$300 ’67 Firebird - The Continuous Build

[CanyonRider]

Longtime lurker - reading, learning and dreaming, first time poster. I’ve learned folks love pics, so I’ll try to keep the pic-to-text ratio high. I bought this 1967 Firebird for $300 (delivered) on June 22, 1981. I was 16yrs old, the car was 14. The car was originally a Sprint6 with a Saginaw 3spd on the floor. Most of the interior was in the trunk, it supposedly ran and I discovered later the subframe was bent - I may have over paid.

I spent that summer before my Sr year of HS assembling the interior, getting the engine running and swapping the subframe from a junkyard Nova. It apparently had been hit in the front pretty hard. Someone had swapped the entire front clip from a ’68 400 - hence the 400 hood.

Here’s how it looked then - and the following 2yrs:





That first summer, the Saginaw gave up and I acquired a Borg-Warner T10 - in a box. I had to buy a few parts, bearings and synchos, but it proved to be a good tranny. - although it was a wide-ratio.

Two summers later I decided “How hard could it be to paint a car?” Here’s a dumb 19yr old painting his car - outdoors, one panel at a time (lacquer is very forgiving). Check out the Herb Adams VSE belt buckle!



Interior




Notice some of the cool cars in the background.





Here is how it looked then.




A year later the Sprint6 motor gave up and I replaced it with a $100 junkyard Pontiac 350. That was pretty much how I drove the car for the next 10yrs.

I finally finished college, got a real job and bought a house (with a garage) in ’93. I attended my first autocross that year. The car was awful, but I was hooked. That winter, I did a cheap rebuild of the 350 (rings, bearings, cam, oil pump,heads, intake, etc); trimmed 3/4 coil off the front springs and added big front and rear swaybars. I also swapped the T10 for a close-ratio Muncie M21 and a Hurst Super Shifter.

Here’s a couple AutoX clips from that period:

http://youtu.be/t_eMHAaUjAo

http://youtu.be/WaoHshYb6vs

I spent the next 5yrs autocrossing and starting a family. In ’98, the engine developed a water leak into the oil pan. At the same time, big changes on the home front were happening: job change, selling house, moving 800mi - and raising kids. I decided to park the car “until I had time to build it right” - although I wasn’t quite sure what I meant by “right”.

Autocrossing continued off and on over the years - although, always in other cars. And there have been other projects including a dedicated track car for HPDEs. Meanwhile, the Firebird sat on blocks under a piece of rubber roofing - until last week.

CR