Project Car Update 2: ’96 Firebird Problem Child
Though on jack-stands waiting for wheels, its good to see the Firebird out from under its cover.
Spring is here which means that my Firebird is out from under its car cover blanket. As usual Rescars readers will know, I own a slightly warn 1996 Pontiac Firebird. My father and I bought the car while I was in college just as a fun project which turned out to be more trouble than it was worth at times. Because of two engine rebuilds, the car has spent most of the last two years up on jack-stands. We parked the Firebird back in December, and have been anxious to get the car back on the road and get out of the Aztek ever since.
The new tires have been purchased and fitted. They might be a cheep brand, but they will do the trick.
Now that the car out in the open, we got to see how the car faired during the winter months. The first obvious thing to fix was the dry-rotted front tires. While we had initially replaced the rear tires when we put the Firebird back on the road last year, we choose not to replace the front tires since they were still in fair condition. Since this is a low budge car, we replaced the front tires with the same non-brand name tires that we used for the back. I am not going to be setting any fast lap times with the tires, but they will do. It was a good thing that we had to replace the tires, because when we took the wheels off, we noticed that the front brakes pads needed to be replaced as well.
This is the heater house fix that I talked about during the last update. Believe it or not, this made it over 1000 miles with out problems.
We also managed to get the heater hose fitting replacement kit that I mentioned during the last update. The original heater hoses fitting on GM’s 3.8L V6 are flimsy plastic clips with a screw cap to hold the hose on the block. A kit was created by GM that will replace the old fittings with something much more substantial, a small metal nozzle that can be firmly screwed into place on the block. Lucky, we found the kit online for a fairly low price right before they sold out. We received the kit a couple of weeks ago and while we have not fitted it yet, it looks like it will do the job nicely. While there is still a lot to do on the car, we have everything in place to put in back on the road in a couple of days. I’ll do another update after my first drive this year.