What do you drive?

cdacda13 wrote: mod98commando wrote: 1984 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am Got it in stock condition with about 66,000 miles on it (carfacts indicates that this is the actual mileage, not a rollover). The body is in decent condition, door pins haven't worn down yet (very common on these cars), and the car was running and drove fine. I immediately changed the plugs, wires, tires (good god were they bald), air filter, and fluids and I had the carb rebuilt. Worked nicely for about a year and then the water pump took a dump. That was the start of a part shotgun. I did the water pump, radiator, and put a flex fan on in place of the clutch fan all in one shot. Then I changed the alternator, distributor, intake manifold, and put a 4-barrel holley carb on. My friend insisted that I remove all the unnecessary emmissions equipment like my smog pump and charcoal canister so we did that. If any of you are considering this, don't do it. You recover at most a few horse power and in many cases your fuel economy can be reduced as well as increased emissions. My car went from about 20mpg with the stock carb to around 14 mpg after the emissions stuff came out. And this was while gas was hovering around $4/gallon so that definitely hurt my wallet and I couldn't feel any power gain whatsoever. I may eventually put the smog pump back on or at least the charcoal canister so the car doesn't always smell like gasoline. In any case, I love this car. I wish I had the money to restore it properly. Why did you remove the charcoal canister? All it does is take fuel vapors from the gas tank and filters and traps them. Smog pump (or air pump) is just an emissions feature that pumps exhaust directly from the exhaust manifolds into the cat on start up to warm the cat up quickly. Neither of them will reduce your gas mileage. If you removed your EGR, then will you notice a decrease in gas mileage. I would blame the new intake and a poorly tuned carb for the drop in fuel mileage.

The charcoal canister removal was stupid, I agree. I didn't realize he removed that until afterwards and I didn't know what it did until I looked it up online and I was like "...uh...why?". The smog pump was also not worth removing but unfortunately I trusted him before looking into it and it would be a pain to put everything back in (not hard but tedious). To be honest, I don't know if he removed the EGR but he probably did. He's one of those types that believes there should be nothing under the hood other than what the car needs to run and anything else is a power drain or excess weight. I didn't realize that until after I did some research on the stuff myself and realized that his advice was based on ideas pulled out of his "rear" rather than facts. The drop in fuel mileage happened before the new distributor, carb, and intake were on so it can't be from those. The only change from stock was the removal of emissions equipment at that point and my carb and distributor were still computer controlled. Unless the computer was confused by missing emissions equipment and throwing off my fuel mixture/timing, I don't know what else could have caused the change. I'm not sure what my fuel economy is like with the new parts on though since I haven't been able to drive the car extensively in months but I'll find out soon enough.

cdacda13 wrote: And nice Firebird. I really like that nose style better then the formula style nose.

Thanks. I picked an 84 because I liked the nose and the spoiler they used more than the later models in that generation. Unfortunately, I think this model had the lowest power rating in that generation but I wasn't planning on keeping it stock for long anyway. I think the stock numbers were like 150hp and 240 ft/lb and my car is probably putting out less due to age and poor maintenance . Not what you'd expect from a firebird with a V8