990 Firebird.
The rest is history. It was the first car I ever drove, the first car I ever owned (when I bought it from her nine years later), and has been my prized possession to this day. I've dumped thousands into restorations, upgrades and repairs, and I've taken as much joy from the car as an inanimate object could possibly bestow upon its owner.
My favorite memory with the car is actually the time the headlight motors stopped working. I couldn't afford the $150 per motor that the junkyards wanted, much less the hundreds the dealer was demanding, so I took them apart to try to figure out how to fix them.
When I discovered that the plastic gears were actually designed to fail, I obstinately refused to give up (not knowing at the time that refurbishing kits were available for like $10), and I wedged small pieces of gravel from my driveway into the channels between the gears.
The fix wasn't perfect. One headlight comes up and goes down a fraction of a second before the other because of the different sizes of rocks I used. But it worked, and the headlights have lazily and happily worked for the last 13 years. I decided that I liked the little quirk, and the personality that it gave my car, and I resolved to leave them the way they were.
Today, after over 300,000 miles, three different motors, and a complete (but poorly executed) power train, suspension, and electrical swap with an '88 GTA, the car just has too many problems to keep it on the road reliably. I have decided to put my old car out to pasture. When TTA #1525 gets here in about three weeks, it will take my old red car's parking space, and the red car is going to a friend who will be parting it out.
I'll be keeping the digital dash that came out of the GTA for my mad scientist experiments, but I have come to an even more important decision. I have decided that the first thing I am going to do to customize my new Turbo Trans Am will be to swap out the perfectly operating, lovingly cared for headlight motors for the rock-filled, lazy-eyed motors from my red car.
ttarider The End.
My parents divorced when I was ten. After the divorce, the first thing my mother bought, less than a week after my dad moved out with my older sister, was a brand new, bright red 1990 Firebird.
The rest is history. It was the first car I ever drove, the first car I ever owned (when I bought it from her nine years later), and has been my prized possession to this day. I've dumped thousands into restorations, upgrades and repairs, and I've taken as much joy from the car as an inanimate object could possibly bestow upon its owner.
My favorite memory with the car is actually the time the headlight motors stopped working. I couldn't afford the $150 per motor that the junkyards wanted, much less the hundreds the dealer was demanding, so I took them apart to try to figure out how to fix them.
When I discovered that the plastic gears were actually designed to fail, I obstinately refused to give up (not knowing at the time that refurbishing kits were available for like $10), and I wedged small pieces of gravel from my driveway into the channels between the gears.
The fix wasn't perfect. One headlight comes up and goes down a fraction of a second before the other because of the different sizes of rocks I used. But it worked, and the headlights have lazily and happily worked for the last 13 years. I decided that I liked the little quirk, and the personality that it gave my car, and I resolved to leave them the way they were.
Today, after over 300,000 miles, three different motors, and a complete (but poorly executed) power train, suspension, and electrical swap with an '88 GTA, the car just has too many problems to keep it on the road reliably. I have decided to put my old car out to pasture. When TTA #1525 gets here in about three weeks, it will take my old red car's parking space, and the red car is going to a friend who will be parting it out.
I'll be keeping the digital dash that came out of the GTA for my mad scientist experiments, but I have come to an even more important decision. I have decided that the first thing I am going to do to customize my new Turbo Trans Am will be to swap out the perfectly operating, lovingly cared for headlight motors for the rock-filled, lazy-eyed motors from my red car.
ttarider The End.
