The Great Transmission Swap Out

I knew that when I bought my 82 Firebird that I would have to swap out the manual transmission with an automatic for two very important reasons. First of all, KITT was an automatic and the lower console won't find around a manual transmission. The second, and probably most important reason is that my wife cannot drive a stick and she put it in no uncertain terms that I am not going to spend this much money building a car she can't drive. Needless to say, the tranny was going to be swapped out.

You might ask why I didn't just buy a car with an automatic transmission. Good question. Before I bought this one, I called around and found a couple of shops that would do the tranny swap out, and they told me it would run about $1100 if I brought them the tranny. Well a friend had a tranny that I could have for $75 that was supposedly good as new, so for the additional $1200, it was worth the work to buy such a great car, with PMD Seats and 15" rims with caps. Little did I know that the tranny I bought from my buddy was shot, and the price was going to go up a bit more than I anticipated for the swap out. $2400 and a brand new 700r4 transmission later, it runs like a champ.

Engine Work

Once the new transmission was in there was another problem, the carburetor didn't like the new tranny. So I decided to replace the carb Not a big deal, however I figured since I had the carb off, I would go ahead and check out a small oil leak I had noticed. While the oil leak wasn't a huge problem, this was a perfect time to take care of it. As it turned out the oil leak was because of a bad intake manifold gasket. So I removed the valve covers and intake manifold to replace the gaskets.

As it turns out, allot of stuff has to be removed to get there, so I decided this was a good time to clean up the pieces before I put them back on (can you see the snowball gaining momentum?). So I made some phone calls and found a place to sandblast all of the pieces. The next day I was at a hot rod show and ran into a company that did powder coating. For a couple hundred bucks they would sand blast and powder coat a number of the parts I had removed to give it that spiffy engine look. Well..after dropping a handful of pieces off, I decided to order some new chrome valve covers, and a new chrome alternator and a few other bits and pieces.

Needless to say the engine is all back together and runs great. Was it worth the extra $400 or so I spent on making it look pretty? Yeah, it's nice to be able to lift the hood and have it start to look as nice as I hope the car will.