1983 PONTIAC TRANS AM

25TH ANNIVERSARY DAYTONA

PACE CAR REPLICA

The engine compartment tour...  Starting at the passenger side at the firewall.  I added lots of convoluted tubing and replaced all the old, dried up, torn up convoluted tubing.

Moving forward you can see the "new" smog pump and diverter assembly.  I picked it all up at a salvage yard for $75.  It seems to work just fine.

I replaced the distributor cap, rotor, and spark plug wires.  After replacing all that the car started and seemed to run just fine.  When we took it for a test drive it only got about 40 yards when it coughed, bucked, and died... and would crank but not start again.  We pushed it back to the driveway and troubleshot the problem.  I traced the problem to lack of spark.  When I removed the rotor cap, the rotor fell out in pieces.  All the metal parts had come off the new rotor.   I removed all the pieces of rotor and reinstalled the old one.  It runs just fine now.  Not sure what happened with the new rotor - either it was the wrong one (it looked just like the old one), it was defective (it certainly was after the 40 yard run...), or I installed it wrong (but it idled just fine and even made it 40 yards!).   I dunno... just one of those "fun with old cars" things that happens!

The spark plug wires that came with it looked like a cobbled together set made up from several different wire sets.  This set was supposed to fit my engine, but I couldn't get the proper combination of wire/location to get the wires to run down and back up to the plugs like I *think* they go originally.  I wound up having them come down to the plugs, but I had to add a wire tie to keep the back, driver side wires from laying on the hot air injection tubing.

I bought ten feet of vacuum tubing, used every bit of it, and still need more!  I have to work on the cruise control - when I hit the switch to hold my speed the unit just keeps accelerating!

One of the littles details I noticed... the spoiler has lots of cracks in the mounting stands.  They don't seem to affect the structural rigidity, but they look pretty bad!

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