Thread: My 2000 TransAm

Originally Posted by Scottydoggs

maybe the paint would hold up better if they were clear coated?

car looks sharp.

I'm not sure, I tried to hand polish one of the wheels and the whole paint came off instantly. The paint kind of dissolved with the polish. I tested another brand of paint and the same thing happened. This won't happen if I have them professionally painted where they did the hood, but I'd rather have the wheels chrome finished instead.

I see, maybe I'll try one can this weekend too.

Car is looking great man. All TA's should have come with the CETA from the factory.

Ok so I went and bought a clear coat and a "chrome" can. The paint that I had on this morning looked like bright silver, but the surface didn't reflect anything except light. I applied a new coat of the new "chrome" can and I liked it. It also looked like bright silver but the surface had some reflections on it. Next I applied a clear coat over it and it instantly turned into a very glossy dark gray color so I applied the "chrome" color again except this time the surface looked even shinier and with more reflections than it previously had so I decided to apply the same method on all the wheels and this is how it looks like. I would say it kind of looks like polished aluminum, these were taken indoors just now I bet they will look even better in daylight.

Originally Posted by lsxftw

Ever thought about tinting the tail lights and 3rd brake light?

plus clear coat on the wheels will help!

I like how it looks on red cars, but not so much on white ones. I also used to have a darker tail light due to water filtration so I ended up relating dark tail lights on trans ams to this so I'm not so attracted to the idea anymore

The can spray paint on the wheels started fading and loosing shine real fast so now I've started the painful process of polishing the wheels. I had to buy one wheel since one of the ones I had had been welded in the past and that would not look nice when polishing it.

Oddly enough I couldn't find someone who was willing to either chrome or polish them so I did one of the wheels myself. It took me around half a day to get all the paint off one of the wheels and to my surprise the aluminum surface was all covered with tiny dots which where very difficult to sand down. It then took me all Saturday to get it sanded down and polished.



I was lucky enough to find someone that would do the job right last week and I just got back the second wheel, the results are great and it's definitely worth the effort. Here you can see the difference between the painted wheel and the polished one.

I got my pontiac overlays for the rear bumper, they look quite good!



I had installed a couple of projector fog lamps a while ago, they were too small and didn't fill the fog lamp hole in the bumper very well so I ordered a set of CCFL rings that go with the projectors to try and fill it out better. I'm not a fan of CCFL stuff but I think it doesn't look bad at all.

These cars will rip a rubber trans mount every 6 months or so, I installed a prothane mount and took it for a test drive on a nearby highway last night. Under normal driving I can't feel any big difference with the vibration. What I can definitely feel is how a great deal of the drive train sludge is gone. I used to have a regular autozone mount in there and it always felt like something was loose down there sometimes something would hit the tunnel underneath me when going trough some rough roads I even had it inspected a couple of times and nothing was broken down there.

When you step on the gas or downshift is when the fun starts, it does vibrate A LOT but nothing to be afraid of. Looking at it on the bright side I think of it as having a built in massage chair in my seat now haha.

Anyway I've never took this car past 100mph and I was impressed on how hard it will pull past 80mph. I shifted down to 3rd and it lifted the front end as if it was going from a stand still and by the time I looked down the seedo I was almost doing 130.

There's a local guy who has a spohn super comp torque arm up for sale. I was thinking of buying it, it's obvious that the harder chromoly material won't break like the stock one but I'm not so sure if it will help on going faster or not. I've read a lot on how aftermarket torque arms increase traction and put more power to the wheels reducing your 60ft times. But I actually don't have traction issues right now, if I do a good burnout at the track the car hooks really good and doesn't spin the wheels at all. If that's the only benefit I get from it my guess is that it would probably don't do much difference on the overall E/T and may not be worth spending the $400 dollars on it.

I said before that I wasn't going to mod this sh1t any further but I just found out that 243 heads also come with 05+ silverado's so that means they are easier to find here in Mexico and they are. I got these on the mail:



I plan to have them acid cleaned and then I'll have them port and polished locally. I guess now I can say the car has an LS6 conversion? It has the cam, springs, intake and heads now.

the only bad news is that I'll have to do the whole tune process again.