Hey all, Most of you here know me as Hardgainer or Hard on or hard of hearing but anyways I got the car back in December of 2013. I have pictures from the day i got it, all up until now. Every upgrade i have done has been well thought out. In the process i have wasted probably 3 times more than the car is worth but I didnt just want to buy a totally done car. I wanted the hobby of fixing up my car the right way. I bought the car off an old lady that had it for 10 years since 18000 miles. It had 11600 on it when i got and a rebuilt trans done around 112000. I paid 4k for it so i was happy at the time.
This is my 3rd Gtp. The last one i had i owned for 6 years. It was silvermist. I LOVE the classiness of SILVER!!! Once i sold it, i immediately wanted to try and have One LAST run at the gtp 97-03 bodystyle. Galaxy silver done right is Soo classy IMO! Here are a few pictures to just start this thread out. I will do more organizing and listing of parts when i get time. I would like to create a timeline of everything i have bought and before and after pictures from cosmetic to performance.
Here is a few from the first week or so i got the car. Notice how the tint was old and purple. I had that changed to 20 percent all around, which still wasn't good enough and ill get back to that more later
Notice how the rear bumper doesn't even say pontiac on it? yep its a knockoff which i later found out. Was too dumb to notice it at night. I was even too dumb to notice that the paint didn't match on the rear bumper but oh well
Old Tint had to go!!!
And here she was after new tint of 20 percent all around and stock snowflake wheels with pin stripes.
I really wanted to have the torque star wheels like on my last car so i set out to find a set of torque star wheels on craigslist. I found a set for 400 dollars with crappy tires. Again i was ignorant and impatient and would find out this was a bad decision later like everything else in life. I get the wheels over to discount tire and have them get me some tires. Upon inspecting the wheels i notice there are some scratches i did not want so instead of bothering the seller with asking for a refund, I decided to go spend 440 dollars extra to get them powdercoated in a superchrome finish. It gets even worse. Once i get the wheels back i finally get some tires for it only to find out that they are all bent and two of them are pretty bad to where you can feel the car shaking. I liked the look of it though so decided to just go with it for awhile. So now i have wheels for 400 and Powdercoating for 440 and tires for 500. I now had a set of worthless 1340 wheels. I later went back and switched the tires to put on the snowflakes. That was phase 1 of my tire ordeal. Here are some pictures of the timelime of that process for you all.
Attempting to get the wheels UNbent. This guy was a professional and said they were too out of balance. The inside barrel was warped and bent
Here is a few shots of how it looked with the torque stars
And that was the end of the journey for the 16 inch wheels, They are sale still with new tires. I have both sets sitting in my garage all stored away
Next i got lucky enough to find a set of 06 GP wheels from a guy that met me halfway about a 2 hour drive for both of us. I snagged them off his hands for 350 with pretty good tires too
Next up was to Remove the pinstripes. I took an hour or so. I used isopropyl alcohol and a heat gun and my fingernail. In the below pic the pinstripes were just removed and i decided to give it a good wash
