[thefirebirdm@n]

After the move to Texas was over, about a year later, I got back to work on the TA. I pulled the motor and took it to a local Pontiac legend here in San Antonio, named Barney. He was already pretty old at the time and now today he's in a nursing home but he raced Pontiacs back in the 70s. I asked him to go through the heads initially which he did but after looking at them he asked me to bring him the block as well so the short block came out and went to him too.

While he had the motor I decided a complete overhaul and restoration of the entire front clip was in order. Yes I fell victim hard to the "While I'm in here..." syndrome.

I pulled the entire front clip off the car (it did make pulling the motor back out a breeze) and took the firewall down to bare firewall. I didn't like that someone had painted it white and it looked terrible (lots of orangey rust all over the white) and I wanted to paint it back to black. One interesting thing I found is that the backing plates for the headlights in the nose were completely wrong and a kludged up mess. I bought the correct ones off ebay and added all new hardware for a complete restoration of the nose.