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Auto Detailing and AppearanceShare tips and tricks on how to make your Third Gen shine! Get opinions on products or how something tasteful looks on your Chevrolet Camaro or Pontiac Firebird.
In the end we have three wonderful examples of third gens with incredible mods to add to the performance and style of these legendary rides... Let the voting begin! https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/auto...-cotm-mod.html
Car (Body) is currently sitting at 14,800 miles so hasn’t been driven much since I did the swap. The build thread is a little outdated though. I’ve swapped out the stock K-Member and A-Arms for UMI tubular and the wheels are Billet Specialties Hydro 18’s.
Also future mods are ordered. Waiting for a Magnuson TVS 2300 with rear cog drive to arrive. Planning on running E85 with flex fuel sensor. Currently looking into running Vintage Air as well.
Current mods list.
415ci Aluminum block LS3
GM CNC Ported LS3 Heads
BTR Stage III Big Cube Cam
Tremec Magnum F T56 Trans
Moser 9” 3:90 Gear
C5 Brakes
18” Billet Specialties Hydro Wheels
UMI everything in the catalog. Lol
Last edited by jtmiller92; 07-04-2022 at 02:35 PM.
Thanks for the nomination! Car was originally a 87 formula 350 which has been converted to a TA. Engine is a Cam'd and ported 5.3LS with a single billet turbo (750hp at 16lbs) run by Holley TermX, Built 2004R, Ford 8.8 with 3.55s. I built the engine, trans, rear (all my own brackets) I painted the car with summit medium charcoal metallic 2k. The car is fully upgraded in every aspect from suspension, interior, gauges, audio, drive train and even lighting. I daily this car around down and to work a few days a week when its nice out and its a blast to drive.
This winter it got a turbo upgrade, Fully sound deadened and insulated interior, new mass backed carpet, sequential tail light harness from Braven, and I fully wet sanded/compounded and polished the whole car.
I appreciate the acknowledgement and was quite surprised to get it. The car has sat dormant for the last few years so I've barely been active on here in that time. Nevertheless, I enjoy the chance to talk about my Camaro! There is a long, 18 pages long, build thread (https://www.thirdgen.org/forums/memb...oming-aka.html) detailing the ends and time I took building the car and doing it almost 100% by myself. The car started out as an abandoned car with no engine, no transmission, no power train wiring and hacked up interior wiring. The car had no title so the first adventure was figuring out how to even re-title the thing. It would be obscenely long to rehash everything I've done to the car so I thought I would stick to the areas that either set it apart from other Thirdgens or aspects that I'm most proud of.
I really like seeing cars with smooth streamlined bodies. For example, I think Dodge did a great job on the Challengers. A smooth flowing body with few or no emblems and no protrusions. If you look in the below and hte above pictures you'll see that the side molding (door ding protector strips) has been removed and the holes welded shut, the antennae has been shaved, the door handles have been shaved, the front bumper emblem as well as the side rocker/GFX emblem have been removed and filled in. In the picture below you might also notice that I filled in the entire rear bumper so it is completely smooth.
In this picture above I fixed the biggest aesthetic issues that plagues all thirdgen convertibles: The band-aid of a solution wrap around 3 piece spoiler. When these cars were made into convertibles the company literally took a hard top and cut the top off and then folded down the excess and spot welded it to the other side of the cut body shell. Then they slapped a chintzy plastic spoiler on and called it good enough. What I did was to make new caps by extend up the fenders up and matching the height of the trunk lid. On the trunk lid I had to fill in the trunk lid brake light(just like you would for shaved door handles) and holes from the plastic spoiler. After I did all that I found a 91/92 Z28 spoiler and had to modify the spoiler by making the lateral supports longer. To date, I have never seen a convertible that has fixed the factory's egregious mistake. There are some Thirdgens that have mounted a hardtop spoiler to a convertible but it's done while leaving in place the side plastic stick-on caps.
The engine bay is an area I think really sets it apart from other builds, even the high-dollar professional builds are still lousy with seams. Maybe 5 other Thirdgens have an engine bay done to this level. Most people weld the strut tower cap and stop there. On my Camaro I have smoothed everything. If you look at another thirdgen engine bay you'll see that they are metal seams everywhere. I hade to make and weld several panels and weld shut dozens of seams. I even "shaved" the humps on the wheel arches that the fluid tanks mount to. I hade to literally cut out big chunks of the wheel arch and shape and weld in new metal. I also removed the upper and lower core supports and made my own tubular supports. I even made my own tubular bumper based on the tubular bumper that you can buy for 80s and90s Mustangs. I really tried to use as little body filler on the engine bay as I could (because I was worried about future cracks from flexure or heat cycle) and I accomplished that by using an excess amount of MIG wire and an angle grinder. Many, many hours on the body work of the engine bay but totally worth it.
The engine itself I'm proud of. I build it as a very close replica of an engine that AFR had on their website years ago. Their engine made somewhere around 525hp/525tq on an engine dyno. The only real difference is my compression ended up higher by .25-.5 of a point and I went with a single pattern cam. Everything on that engine I polished myself. I also threw in the towel on the old SBC 80's era electronic timing. With the ability of MegaSquirt 3 extra I now use the same coil packs as the C6 Corvettes and use a wasted spark ignition scheme like the LT1 engines. The distributor I cut down to a stub and it's function now is just to turn the oil pump.
The exhaust I had fun doing. So cool to look at. Very time consuming but it came out and did exactly how I wanted it to for cheap. 300 series stainless pipe that I "pie cut" on my bandsaw and welded back together to get shape I wanted. I also used V band clamps which really are as amazing as you've read about.
The interior I left pretty simple. The door panels I stitched myself after the local upholstery company wanted $400 to do them. I created a 3D file for a tablet mount based off another member's 3D file of a larger din stereo mount. So there is a tablet that controls the music and can connect to MegaSquirt. The gauges are Speed hut's and I think in the future I will have them print new backgrounds that are black and use the 80's yellow or orange light and 80s font. I also run the T-56 with a T grip shifter because I've never really been a fan of round shift *****.
There really is a lot more that I could say about my Camaro but I'll stop here. I've done a ton of stuff with the suspension and making my own suspension pieces, doing custom electrical, custom stereo, relocating the battery, USB charging ports, making subframe connectors and I even made my own frankenstein 8.8 but if you really want to spend the time reading about them and seeing how I did it then head on over to that long build thread thread. Thanks guys!
O yeah, one last thing I forgot.... The car caught fire back in 2017 or so and I had to replace the entire interior, repaint part of the car and rewire most of the car since most of the wiring originates in the cabin. So all the pictures from the prior post are after I rebuilt it. So I've built some parts of the car twice and I think that sums me up pretty perfectly, don't let anything keep you down or stand in the way of what you want.
When the poll closed this morning we had ended in a tie with jtmiller92 and customblackbird each having 14 votes... as we need to have a winner and we have picked up on the voting, i have re-opened the poll through early Saturday morning
If you haven't yet voted now is the time we have three great choices and will declare the winner when the extended voting ends Saturday!
06-26-2022, 06:33 AM
