72 TA : New Project

[gb70]

If I had to guess I would say that you have 1500 thus far. You can't rush quality and it shows as if you made sure all the details are just right.

[Norwood]

Steve, when that car is finished you need to have a BIG PARTY and invite everyone....

[SuperNovaSS]

Are you kidding? When he is finished we need to have a big party FOR Steve.

[njsteve]

At this rate, it will debut at my daughter's Sweet-16 party. As you may recall from this never-ending, epic Odyssean thread, she helped me assemble the engine when she was 8...she's in high school now.

[njsteve]

Picked up the fenders on Saturday. The high schooler took some time out from her busy social calendar to help me hang the drivers side fender. And the wife helped with the passenger side fender. The drivers' side fender took about 5 hours to get close and the passenger side took about 3 hours.

Even though both fenders were prefitted and the body work done with the fenders on the car, the shims that were used did not give the right alignment so I pretty much started from scratch. I found that to get the door gap right I had to alternate between one floor jack under the back of the subframe and another under the front crossmember. I would raise the middle of the car to get the bottom half of the gap right, tighten the bolts, let the car down and then raise the nose to get the upper half of the door gap right and then tighten it. The second generation F-bodies are a pain in the butt as the center of the front of the door by the body line, scissors inward along the outer edge of the fender while the bottom and tops of the doors scrissor outside of the fender edge. It's rather maddening to get it done without shreddding the edges of the paint on either panel.









The door gaps. The factory spec is .220 +-.04 and I was able to get them around .19. They still look pretty wide but any closer and the front edges will rub/chip off the paint.

[gb70]

good work! Gaps are so important and your attention to detail is what makes this build superior!

[KevinW]

Gaps look sweet!

[njsteve]

More minor things. Applied the "Trans Am" decals on the fenders. It took an hour to lay out all the tape to get the measurements right...and then took about 15 seconds to actually apply the decals.

Installed the original black rubber hood bumpers, three per fender. Got to use last year's X-mas gift: a set of plastic mini prying sticks. They worked great to push the rubber tabs through the slots in the fenders. Anything metal would have damaged the paint and split the original rubber bumpers.





Engine running nicely now that the original coil is back in place and the new set of points are installed.



Even the A/C is working nice and cold...now that it's nice and cold outside.