John's Finale

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   We bought the car in pretty sad shape on 4/14/02. It was an '85 SE with a 2.8L We had the mechanicals debugged while we were waiting for the Finale body kit from V8 Archie and the leather upholstery from MrMike. We received the body kit from Archie and began pulling the '85 body parts from the donor on 7/22/02.
   The install of the kit took less than 60 days to complete, but it took a lot of coordination and planning. It took 1 day short of 5 months from the time we bought the donor car to calling it "done". If a thing like this can ever be called really done. :)
  
   Total Work time on the car, I estimate, was around 1200 hours, including the mechanical repairs. Somebody worked on it every day and most of the time there was two of us, many times 3 or 4. It was a family project from the start.
  My farm hand worked on it alot as well. He's a master welder and heavy metal fabricator. That is worth a lot when you have to redesign rear body mounts (due to the tail lights), fabricate brackets, and repair rusted frame areas. I can't count the number of nights we all came in after 11:00 pm covered in micro and fiberglass dust from sanding. None of us had any fingerprints left by the time the car went in for paint.
  
  The paint is a custom mix that is very close to the 2000 Mazda copper that we tinted to try to match the Metallic Beryllium Copper of the Saleen S7. It's a Dupont Chroma Basecoat/Clearcoat system.
The interior was painted with Sherwin Williams Ultra Interior with a touch up gun and airbrush.

 

  Little details just kill you on time. my hired hand and I spent a full afternoon and part of an evening doing nothing but figuring out the mechanics of the power hatch release and the back-up key lock release, a necessity with the shaved door handles. Figured that way, we have about 15 manhours in the hatch release. We figure we have at least 200 manhours in figuring out, contouring, and fabricating brackets to mount the rear tail lights.

 
The wheels are Sport Edition Fox 5 and the tires are Dunlop 9000. All from The Tire Rack. I wasn't crazy about them but Chris picked them out and now that they're on the car I think they're about perfect. If I was doing it over, I might have tried 235's in back instead of 215's

Here's the list of changes/fixes that I can recall:
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GM 3.4L Crate Engine

WCF Shorty Headers, wrapped in Thermo-Tec
MSD Coil, 6-AL, Wires and harness
Ram tube with K&N Filter
Underdrive Pulley set
New A/C compressor
Hypertech Chip, Fan Switch
LinTech Injectors
New Alternator
New Water Pump
New coolant and fuel lines (flex lines, not hard lines)
WCF Poly Transmission and Engine Mounts
Poly Dogbone bushings
Poly Cradle Bushings
Rebuilt Transmission
RCC Bump Steer Correction Kit
New Rear Tie Rod Ends
All new Poly control arm bushings (f&r)
All new ball joints (f&r)
New half-shafts
New carrier bearings
New rotors, calipers all four corners
Blazer master cylinder
Braided Stainless Brake lines
KYB Shocks and Struts
Eibach Springs (f&r)
All new parking brake cables
Spin Tech muffler
Ractive tips
All new switches in the interior (they all showed wear)
Mr. Mikes leather interior
Repaint vinyl trim in interior
New headliner
Finale kit from V8 Archie
Shaved door handle kit from Dakota Digital with 7 channel remote.
New in seat and in dash speakers
Sony CD Receiver (already had it, DIN Spec)
Power antenna
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Some of the custom touches on the car:
'98 Bonneville Rear tail lights
Molded in LED third brake light in the wing
Driving lights
Custom trunk cover that seals the entire trunk area
Power antenna
Custom mount cell phone antenna
All power acc (locks, doors, windows, mirrors, a/c, cruise, deck lid) and hatch, doors, & locks are keyless remote
Custom cold air box and intake
Custom rigging to have hatch and deck open as one unit
Custom modified '84 engine grille in rear deck
Blended wing into rear section, smoothed and molded all body panels together into one unit
ALL wiring soldered, shrink wrapped, and taped into harnesses.
Eastwook Caliper paint
Custom aluminum grill
 

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