Showing posts with label Trans Am. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trans Am. Show all posts
Monday, June 15, 2026
Thursday, April 30, 2026
how Trans Am hood birds were installed at the plant.
The GM plants were cranking out 58 cars/hour at the peak of F-body production, so installers at each station had just about a minute of actual working time to complete their task.
When Van Nuys first started building Firebirds, decal installation was done as the cars were emerging from the paint curing ovens. Jon said the sheet metal was so hot they had to douse the car with three 5-gallon buckets of water just to be able to touch the surface. Even so, the water evaporated so quickly the decal immediately fused itself to the hood wherever it touched, so the defect rate was over 50%.
They eventually moved the decal installation operation further down line just before the doghouse was installed.
Workers pulled a hood off the overhead conveyor, set it on a jig attached to a turntable that allowed them to spin the hood 360 degrees while using a squeegee to displace air and water trapped under the decal.
Once the decal installation was complete, the hood was hung back on the conveyor hook (in the same spot) where it would remain in proper production sequence to be mated with the car for which it was intended.
Friday, March 06, 2026
Tuesday, February 17, 2026
Monday, November 17, 2025
Saturday, October 25, 2025
"let’s mount a cannon in the trunk, fire it downward, and blast this Impala into the sky like Evel Knievel in a steel coffin" (Hal Needham invented the car flipping canon, and this was it's 1st use) A movie review of McQ, the John Wayne movie with a Trans Am in 1974 Thank you Doug!
I haven't seen that movie in decades, and didn't make the connection when I saw it what a similarity there was between McQ and Bullitt.
Monday, October 20, 2025
Sam Joe just told me about a Rájen, who found a filming location of Matchbox, and shared it on his blog Szirszarjaim
it's an iconic Matchbox , the Dodge Wrecker
there are a couple more photos of the location, in Hungary near Budapest of course... it's a place famous for Hollywood movie making
https://szirszarjaim.blog.hu/2025/02/15/carspotting_349
Saturday, September 20, 2025
hey bud, psssst, come here. I have some eye candy for you (730HP 1971 Pontiac Trans-Am SCCA 496")
if "hey bud, psssst, come here" sounds familiar, then you might remember Lefty the Salesman, one of my favorite characters from Sesame St. Also, from 1971
Monday, August 25, 2025
Monday, April 07, 2025
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Sunday, February 16, 2025
Friday, January 10, 2025
David Tom, the founder of the Historic Trans-Am Registry and the author of The Cars of Trans-Am Racing
collects and restores historic race cars in his Apache Junction, Arizona, shop.
He has owned 15 vintage Trans-Am cars, including the 1968 Smokey Yunick Camaro, the Jerry Titus Firebird/TG Firebird, a Bud Moore prototype Cougar, a Jim Hall Chaparral Camaro, and one of the 1968 Penske/Donohue Camaros
Monday, January 06, 2025
Monday, November 11, 2024
Monday, September 09, 2024
the Wall Street Journal had a catchy headline that caught my eye.... a Private Eye found the Trans Am he'd sold decades ago, in Alabama, and now he's restored it.
Gransden grew up near Buffalo, New York, and saved up to buy his 1979 model when he turned 17. He was already a talented trumpeter. After a few semesters at Fredonia State University, he toured with the Tommy Dorsey big band for a year (that band is still performing, though Dorsey died in 1956), lived in Manhattan, then relocated to Atlanta and entered Georgia State University to study music.
To cover tuition he sold his beloved special edition Firebird. The beast was a beautiful car, but the 400 cubic inch V-8 engine drank a lot of gasoline.
“I really needed a Honda,” said Gransden. “In Atlanta a nine-mile-per-gallon four speed Trans Am was not the way to go.” On the other hand, “I really didn’t want to sell that car.”
Robert Baitis, a transplant from Germany, bought it in 1993 for $7,500 then moved to an apartment in Huntsville, Alabama, where the Trans Am had to sit out in a parking lot most of the day.
Baitis felt bad about that, so he sold it to his mechanic in Alabama for $9,500, before moving back to Atlanta. The mechanic passed on, leaving the car to his widow, who remarried and sold the car again, to someone in a small town south of Huntsville.
After some bargaining with the brother, Gransden bought back his old car for $6,000. He sent it on a flatbed to Trans Am Specialties of Florida in Miami, where Deiters keeps perhaps 80 Trans Ams that he’s restoring, selling or buying.
Next came the pandemic. Gransden, who makes his money from performing, couldn’t perform. Deiters, who gets his parts through the supply chain, couldn’t get parts. Everything stopped.
Then Deiters’ warehouse caught fire. Thirteen priceless Trans Ams burned to the axles. His shop and showroom were half-destroyed. The business ground to a halt as Deiters rebuilt the structure. But Gransden’s Trans Am was spared. Said Deiters, “It not only survived sitting under that tree in Alabama, it survived the fire in my place.”
After four years in the shop, and many thousands in restoration costs, including a transplanted low-mileage 2006 GTO engine, Gransden’s Firebird came home.
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