I am mainly into the old musclecars, but me and my son were looking for a modern project car: a 1998 to 2002 Trans Am WS6 (because he likes how the hood scoops look - hey, he's 13 he doesn't need a real reason).

We found one today and picked it up.

Amazing to say the least - After searching through weeks of Craigslist and ebay ads and here in the for sale section, I narrowed it down to half a dozen cars. It was really difficult to find an unaltered original car in the Northeast, all the stock ones seemed to be out west.

The really weird thing was that there seemed to be two specific types of people that were selling these.

1) Young men who's wives just told them they were having a baby, and that they needed a larger car.
2) Older women who were the original owners of the cars.

It was three of each situation. Very strange to say the least.

Well, I found a car listed on Craigslist here in NJ that belonged to the latter group. She was an older woman (a former over-the-road truck driver) who bought the car new in 2001. Wonderful lady to say the least. The ad had no pictures and very limited description. So, after a few days of texting and photos being sent, me and the boy went down to Southern Jersey and picked it up today.

The lady was fanatical about maintenance. She has over an inch thick stack of invoices for oil changes every four months. Sadly it seems that the GM dealers were taking advantage of her and doing every crazy fluid flush and cleanse just about every time the car showed up in there service lane. They would perform the $169 "6,000 mile service" every 2,000 miles. The car only has 61,000 miles on it.

The absolutely amazing thing is that she bought three extended warranties over the past 13 years! The car's mechanicals are still covered until late 2016! In fact the GM dealer just rebuilt the noisy rear differential in late 2013 and she only paid a $50 deductible for a $2,200 repair.

So here are some photos:

The window sticker: Bought from Triboro Pontiac in Cinaminson, NJ. Came with the optional Hurst Shifter for the 6-speed, and the rare traction control option.



Here's the pile of paperwork, and the inch thick stack of invoices from March 2001 to a early 2014. She paid full sticker for the car when new, plus the GM Mastercare extended warranty plus another aftermarket 60 month warranty when the GM one was about to expire in 2011.





And the door tag with the WS6 Ram Air option prominently listed:

 

The owner was such a fun person to deal with. I had to talk her into letting me test drive it after she drove us around the block. It seems that no one had ever driven her car but here. Even her husband who was standing there nodded his head in agreement. She never let him drive it (he doesn't know how to drive a stick shift anyway). So after I passed the interview she let me test drive it with her in the passenger seat and my son in the back.

The car just purred and tracked and stopped perfectly straight. Ran like it should. (And after perusing the stack of receipts I saw that she would get the car aligned every six months and the wheels rebalanced at the same time.

 

The reason she was selling the car was that she and her husband moved to a large property out in the country on the end of a long dirt and gravel road and she hadn't driven the car in months because she hated seeing it get dirty. The car had never been driven in snow and very rarely in rain.

Here's the ebony leather interior. The seats are very nice but the car does need a new carpet set because she was a former smoker and the carpet has really absorbed that tobacco smell. There is a cracked outer plastic molding on the driver's seat where the power adjustment switches are.






And the obligatory cracked door panel that these cars are renowned for. She didn't realize that this could have been covered under the GM warranties had she only asked at the time they were in effect.



The passenger door panel is perfect:

 

Please tell me you bought the car for you and him to work on and you don't plan on handing him the keys to car like this at 16..

Car looks fantastic though.

 

The engine compartment. All the factory ram air components are intact. Most original purchasers tossed those air cleaner box resonators the first day they had the car. Original drivetrain of course. Even the original clutch, too. As an over-the-road trucker she knew how to shift and transmission properly. That tranny doesn't make a sound! All the synchros are still intact.

 

And now the bad parts:

Like 90% of the 1998 to 2002 F-bodies, there is a factory defect that was covered under a Technical Service Bulletin (03-08-98-001 Feb 2003) but not a recall. If you didn't push the issue with your dealer back in the day, they didn't voluntarily fix it. - And it was an expensive job - around $1,500 to $2,000. Had she known that it was something she would have gotten repaired under warranty, she would have definitely done it. You'da thought that since the dealer was charging her for every new fluid flush and refill process under the sun, they could have at least offered to do the roof repair at the same time since she was at the dealership every six to eight weeks for 13 years.

The assembly line used an inferior adhesive to bond the sail panel/roof panel to the steel roof frame of the car, starting in late 1998. It was too chemically aggressive/reactive for the plastic roof panel material. After several years the adhesive wicks its way through the molded plastic roof panel and bubbles the paint. No matter what paint repair is attempted, the bubbles will return. The only fix was to remove the roof panel and install a new one (while the panels were still available from GM - they haven't been available for years now). The red outlined areas are hard to see in the photo but there is a distinct line of blisters going all along the glue route.



Unrelated to the roof defect is paint flaking off the front tips of the rear wing.
]

 

If anyone happens to have an original black Firebird logo insert that goes in place of the front licence plate, give me a PM. The seller's husband said he had it hanging in the garage for years but couldn't find it when he recently looked for it again.

 

Oh Hell no! He doesn't get behind the wheel of this car til he's at least 50 (like me).

It's a joint project for him to learn about modern cars. He already learned how hard it is to clean a black car.

He actually rebuilt the Pontiac 350 engine in his great-grandmother's 1975 Firebird when he was 9 years old. His wasn't too happy since his sister got to rebuild a 455HO when she was 8. She drives a 2009 Impala SS now. And we put her through several high speed collision avoidance driving schools before she got her keys to that car. And 5 years of driving a John Deere lawn tractor.

Here's the link to his rebuild: (I also posted a sister thread of our WS6 over there).

http://www.yenko.net/ubbthreads/ubbt...ect#Post449019

:-)

BTW, I got my first 1969 Camaro when I was 14 and promptly took it apart. My dad wouldn't let me drive it til I got it all back together myself...which took a few years. Smart man.

 

Damm that car is clean great find especially in salty north. How much did you give for it if you don't mind my asking.

 

Yes, it was very hard to find a nice one up here. All the salt free cars seemed to be in the south or out west. By the time you pay for flying out there and transporting the car back, you are way over your head. This one was only 75 miles away and I had my truck and trailer all ready.

We negotiated the price down to $11,500, including the transferable warranty that's good til November 2016. My son watches that Wheeler Dealer TV show and got quite a kick out of our negotiations. Even ended with the mandatory, deal-sealing, handshake.

I probably could have gotten it even cheaper but I didn't want to push the issue. It appeared that all the seller really wanted, was to see that the car went to a nice home. She had refused to sell it to some young kids because she knew it would have been destroyed in a matter of days. The "interview" process I went through seemed more like I was asking to marry her daughter, versus trying to buy her car.

 

Not a bad price at all. My cars stuck in paint jail for some seemingly small amounts of work and it's been there 6 months. I'm damm near ready to part it out and go spend the money and find a nice one like you have. I was supposed to be driving it by now my project complete enjoying the summer. Here I sit on saturday night behind a keyboard fuming and dreaming. With my 6.0 on a engine stand in garage with no home to put it into and a set of kooks behind my recliner. Damm frustrating good luck yours needs few small things and shes ready to go.

 

Get your car out of there. I have served too many paint jail sentences over the years to put up with it any more. After my 1972 Trans Am (a non-rusted California car) spent 7 years in paint prison I swore NEVER AGAIN! So now, at the first inkling of an unexcusable delay, I show up with my truck and trailer and I pull my car out of whatever shop it's in.

 

Odd with the flaking paint on the spoiler. I also scratch my head why someone so **** about their car would smoke in it. Nonetheless, I think you got a fair deal for an unmolested WS6 with "low" miles. It'll be a very nice clean up project.

I'm assuming you meant the not-so-rare traction control option as NW9 was usually ordered with all of these cars. That is, it's rare to not have it.

I've never understood this line of thinking. You begin to teach responsibility and respect for the car early (like 13 in the OP's case) and ensure plenty of time behind the wheel. A kid can hurt himself or others in a Prius just as much as a Firebird.

 

I LOVE a well maintained car w/ records. You can never over maintain a car and yours should be in as good a condition as humanly possible with those miles. The price is certainly OK too. Enjoy it!
Many owners go to extremes with maintenance but their cars do last a really long time. My brother in law has an old Trailblazer pushing 200k miles. EVERY single year he gets every fluid changed. He never has brought the car in for a repair related to any fluid. I guess it makes sense.

 

I just felt bad seeing all those crazy charges for fluid flushes and for new belts and filters every few weeks, when the service writers would have known the stuff was just attended to last month.

Or maybe she had Munchausen's Syndrome By Proxy with her car.

But in the end I am quite happy she did all that. Who knows, maybe she ended up marrying one of the mechanics and this was his way of getting her to keep coming back for more (service, or...maintenance). Hell, that didn't come out right. You know what I mean.

:-)

 

Very very nice car. This is one I'd leave stock.

 

Beautiful car. Congrats OP

 

Wow. You have a beauty there. If you can get past the imperfections, which are all repairable one way or another, you got yourself and your son a very clean WS6. Nice deal on the extended warranty too. Might be useless if you get the performance itch. haha

 

We spent about 4 hours today working on the car. Got a new pair of rear lift cylinders to replace to old ones which weren't holding up the rear hatch any more. Gotta love Advance Auto parts and their online $25 coupons!

After installing the new cylinders (while trusting my son to hold the broom handle in place to keep the hatch from slamming down on me), we started to clean the exterior.

I showed him how to use the clay bar and detailer to clean the crap off the paint. The car was surprisingly clean compared to when we did the black paint on my daughters Impala SS a couple years ago. That car was a mess. Then we waxed the car and polished the rims.

Times like these are priceless especially after spending all those hours waxing and primping the black paint to have my son then look at the paint and say: HEY, WHAT IS THIS! THE CAR IS ALREADY DIRTY AGAIN AND WE HAVEN'T EVEN DRIVEN IT ANYWHERE!!!

I replied in best fatherly tone: "Welcome to the wonderful world of owning a black car, my boy."

He was not amused.

Here are the after detailing photos. My wife, who usually doesn't notice anything more than the fact that her car was washed, actually noticed quite a difference in the shine from yesterday.





And parked next to the old bird. My son asked if we could move his great-grandfather's 1971 Lincoln to the house garage so he could park his car next to my Firebird and his great-grandmother's 1975 Firebird.

 

Beautiful car yah got there