I would suggest pulling the engine and tearing it down, get all the parts hot tanked and do a visual inspection of the block in the cylinder walls and the lifter bores. If there is a visible crack in a cylinder or a lifter bore you can get a machine shop to sleeve it and save the block. By the numbers GM gave to you it looks like that trans am is worth restoring back to a numbers matching car.I hope for your sake it is only a head gasket and water hasn't pitted and cylinders. Good luck Al
Thanks guys. I talked to Doug at Pontiac performance and he has a 455 i'm going to buy. I have a shop ready for June so that's when when I start to teardown the car. Got a 77 Formula to pick up tonight for parts. When i'm done with stripping it out then i'll start the T/A.
Good score ! They only made a little over 7000 1976 TA 455 4 speed and 76 was the last year of the mighty GM 455s. I have a spare set of 6H heads for your engine if you are interested, honeycomb wheels would look good on this car too. How are the floors on your TA ?
Hi guys. Update. The floors are bad, trunk & rails also. I bought a '77 from California, via Seattle,then Detroit. I drove it home last summer. Plan was to use the 77 shell to restore the '76. In the meantime I found a 79 in very nice condition that didn't need a resto and I bought it. So, long story short, I sold the '76 & '77 to another guy in town and I'm going to drive the '79 that's done already. Also I just got an e-mail back from a guy who has a '79 Silver Anni. 4speed car,but it needs a resto also. I don't have the ambition to get into another big job or the money. I'm planning on just driving a nice big Cadillac convertible this summer and using the '79 once in awhile. The cost of the resto work ends up being way more than I can buy a driver for. I have to farm out a lot of the work until I get a new shop built. But even then I just don't have the desire to do a full scale rotisserre type job. When Steve gets that 76 done then I know I'll have my regrets, but he is a lot younger than me and has more ambition (probably more talent) also.
